User Reviews

What does it take to get your film outright banned from Italy?

This is the film that shows you.

This movie was supposed to be released in 1973, but the production company went bankrupt. Then, in 1975, it was banned by the Italian board of film review. Finally, in 1979, director and writer Renato Polselli re-cut and re-dubbed the movie to transform it into an allegory of female oppression and it was approved.

Then he decided to go for it and made an extended version with hardcore inserts that was released in adult movie theaters. That version was seized by the authorities for a few months.

A group of sinners has destroyed Mirielle (Mirella Rossi) and made her hate her body. Now, one by one, a lawyer calls them out and makes them confess their sins. I mean, yes, technically, that's what they say this movie is about, but somehow it also has the Garden of Eden. Satanic rituals - more than one! - and just about every single form of perversion that has ever been imagined from bestiality with a donkey to nature-based masturbation with a corncob and a tree branch, as well as a candle being used, orgies, toes being inserted, whipping and just about anything else you can pull out of the filthy mind of Renato Polselli, who seems to

Obviously not available in a great quality - I can't even imagine who would put out this movie - and it concerns the idea that in the Garden of Eden, men and women were equal but after the apple got eaten, well, men had to become masters and women the slaves and no one has been happy about it. Men treat women horribly, mothers in turn treat their sons even worse and sex - which should be a holy act - has turned into perversion.

Cue the Black Mass.

I'm obsessed with Polselli. Was he a learned man who was interested in pushing these ideas? Or was he like Joe D'Amato, someone who used sex to make money? He's long gone - he died in 2006 - and the only interview with him I could find was on an old forum and posted by Jay Slater. It was written in 1997, nine years before he died, and in it, I learned that Polselli had a degree in philosophy and doesn't think much of Dario Argento, saying "Argento doesn't make real giallos. He takes five or six horrific elements and sticks them together with a very thin plot."

This part of the interview speaks directly to this film:

"The director intended the film to be about obscenity and how it has asserted itself in the world, and through religious circles. He submitted the movie as Quando l'amore e' oscenita' (When Love is Obscenity) in 1973, but the Italian censors had finally had enough with the director's films - the president of film classification remarked: "You have made a film way too tough."

"Another way of interpreting the film is how it fights against the Italian system, and how obscenity was dealt with throughout history. I was very much against the contemporary ideas of Italian thinking, and how politicians were blinded by the church and its religious thinkers. The censors were shocked by my film, not because of its graphic imagery, but due to its political nature. Because of this, I had to re-edit and re-dub the entire film, and turned it into a feminist picture," Polselli sighs. Six years later, he re-submitted Oscenita' as a giallo, another illustration of ultra sexual violence against women. A three-minute presentation trailer can be found circulating between collectors of the genre, and Polselli hopes to release the original cut of Oscenita' on video and DVD in the near future."

Wow! Quando l'amore è oscenità, or more commonly known as Oscenità, is a very rare and hard to find film. I only know of two sources which carry it. Of all the hype I've heard of this little known rarity, it does stand up to what is said. This movie does deliver the goods. This masterpiece directed by Renato Polselli (aka Ralph Brown) was made in 73, but censors deemed the movie to obscure towards women. The films dialog was changed and not released until 79, taking on a different approach-now aimed at masculine perversions. Oscenità surely beats out the "sexploitation" competition by D'Amato and others. The film presents an array of nasties, from intercourse with a tree branch, candle masturbation, whipping, switchblade foreplay, orgies in the presence of animals, a woman urinating in a bucket, black magic lesbian rituals, toe masturbation, women fooling around with a real corn on the cobb, and last but not least; a scene with a woman and a donkey, which makes the one in Emanuelle in America seem very tame!! The film is only in Italian with no subtitles. The picture was not the best quality (which I think actually adds a surreal look to the film), but it was a very interesting viewing experience. I highly recommended this film for fans of exploitation and the obscure.