This movie is three movies (Roger Vadim / some fuck / Fellini), one rips the living tits off of costume and story and horse. One doesn’t live up to its own child actor lizard and Brigitte Bardot, the third is like a not-very-interested dementor’s dick in your mouth, by Fellini.
All three are “based on” Edgar “Allan” Poe’s “short” “stories”.

First the HORSE AS FUCK MOVIE

This fucking shit is gorgeous, from the locations to the Jane Fonda, to her ever-changing pristine costuming, to the horses, to the coloring, to the story. Within the first minute, we see True Clothing and an ocelot baby cheetah. Every movie should be a zoo, at least a circus.
Jane Fonda is Ramsay Bolton/Elizabeth Bathory, living the sexlife in her castle of debauchery and Cheetahs. Ah, her imperious mien, her glance of insuperable hauteur!–it’s just hella.

She has a Westley/Buttercup relationship with her cousin (this whole story is about fucking your cousin who is also a horse you commit double suicide with to be together forhorseever) and when she gets caught in a bear trap one day she incredulously calls out for assistance to her wandering cousin, who seems to only commune with nature and is–as he puts it–a happy man. We utterly believe him, and the thought that torturing slaves is not the best thing in life starts to weigh on our sexy sexy fucking hot heroine.

After meeting him WITH A CODPIECE THE SIZE OF AN OWL in castle ruins she is spurned once again (while Sultan & Prince, their horses, elope together), and sends her henchmen to burn down his barn in her furious heat.
Being as close to a druid as an Anglican (you know this is set in like… Prussia or somewhere right?) can get, he leaps into the flames to save his horses.
This is where shit gets fucking awesome.

Frederique (oh, by the way, Jane Fonda’s name is that) is sad to learn of her cousin’s death, but out of the flaming stables bursts a powerful black stallion, which no one has ever seen before.
There is a tapestry of said horse in her castle that is burned when the real horse appears, like the mantle torn in the temple when Jesus died.
She hires a weaver to start repairing the tapestry.
The rest of the movie is her riding the horse and wanting to fuck the horse and synergizing with the horse. “She returns to the stable, now spiritually ready to bear her cousin’s centaur offspring.” — me narrating the movie.

I don’t think the tapestry ever gets finished, but there’s a brush fire started by a storm so she runs out on the horse and dies in the flames with it in ecstasy, as do we all.

Elizabeth Bathory, eat your fucking heart out!

second Movie – dopplefuckthis.
William Wilson is the best sadist child I’ve seen in a movie, but as he Tom Riddles merrily through elementary school his zeniths of cruelty are interrupted by another kid named William Wilson.

He goes on to doctor school out of sadistic curiosity where he abducts a woman off the street to try and cut emotion out of her heart, but is interrupted by his doppelnämer again.

He goes on to military gambling school which features a nice rack (of swords) and then Brigitte Bardot.
Has Brigitte Bardot however he chooses; chooses wrong. (Having just seen Jane Fonda in billions of costumes and animals, seeing Brigitte Bardot raises your hopes and then dashes them by having her just sit there and play poker in black funeral garb.)

This Maverick episode starring Bardot ends in super-Zorro saving her from his doppleganger, then the plot just takes a dip in the Poe and never comes back up.
This clip sums up my thoughts and emotions on this story:

Third movie – why won’t this fuck just die already. Prick dies slower than American democracy.
Fellini wastes his and our life for what seems ages.
We’re introduced to some actor/rock-star shitworm, who after a tv interview goes to the “Golden Wolves” Roman Oscars. Me, 20 minutes in: “THE SCENE IS SET ALREADY.”
He then gives a speech at the YES WE GET IT, HOLLYROME IS FAKE Oscars and rants about how bullshit everything is, then escapes to his reward for making an appearance; a Ferrari, which he drives through cardboard people in an empty YES WE GET IT, LIFE IS FAKE Rome, before FINALLY after 8 Toby Goddammit hours crashes after seeing a devil girl like we knew he would the instant he saw the fucking car.

This nightmarish take on the death of an upper cruster is brutalized in its crib by tedious pacing, but I suppose it’s not helpful to say “this could have been good if it was not so boring”.

Two good things about this narrative turd:
1 – At his interview he gives all the disinterested ‘I live my own life, man’ answers to his Hunger Games-esque interviewers. This was 1968 but is eerily an impersonation of 1977 Johnny Rotten jerking off in your face, being a “rebel”.

2- The woman who comes to him while he’s blackout drunk to offer him love and security. What this woman represents/offers him is the escape he is searching for in pits of substance abuse and fame. But he denies this search and crashes and burns in a fake world. (I get my ‘this was almost a good thing’ anger from this not being the David Foster Wallace story about postmodernism and drug recovery I want it to be, but rather just Fellini tonguing the cheek out of an already better tonque-in-cheek EA Poe Grimm Fairy Tale.)
FUCK THIS SHIT. Pretentious come on the intellectual breasts of budding young cinema. We have seen Satyricon, we know what Fellini is capable of visually, and competent with in taking a doesn’t-translate or fractured narrative and making something at least watchable – this is his George Lucas Attack of the Clones moment, this is pig shit rubbed on your naked grandma. This is like Michael Bay trying to be David Lynch. Don’t fuck with us, we know what to do with trash – rewind to Jane Fonda wanting to be/fuck a horse!

♥♥♥♥♥♥ 6/7 ♥’s for HORSE AS FUCK, ♥♥♥♥ 4/7 ♥’s for Poe bullshit, ♥ 1/7 ♥’s for ROME IS HELL WE GET IT. For an overall rating of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 6/7 ♥’s (all that matters is the horse movie)