Cross of the Seven Jewels

Cross of the Seven Jewels
1987
Marco Antonio Andolfi

Marco (or Eddy in the English dub) is visiting Naples when the jeweled cross he wears on his neck is stolen by two hooligans on a motorcycle. Desperate to get it back, he follows the trail of these criminals, which quickly leads him up the chain of a crime ring. These criminals, of course, are not too interested in helping poor Marco, but little do they know that Marco is in fact, half monster and that if he doesn’t get his cross back by midnight, bad things are going to happen.

I went into Cross of Seven Jewels half-expecting it to be a werewolf movie judged solely on the few images of it I had seen.  That all went out the window pretty quickly. I mean, I wasn’t wrong, it is kind of like a werewolf movie in that our main character is afflicted with a time sensitive monstrous condition, but beyond that, Cross of the Seven Jewels is invested in being extremely cheap and weird according to its own rules. I don’t know what you would classify this movie as other than a Satanic Psychic Werewolf Sex Fiend horror film.

It's sad when a werewolf can't grow a beard.

 As any film worth your time will do, Cross of the Seven Jewels opens with a devil worshiping Wookee orgy. Right away, you can tell this is a film that exists in the decline of the Italian genre explosion of the 1980s, the sets and costumes look threadbare and even the grim sheen of a terrible transfer onto VHS can’t enhance it. Director and star, Marco Antonio Andolfi’s monster costume consists of a half a wolf head and some claws, beyond that he doesn’t have a stitch on. So, I hope you like plenty of bare butt with your monster because Marco is looking to show his off.

So you have a hairy mostly nude man-monster, who growls and has teeth and claws, he is surely going to rip and tear people apart, right? Wrong. Marco might crash through the occasional window, but his method of killing is mostly hands off. He stands and stares making animal sounds until the laser effects and glowing kicks in, then he melts a low-level criminal’s face with his mind. Later he’s back to throwing people through tables and strangling naked fortunetellers... so what did that first criminal do to warrant his own personal face removal?

"You call that a fortune?"

The music is a mix of orchestral bits and some oddly bouncy and uplifting synthesizer tunes. I don’t know if any of it was designed with this movie in mind, it all seems cobbled together to fit whatever scene they could stick into. It adds an off-kilter accent to a movie that already teeters out of control from the first frame.

Cross of the Seven Jewels offers 82 minutes of virtually plotless lewd entertainment. You never know what’s coming next but I’m fairly certain the filmmakers had no idea either. This film is easily the best and worst bare-assed werewolf based satanic horror show you are ever going to witness.