Don't Look In the Attic, Ghosts Italian Style

Beba Loncar is the great Serbian actress you always hear about. Okay, maybe not great...and maybe you have never heard of her...but she is pretty enough to appear in an Italian horror film...which should have made her a hero in her native Belgrade. Besides, what a name! Beba Loncar! I'm definitely going to name a character after her in an upcoming novel. Say it with me...Beba Loncar! Her beauty gets her top billing in 1982's "Don't Look In the Attic," though in reality she should have gotten sixth or seventh billing. Ah, the perks of being really good looking.

In 1955 ghosts possess a family at an Italian villa turning them into homicidal maniacs. All will die. Present day a weird law firm,which Martha (Loncar) is a secretary for, conducts a reading of the will. The surviving children of the 1955 carnage inherit the place but must live there. Elisa (Annarita Grapputo) has been contacted by the ghost of her mom who died in the massacre. Nothing too dramatic, just warnings like "DON'T COME!" She shows up with her two estranged and weird brothers, Bruno (Fausto Lombardi) and Tony (Tonino Campa). Also arriving is Bruno's beautiful wife Sonia (Ileana Fraia). No one really pays any attention to Sonia even when she is the first to die.

Meanwhile Bruno angles to take sole possession of the villa. He plans to kill Tony and rape and marry Elisa. This won't go well. Meanwhile again, Beba Loncar tries to rekindle an affair with a lawyer in the law firm she works at. Oh yes, the sultry Ms. Loncar, as Martha, also researches the occult (don't ask). Largely irrelevant to the plot, Beba Loncar is too pretty to be ignored. When her sometimes lover Ugo (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is mysteriously murdered, she rushes over to the haunted villa. As the villa is about to be graced with the arrival of Beba Loncar, Elisa fends off rape attempts by her brother and finds her dead mother's diary...and it is revealing.

What will Beba Loncar do when she reaches the haunted villa? Will the ghosts turn their focus from the plain-Jane Elisa once the sultry Serbian comes through the gates? Will Bruno forget about impregnating his sister once the Beba Loncar barges in? There are a lot of questions answered at the conclusion of this Italian horror film. Perhaps not the best Italian horror film out there, but a pretty good vehicle for the incomparable Beba Loncar. "Don't Look In the Attic" is directed by Carlo Ausino and is a pretty atmospheric ghost story.