Kiss Me Kill Me, 1973

P. wanted to watch Baba Yaga [aka Kiss Me Kill Me] because it features a witch who isn’t a story book hag; in fact the witch is played by Carroll Baker, a steamy sixties sex symbol! It’s a shame that this central female figure turned out to be a very wooden and unconvincing bad dame! Fortunately, however, the worst aspects of the film are kept to a minimum and there are unexpected delights aplenty.

[Carroll Baker as Baba Yaga]

Basically female photographer, Valentina, has a chance (or is it?) meeting with witch, Baba Yaga, when the witch almost mows her down in her enormous old Bentley. What an eastern European witch is doing in Milan is anyone’s guess.

[Isabelle De Funès as Valentina Rosselli]

Baba Yaga is a lesbian who wants to seduce Valentina, and who takes out her sexual jealosy of Valentina’s models and friends by cursing a camera so that the shutter action flattens anyone it photographs. Baba Yaga gives Valentina a strange large doll dressed in S&M gear, Annette, as a protective talisman.

[Annette and one of Valentina's many partially-dressed models]

Things get weird and Valentina calls her handsome lover Arno to help her figure it all out. Annette comes to life (oh my, what eye candy that is) and it all gets weirdly hallucinagenic and disitinctly S&M for a while. In the end the evil witch is pushed into the bottomless pit—which just happens to be a lounge-room feature of dilapidated houses—and the beautiful Annette is beheaded by Arno, but it is only doll parts that fall to the floor.

[Ely Galleani as Annette. She's Alive!]

[Annette departs with Valentina's camera (note the Morticia Addams cane peacock-back chair)]

[Annette shackles and whips Valentina]

[Annette's head]

The end has everyone wondering if the whole episode was in Valentina’s head—and the film has plenty of perverse dream sequencess—or if it were some truly magical happening.

Kiss Me Kill Me is an adaptation of an adult comic book, something which took us by surprise. The comic, Valentina, written in Italian and never translated to English, is considered a classic, a classic that became increasing erotic as the series went on. Graphic novel and comic-book adaptations have been such a successful filmic enterprise in the last fifteen years that we were surprised to find one from 1973. Even earlier, however, is Vadim’s Barbarella of 1968, itself “an imaginative adaptation of a French cartoon strip by Jean-Claude Forest”* with psychedelic detail rather than 70s goth chic (and, strangely enough, Barabrella is also attacked by vicious dolls).

Kiss Me Kill Me has cinematic features of more modern comic-book adaptations, especially the comic-book interludes in the film. The prelude to the only sex scene is beautifully set up, with the two lovers viewing an adult comic book together, which changes to include them in the comic book images, which changes to a montage of black and white stills in place of the actual sex scene. It is fantastically well done, especially when you realize how new this style is.

[Valentina and George Eastman as Arno Treves, reading an erotic comic]

[comic images seague with BW montage]

It is also worth mentioning the amazing sets. Baba Yaga’s house is a wunderkamer of sensual delights. Everywhere the photographer looks is an impossibly beautiful image and she is seduced to masturbatory delight by all that she sees.

[Baba Yaga's mansion]

[Baba Yaga's mystic symbols, used to control events]

[70s Gothic Chic]

And of course, there are the 70s features. There are sculptured plastic chairs, vast and low beds, transparent phone and brick like answering machine, a red Mini, Hippies, casual nudity, earnest “social unrest” and a cool soundtrack. The blokes have beards and Starsky and Hutch sheep-skin jackets, the girls (other than the Louise Brooks-inspired Valentina) have long hair and death-defying footwear.

[The phone you've always wanted]

[Technicour Hippy]

[Make Love Not War]

Kiss Me Kill Me is widely available on DVD.

*John Stanley, The Creature Features Movie Guide (1981), the bible for all things mad, bad and fab. This has been P’s main viewing guide since he was given it as a teenager. It now has an terrifying number of ticks!!!!