UnowPriceless hyped garbage

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Joseph Brando If you answered "Yes" you should not bother seeing this movie. However, if you can view a haunted house dark ride style movie as a satisfying cinematic viewing experience, then strap yourself in and enjoy the view as creepy weird unexplained visions flash in front of you. Pouty-lipped Valentina is smack-dab in the middle of the art house European revolution crowd of the time - photographing nude woman by day and walking the lonely city streets at night alone, which is how she meets up with "Baba Yaga" a mysterious woman who dresses in black (played by the always lovely Carroll Baker). She instantly weaves a spell over Valentina haunting her thoughts, her dreams and her camera. She also does a pretty decent job of weaving her magic spell over the viewer. "Baba Yaga" takes Gothic Horror, stylish pop art, comic books and bondage sex, whirls them in a blender and spews the concoction forth. Although very often defined as a "Giallo" film this certainly belongs more to the "Art Horror" genre. Those who are fans of the trippy stylish body-baring Giallo/Horror output from Italy circa 1970 should put "Baba Yaga" on their "must-watch" list.

Hitchcoc I watched this with an awareness of the pseudo-art of the seventies. I'm sure the people who made this thought carefully about each shot, put together some silly plot, set up some titillation, and went from there. The movie is mess because the editing is a mess. If they thought they were making a serious film, it needed to be put together with some sort of point. The story is a bit ghost story/fantasy. A photographer makes a good protagonist because of her ability to encounter a cross section of characters. Many are superfluous, there so we could see them unclothed. This is just more of the junk that was put out in the seventies in Europe. It was a liberating time but it brought out hack artists. From reading other reader comments, apparently this particular character has a comic book connection. Having seen none of them, I can't judge this based on that form. As a movie, it isn't much. Good old Carol Baker. She never really amounted to a whole lot, did she?

Coventry Psychedelic soft-erotic exploitation movies were an inexplicably popular trend amongst European directors back in the late 60's and early 70's. This generally pointless sub genre of horror consists of movies that basically don't have any plots, but are stuffed with trendy looking women parading around naked and fetishist escapades that all healthy heterosexual males are supposed to fantasize about. Yeah, right … I don't know about you, but I surely never dreamed of sadomasochistic rubber dolls or Nazi elimination squads. The list of these oddball movies is long and contains efforts from several acclaimed directors, like Mario Bava's "Lisa and the Devil", Jess Franco's "Succubus", Massimo Dallamano's "Venus in Furs", Umberto Lenzi's "Orgasmo" and Piero Schivazappa's "The Laughing Woman". "Baba Yaga" also fits into this category, but here the script was inspired by an eccentric comic books series courtesy of Guido Crepax. Basically this means that "Baby Yaga" is even weirder and more flamboyant than all the other psychedelic sex flicks mentioned here above. During a live and personal presentation of his film, at a festival in my home country Belgium, director Corrando Farina explained that he tried to translate as many comic book elements to the screen as possible, but that it certainly wasn't easy due to budgetary restriction and uncooperative producers and censorship. Still, no matter what Farina claims, nothing can divert the attention away from the fact that "Baba Yaga" is a dull and utterly incoherent movie. I didn't spot any artistic style elements at all and the hallucinogenic footage is just a bunch of randomly scraped together and irrelevant sleaze. Isabelle De Funès (Louis' yummy niece, apparently) stars as a liberated photographer in Milan. Late one night and following only a brief encounter, she reluctantly becomes the object of obsession of the funnily named lesbian witch Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker). The deranged hag turns Valentina's camera into a murder device, transfigures her best friend into an SM-doll, inflicts eerie nightmares on her and eventually lures the poor girl to an abandoned mansion with nasty sewing machines and bottomless pits. In case you're looking for significance, symbolism or possibly even an explanation, I'm afraid I have to discourage you straight away. Everything that happens in "Baba Yaga" happens for absolutely NO reason and the film finishes just as void as it begun. To round up with at least a couple of positive remarks, I really liked the music and both Isabella De Funès and Ely Galleani are stunningly beautiful ladies to look at. George Eastman (as the heroine's clueless boyfriend) is good too, but I definitely prefer the roles he played in his later career as they were practically all villainous.

Lee Eisenberg During the late '60s and early '70s, Carroll Baker expatriated from the United States and made some horror flicks in Italy. Among these giallo movies was "Baba Yaga". It portrays a fashion photographer (Isabelle De Funes) getting involved with an otherworldly older woman (Baker). The title identifies who she is, but people unfamiliar with Slavic mythology may not know who that is. Baba Yaga is a witch in Slavic, especially Russian, folklore. Depending on which story, she can be good or evil, but they usually portray her living in a house standing on chicken legs. We in the west usually mispronounce the second part of her name: we say YAH-gah, but it's actually yah-GAH.But let's not get off topic. I liked this movie. It was sort of half horror, half look at the mod culture in early 1970s Italy (although it seems like all the giallo movies back then showed it). And of course, there's plenty of eroticism to go around; as far as I'm concerned, Carroll Baker embodies (pun intended) eroticism. Quite cool.Also starring George Eastman.