"Night of the Sorcerers" deserves a special type of award for featuring the only pre-credits opening sequence in cinematic history that is both terribly boring and bloody exhilarating at the same time! Like many movies of its kind, it starts with a tribal voodoo ritual with monotonous hand-drum music and half-naked aboriginals oddly dancing. Just when you're about to hit the fast-forward button for the first time, because the dancing is already ongoing for a dull two-and-a-half minutes, the aboriginals drag in a beautiful young woman and tie her to a tree. The witchdoctor whips her until she bleeds severely, and he even has the skills to whip her straight out of her clothes! Then there's another several minutes of only dancing to jungle-drum sounds, and you wish to fast-forward again, but then hell breaks loose! The aboriginals are savagely massacred by white people with guns and the poor whipped girl loses her head (but promptly opens her eyes again and suddenly grew impressive fangs!) What a rollercoaster of an opener.
This is a must-see movie for euro-exploitation fanatics, for the simple fact that it was written and directed by the great Amando de Ossorio. The man wrote horror history with his "Blind Dead" tetralogy, but also delivered a handful of terrific individual classics, like "The Lorelei's Grasp", "Malenka", "Demon Witch Child", and this "Night of the Sorcerers". De Ossorio has a unique style and somehow always manages to generate suspense and morbid atmosphere despite his flicks being cheesy, sleazy, and substantially as good as void.
Sixty years after the ritual of the opening, an expedition heads out to that same African area. Some expedition, by the way... It exists of one scientist, an aspiring photographer/beauty queen, a reluctant rich girl/beauty queen, a guide, and the guide's girlfriend/beauty queen. At night, when the guide and his girl are making love in the lake, the photographer is lured into the jungle and undergoes the exact same fate as the girl of the intro. Does the rest of the group stand a chance to survive?
It's not highly sophisticated cinema, for sure, but "Night of the Sorcerers" is great and trashy exploitation fun with lots of excessive gore, shameless gratuitous nudity, and quite a bit of spooky moments. De Ossorio must have loved the whipping and decapitation sequences so much that he repeats them a couple of time, and the same goes for footage of the gorgeous brunette (Kali Hansa) washing herself.
