I don’t think that anyone would ever say that Twitch of the Death Nerve is Mario Bava’s best film.  However, it’s hard to dispute one thing:  It does feature the most carnage ever seen in one of Il Maestro’s movies.  There are enough impalings, strangulations, throat slashings, and hatchets to the face than most movies can handle.  

The gist of the plot is that there are all these greedy ass people trying to get their hands on this bay front property for their own variously shady purposes and are willing to stab, hack, and choke anyone that gets in their way.  What is novel about the film is that not only are there multiple murderers running around but also multiple motives for the killings as well. 

The downside to having everyone being a cold-blooded killer out for themselves is that not a whole lot of the plot ever really makes much sense.  This movie simultaneously has too much and not enough plot.  That’s okay though, because I don’t think Bava cared either.  In this film it’s not WHO the killer is, it’s WHO the victim is and HOW they will get it that really counts.  Twitch also contains one of the looniest WTF endings in cinema history, one you have to see to disbelieve.

Twitch of the Death Nerve was one of the most highly influential horror films to come out of the early 70’s.  It was the first real “body count” movie of it’s time.  (I liked the way the killers stacked their victims up like cordwood.)  Heck, the Friday the 13^th franchise pretty much swiped everything wholesale from this flick, particularly the scene where two lovers are humping and get impaled with a spear while doing the deed.  Bava is such a madman though that he actually let them finish fucking while they were still impaled!  You won’t see that in a Friday the 13^th movie, that’s for sure. 

AKA:  A Bay of Blood.  AKA:  Carnage.  AKA:  Bloodbath.  AKA:  Bloodbath:  Bay of Death.  AKA:  Chain Reaction.  AKA:  Last House on the Left 2.

A wealthy inventor invites a bunch of dudes and their hot sluts to his fancy schmancy house for a weirdo cocktail party.  When it comes out that he’s just invented some top secret formula and is going to receive a huge payday from it, people start dropping like flies and end up hanging in the meat locker. 

Five Dolls for an August Moon is a middle of the road giallo from the maestro of Italian horror, Mario Bava.  Reportedly, Bava didn’t like the script (which shamelessly rips off Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians) and only directed the movie for the money; and it really shows.  If anything it plays like a rough draft of his classic Twitch of the Death Nerve.  As with that film, it doesn’t matter who lives and who dies, but how they die that really counts.  (The meat locker scenes are Bava’s none-too-subtle way of conveying that he thinks of his characters as merely pieces of meat.)  Unlike Twitch, the deaths are all pretty bland and mostly happen off screen, which is quite a letdown to be sure.

The flick at least has the benefit of some atmospheric moments, most of which revolve around the inventor’s state-of-the-art house.  Even though Bava was just going through the motions on this one, he still does a competent job behind the camera and holds the viewer’s attention for the most part.  Five Dolls for an August Moon may only be a minor entry in the master’s oeuvre, but if you’re a Bava completist like me, you’ll find it to be somewhat rewarding.

AKA:  Island of Terror.

Mario Bava has directed movies about vampires (Black Sunday), suave super thieves (Diabolik) and demonic possession (Lisa and the Devil), but I never knew he did swinging ‘70’s sex comedies too.  It’s a shame that most of it is not very sexy or funny.  Oh well, you got to give the man credit for trying something different I suppose.  

The film’s structure mercilessly rips off Rashomon as we hear four different versions of how a playboy (Brett Halsey from Return of the Fly) tried to romance a hot chick (Daniela Giordano from Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key).   First the girl tells her story where the guy tried to rape her.  Then the guy tells all about how she willingly fucked him in the shower.  Next, the horny doorman tells his version which involves some hints at lesbianism.  The fourth and final version is told by some weirdo doctor, which I guess is supposed to be “the truth” or something. 

While there are a few breasts on display, all the sex stuff is rather tame and is really nothing that will get your heartbeat going.  The comedy is equally lame.  Seriously, fat guys running in fast motion while comic music plays is only funny if your name is Benny Hill.  The biggest problem with the film though is the structure.  I mean the premise was thin to begin with and the fact that it’s repeated no less than FOUR times (albeit in slightly different versions) doesn’t exactly do the film any favors either. 

Four Times That Night could’ve been an interesting departure for Bava enthusiasts.  I personally love me some Bava, but even I have to admit that parts of this thing were pretty tough to get through.  Bava bathes everything in rich eye-popping color, but it’s easy to see that bedroom comedy, hippie go-go dancing and stupid comic relief doormen are clearly not his specialty. 

Halsey gets the only funny line of dialogue when he tells Giordano, “I’m a wild man with turbo hormones!”

A lot of directors have stolen from Alfred Hitchcock over the years (heck, Brian DePalma has made an entire career out of it) but I believe this was the first time someone wore their inspiration so proudly on their sleeve.  (The title itself not so subtly spoofs The Man Who Knew Too Much, a story that Hitchcock had already filmed TWICE.)  With The Girl Who Knew Too Much, director Mario (Black Sunday) Bava tailored his already impressive cinematic style to fit a story that even Hitch would have been tempted to film. 

Nora (Letecia Roman) is a beautiful girl visiting her aunt in Rome.  When she passes away suddenly, it rattles Nora into a state of shock that isn’t helped much when she witnesses a murder shortly thereafter.  Of course, no one believes her but John Saxon tries to help her find the killer, mostly because she looks hot as Hell. 

The early scenes work the best where Mario slowly ratchets up the tension.  He bathes the opening sequences with the usual Bava atmosphere but gives things a bigger-than-life feel the way that Hitchcock always did so well.  Bava doesn’t directly lift from Hitchcock per se; rather he echoes familiar feeling scenes from Hitch’s repertoire and gives them a new twist.  (The airport scene is reminiscent of North by Northwest.)  The film also has a dark tongue in cheek sense of humor that the Master would have enjoyed and there’s a pretty funny running gag where Roman sneaks up on who she thinks is the killer and beats him up and every time it turns out to be Saxon.  (At one point she even ends up breaking his finger.)

That’s not to say it’s a perfect film.  Far from it in fact.  The problem is that Bava plays all his cards too soon.  The first 25 minutes or so of this flick is quite memorable and very tense but once the love interest enters the picture, the pacing gets particularly pokey.  After the strong opening, Bava eases off on the suspense and unfortunately is never able to recapture the magic of the early scenes.  Not only does Nora’s plight grow a little tiresome after awhile, but her character does too.  While beautiful, Roman just doesn’t have the acting chops necessary to carry a film like this one.  Good thing Saxon is around to keep you entertained. 

 
While he’s not at his best, Bava still packs on the atmosphere and crafts a pretty fun, if uneven, little chiller.  Even minor entries in Bava’s oeuvre are worth a look in my book, so if you’re a Bava fan AND a Hitchcock fan to boot, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.   

Mondo Cane co-director Franco Prosperi also served as assistant director.

AKA:  The Evil Eye.

A wife (Daria Nicolodi) and her new hubby (John Steiner) move into the house where she murdered her first husband with an Exact-o knife.  At first things seem normal, but when her ex’s ghost possesses their young son and he starts doing weird shit like stealing momma’s underwear and trying to dry hump her, Daria starts to suspect that something’s up.  Finally the ghost stops pussyfooting around and makes the Exact-o fly around by itself and chase her around the house.  This gets Daria so upset that she has to land a pick axe into poor John’s chest.  In the end the ghost causes the house to topple on top of his no good skank wife so he can play Tea Time with his snot nosed brat of a kid.  

Shock was the final film by Italian horror maestro Mario Bava.  Supposedly he was so frail that he had to get his son Lamberto (who also co-wrote the script) to help him direct a lot of scenes.  It certainly shows as the end result is kinda patchy.  The film lacks a lot of Mario’s usual visual flair and the opening scenes move at a snail’s pace.  What’s worse is that the supernatural shenanigans are mostly weighted towards the last fifteen minutes or so. 

While the flick may have several weaknesses, it does have an undeniable hypnotic charm that holds your attention even when things are getting particularly slow going.  The gore, when it comes, is solid and the scene where Nicolodi is ravaged by her invisible husband is reminiscent of The Entity.  Shock may not be the swan song you would hope for from the master but it still has its fair share of memorable moments to qualify it as a must-see for rabid fans of the late, great Bava.

Lamberto also directed the Exact-o themed A Blade in the Dark.

AKA:  Beyond the Door 2.  AKA:  Suspense. 

Women keep turning up dead in France without a drop of blood in them, leading the press to proclaim that there’s a vampire on the loose.  In actuality, it’s a mad scientist living in a decrepit castle who is stealing the blood of virgins and using it to create a serum to keep his old hag of a wife eternally young.  The grizzled looking grandma takes the potion which temporary restores her youth so she can throw herself debutante balls and make time with a studly journalist.  Luckily, the journalist is more interested in getting a scoop than getting laid and when he learns of her foul deeds, he sends in the cops to gun down the scientist for meddling in God’s domain while the old woman shrivels up like a prune. 

This was the first horror movie ever filmed in Italy because of rampant government censorship.  (Fucking fascists!)  Like many “firsts”, it’s not very good but it’s worth a look if you want to see the seedling that spawned countless Italian horror flicks. 

You might be able to tell just by looking at I Vampiri’s uneven quality that it was a rushed production.  Meddling producers caused original director Ricardo (The Ghost) Freda to walk off the set, but be glad he did because that gave the film’s cinematographer, Mario Bava a chance to step in and finish the film.  Bava, of course went on to be one of the most revered horror directors in Italy and any Bava fan worth his salt will probably want to check out the film just to see how he got his start. 

Like most of Bava’s work, the film is quite stylish looking and has a couple of atmospheric sets (like the dungeon).  Unfortunately, the film offers no surprises and is dull as all get out to boot.  Vampire fans will also be severely disappointed by the fact that there are NO vampires in this flick as it’s another one of those Old-Woman-Looking-for-the-Fountain-of-Youth-Parading-Around-as-Her-Niece Movies.  This genre is an old hat and you’ve seen it done lots better before; my favorite being The Leech Woman. 

It ain’t great, although you may get a kick out of the surprisingly sophisticated special effects of the old bat rapidly aging.  They’re reminiscent of the ’32 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and are easily the coolest thing about the film.  If you don’t count a bunch of Parisian trollops inexplicably speaking Italian that is.  

AKA:  Evil’s Commandment.  AKA:  Lust of a Vampire.  AKA:  The Devil’s Commandment.  AKA:  The Vampires.

Boris Karloff stands in front of a blue void and narrates three tales of terror from Italian horror maestro Mario (Black Sunday) Bava. 

In the first story, The Telephone (** ½), a hot chick gets menacing phone calls from a mysterious stranger who can see her every move.  She deduces the caller is her recently escaped homicidal boyfriend so she calls her sexy friend (and lover!  HEY OH!) and has her come over to keep her company.  Unfortunately for her, her ex also shows up looking to ring her pretty little neck.    

Bava slowly builds suspense and does a fine job at maintaining it, which is quite a feat considering this is essentially a one person story.  Too bad the plot is paper thin and suffers from a lifeless ending.  It also doesn’t help that it goes on way too long, even though it only runs 30 minutes. 

The next story, The Wurdalak (***) stars Karloff as the titular vampire who returns to his family’s home after his death to feed off his living relatives.  (Wurdalaks can only drink the blood of their loved ones.)  He puts the bite on them one by one until only his hot daughter and the romantic lead Mark Damon are left.  It all ends with the hottie sinking her teeth into Damon’s jugular.  (Hey, at least that means she loves him, right?)

This segment has the look of a Corman Poe movie (co-star Damon was also in The Fall of the House of Usher), but it has a sinister charm all it’s own.  The scene where Karloff puts his grandchild on his knee and leers at him ominously like he’s going to turn him into a hot lunch will certainly give you the heebie jeebies and the severed head gag is superb for a 60’s flick.  Although this story suffers from some pokey pacing (at almost 40 minutes, it’s by far the longest of the stories), it’s easily the best looking of the bunch as the colorful cinematography is absolutely spellbinding.   

The Drop of Water (***) tells the story of a bitchy nurse who is hired by a mortician to prepare the corpse of an old clairvoyant for her funeral.  While dressing the body, the nurse steals the corpse’s ring and faces the wrath of the old woman’s ghost, which personifies itself in the form of an annoying fly, an irritating drop of water, and finally in the form of the old woman’s ghost.  

This story may be the best of them all as it’s straight up meat and potatoes horror that channels the best of the EC Horror Comics as well as Bava’s patented gothic sensibilities.  It’s short, simple, and to the point and the villain gets her just desserts in the end, so what’s not to like?

The exploitation geniuses at AIP bought this flick, changed around the order of the stories, took out all the references to lesbianism and re-titled it to cash in on their previous Bava hit, Black Sunday.  While it’s nowhere near the same league as that immortal classic, Black Sabbath is still quite a lot of fun for both anthology fans and Bava loyalists.  I especially liked the way Bava used sound to enhance the film’s atmosphere.  In The Telephone, it’s the constant ringing of the phone, it’s the whirling winds that signal the return of The Wurdalak, and in The Drop of Water it’s… well the drop of water.  The film is also lushly photographed (the trippy Karloff hosted framing device in particular) and ranks among one of the finest looking films Bava ever cranked out.    

AKA:  The Three Faces of Fear.

Elke Sommer stars as a tourist named Lisa who visits Spain and gets separated from her group.  While trying to find her tour bus, she runs into a charming butler played by Telly Savalas, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a mural of the devil she saw while sightseeing.  He offers her and a group of strangers shelter in his master’s mansion where they posture and preen for an hour or so.  Predictably, the man of the house goes crazy and the bodies start piling up.  Since he likes Lisa, he drugs her and bones her next to the corpse of his first wife.  (If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.)  In the end we learn that Savalas is indeed the devil and turns all the dead bodies into mannequins

The film’s best sequences are it’s earliest where Elke wanders around the surreal back alleys of Spain.  The maestro Mario (Black Sunday) Bava lushly photographs these scenes and bathes them in bright poppy colors, which gives the film a trippy atmosphere.  Unfortunately things get severely bogged down once she reaches the castle and the film starts to quickly work on the audience’s patience. 

In Bava’s oeuvre, Lisa and the Devil is a minor work, but just because it doesn’t stack up well against his other classics, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth a look-see.  There’s a great bit where a woman goes nuts and runs her husband over SEVERAL times with a car and a flashy scene where blood literally covers the camera lens.   

To ensure American audiences would sit through this lyrical and often beautiful looking film, the producers forced Bava to add a bunch of superfluous exorcism scenes featuring Robert Alda (Alan’s dad) as a priest to cash in on the success of The Exorcist and re-titled the film.  The results were:  

THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM  (1976)  ** 

As much as these scenes go against the grain of Bava’s original intentions, they provide a lot more cheap thrills than in the film’s original incarnation.  I can’t say that I really blame the producers for adding them because Lisa and the Devil was way too pretentious to be truly involving and too arty to be scary.  At least the green vomit, constant swearing (“I am the asshole of the world!”), and gratuitous nudity of The House of Exorcism add a little fun to the proceedings.  Like any piecemealed together movie, what you gain in shock value, you inevitably lose in coherence. 

In the end, it all comes down to what kind of movie you’d rather see.  If you want to watch an uneven but majestically filmed supernatural story, see Lisa and the Devil.  Those who love their Exorcist knockoffs filled with green vomit and confusing editing, see The House of Exorcism.  By themselves, neither is very satisfying, but seen back to back; they’re a fascinating lesson in crass movie marketing. 

Savalas gives a playful performance (he even sucks on a lollipop like Kojack) and is clearly relishing being allowed to go over the top, especially while talking to a bunch of mannequin heads.  Elke looks great, particularly when she’s displaying her luscious melons and Gabriele (Women’s Prison Massacre) Tinti co-stars the ill fated chauffeur. 

The wimpy master of the house gets the best line:  “I can’t live like this in your shrine of death!”

AKA:  The House of Exorcism.  AKA:  The Devil and the Dead.  AKA:  The Devil in the House of Exorcism. 

Black Sunday is an unparalleled classic in Italian horror.  Mario Bava’s first and best film is pound for pound the most atmospheric movie ever made and features an incredible performance by Barbara Steele.  She plays two roles, the sexy and evil vampiric witch Asa, and her innocent descendant Katia.  The opening scene where Asa is branded, burned at the stake and gets a giant spiked mask hammered onto her face is still unsettling, even after 45 years.  Two centuries later two doctors unwittingly resurrect her and she sets out to kill and replace Katia.  Besides the brilliant opening scene, Bava offers several equally memorable images (Asa’s eyes slowly growing back into her sockets and Asa’s masked servant crawling out of his grave, just to name a few) and fills every inch of the frame with fog, fear and dread.  It was later remade by the director’s son, Lamberto.  

AKA:  The Mask of Satan.