The Devil's Pleasure Garden: Pretentious Pictures Presents:

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

The fallen angela

The Devil is coming to Rome, and he's traveling in style.

First stop, the Monte Carlo Casino, where Cardinal D'Antonio, a compulsive gambler in mufti, loses a fortune in Church funds to him.

Then he drives his red Cadillac convertible—such a show-off!—to Tuscany, where he stops to visit his old friend Alfredo, and his beautiful, ah, so beautiful wife Angela. "This is Del. He's—what are you in, Del?" "Futures," smiles Del.

The servants struggle to get Del's impossibly heavy trunk up to his room, and when he's not there her kids unlock it and peek inside.

Del, invisible to her husband, makes love to her while they chat in bed about family matters and she tries to keep her voice calm—what's going on? In the morning he takes her away.

Is this what she wants? It must be. "No one does anything they don't want to do." He drives her to Rome, installs her in a hotel with his trunk—then flies to the Vatican. The air force pick him up, "It's some guy hang-gliding," and then lose him.

When he alights his wings fold and disappear, and as he walks into the Vatican Palace his simple black clothes transform into gold-trimmed purple and a crimson cape, magnificent horns sprout on his head, and a mustache and goatee point his features demonically. Nuns and priests cross themselves.

In this guise he joins the Pope, who is at lunch with D'Antonio and three other cardinals. They are shocked—they have no doubt who he is—then respectful, and the waiters serve him lunch while Del presents them with D'Antonio's check from the casino, which shocks them further. "Have you come to collect your debt?" "Not yet."

"We are wondering, Your Excellency, why you are with us today." "I am always with you." "Of course, of course. Is there any special reason why you have taken visible form to visit us?" "I've come to tempt you." "Naturally." "I have brought you the most beautiful woman in the world." The Pope is relieved: is that all? "Your Excellency, at my age—" But Del smiles and eats, and the Pope is worried.

At the hotel he tells Angela he wants her to seduce the Pope and she refuses. He takes her flying over the city and threatens to drop her unless she agrees, but she defies him and she falls a long long way. Then he catches her. "That was fun," she says, "let's do it again!" She knows he loves her, and agrees to do what he asks, to torture him with jealousy.

But the Pope, awakened from obscene dreams, refuses her with such vehemence that she, though she hurts for the Pope, is insulted, and let's Del down just when she should be seductive; for which he locks her in a rat-infested dungeon "so deep even Rome has forgotten it," where she sleeps on cold stone and has the illusion growing old and being there forever.

Thieves steal Del's trunk and take it to a tenement where it sinks through the floor and smashes through all the floors beneath to the cellar. Cops. Jail. Del visits them, opens the trunk for them and each of them steps in and falls screaming into an infinite fiery distance.

When they come out again they are dead men who do Del's bidding.

In the dungeon he whips Angela in anger. She asks to see the Pope, not to comply with Del's wishes but to confess, and he, sensing a way in, brings the Pope to her. But she is pregnant with the Devil's child, and the Pope wants her to abort it, which horrifies her.

Back in the Vatican the Pope studies maps of the ancient sewers and sends the police and the Swiss Guards down there after her. They bring her back, but the doctors want to kill the monster that is coming quickly to term in her.

She escapes, chased through the sewers by the police and then, when the river rises to the vaults, by Del's zombies marching relentlessly under water after her, and down the Tiber to Ostia, where she gives birth into the sea to an eight-foot monster that attacks her.

Two police helicopters come down. The monster swipes at one, and it rises. She grabs the strut of the other and it rises as two zombies grab her legs, two more grab them, and the monster grabs them and climbs toward her, ripping the lower two away and grabbing her. She kicks the three of them off and reaches up for the cop's hand but falls...