Magdalena vom Teufel besessen AKA Magdalena Possessed by the Devil (1974)


director: Walter Boos
release-year: 1974
genres: horror, sexploitation
countries: Germany, West Germany
languages: German
fests: Sexploitation Horror Fest (2022)

German sexploitation knock-off of The Exorcist, focused significantly more on the sex than on the horror.

A hooker stumbles drunkenly out of a bar and encounters a man crucified in her courtyard. The coroner deems this unusual, and there is some discussion about informing the dead man's granddaughter, Magdalena, who lives in a boarding school nearby. The acting is just unforgivably horrible right from the start, and certainly does not improve.

Cut to the boarding school, where the girls are having a party. Magdalena falls to the floor and foams from the mouth, and everyone stands around uselessly. The head mistress proclaims that no doctor is needed because, presumably, young girls convulsing and foaming from the mouth is normal behavior.

Everyone hears a fly buzzing around during the seizure -- a sound that will accompany all of Magdalena's upcoming odd behavior -- and the head mistress proclaims that something must be odd because there are flies... in this season? I didn't know flies are seasonal. A small dog growls briefly, and this is also overly emphasized as being unusual and somehow important, though it is never really explained why. Magdalena's seizures get worse over the next few days, escalating to her ripping her clothing off during each episode.

The doctors decide to send Magdalena to live under observation on a farm for some reason, and at precisely this point the story stops making any sense, cutting from one mostly unrelated scene to the next.

Magdalena lures men into attempting to rape her or into killing each other for the opportunity to have sex with her. It's unclear if anyone actually does have sex with her, but she sure is naked often and a lot of people get terribly injured or die as a result.

The town doctor calls the priest, the priest has an entirely uninteresting exorcism, the demon pops out of her and vanishes, and she skips off into the sunset with some dude who she had just a few minutes earlier tried to murder.

It feels like it was filmed completely out of order, perhaps without a complete script, and cut together haphazardly. The first half at least tells a consistent story, despite uneven editing and tragically bad acting. The second half is consistent only insomuch as that the acting remains terrible.