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Review by E.C. McMullen Jr. |
 A BAY OF BLOOD - 1971USA Release: May 3, 1972 Nuova Linea Cinematografica, Hallmark Releasing (May 3, 1972: theater - English dubbed), Columbia Pictures (theater - Spanish dubbed), Edited for "R" and retitled as TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE - USA Re-release: Dec. 1972 with American International Pictures (theater - English dubbed) Rating: USA: V, R |
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Welcome to Mari Bava's A BAY OF BLOOD, also known as BAY OF BLOOD and many other titles depending where on earth you live.
This movie had a troubled conception, birth, childhood, and lifetime, nearly all of which I knew nothing about when I saw it, so I'll just focus on the movie.
Whew! Some whacked out movie trailer, eh?
The art world was going through its Peter Max era. Peter was a best selling artist who primarily worked with Primary colors. He was so popular for his time he designed one of the most popular U.S. stamps of all time, EXPO'74. His style was, to greater and lesser degrees, shared by artists like Robert Indiana (1973 LOVE stamp) and Andy Warhol.
Mario Bava's movie trailer is Peter Max'd to the Max!
Despite the extremely low budget, or because of it if you prefer, Director Mario Bava (PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, LISA AND THE DEVIL) also took over the cinematography, which is outstanding. Particularly when you realize how cheap the film stock was.
In fact, A BAY OF BLOOD is filled with cinematography moments where Mario was just showing off, like slowly panning past a setting sun on the bay, repeatedly, decades before the age of digital camera sensors would change settings on the fly and a fixed film speed was not to be trifled with.
A sad old woman in a wheelchair looks out the window and Mario takes more artistic cinematography license. If it wasn't for the soap opera music, which was all the rage in Italy in the late 60s, early 70s, suspense could have been built here. But Italian and Spanish movies invariably had incongruous music before Dario Argento and Goblin trail blazed.
So in early Italian giallo you watch someone's screams cut short as they get beheaded, the camera zooming into the blood spurting neck, all to the pastoral sounds of flutes and oboes, as if you were watching a nature documentary of a fawn gently walking through tall grass on a warm spring day.
Old lady doesn't get beheaded but she does meet her untimely demise when a killer cleans her clock. The killer tries to make it look like a suicide when a second killer settles the first killer's hash!
It's all merry mishaps after this.
In some city a lawyer named Franco Ventura (Chris Avram: ENTER THE DEVIL, OBSCENE DESIRE, STAR ODYSSEY, ESCAPE FROM GALAXY 3) has finished a roll in the hay with his secretary Laura (Anna Maria Rosatti) and is now off to settle a real estate deal over a fancy estate by the bay. He's a repugnant sexist pig in 4D but Laura knows he really loves her and she can change him.
Laura tries to change Franco.
So off he goes on a road trip to do business at that bay. You know, the bloody one.
Meanwhile, back at the bay, an idiot named Paolo Fosatti (Leopoldo Trieste) gets bullied by the hot-headed local fisherman, Simone (Claudio Camaso: THE UNNATURALS). Simone catches octopus in the bay and eats them raw and alive. Paolo goes home to his wife Anna (Laura Betti: HATCHETT FOR THE HONEYMOON, SBATTI IL MOSTRO IN PRIMA PAGINA, CARAMELLE DA UNO SCONOSCUITO, TEOREMA), who reads tarot cards and adores him, but he ignores her so he can spend time with his precious pets - insects that he kills to add to his collection.
Meanwhile, back at the bay, some young folk on a fun weekend, perhaps fresh out of a semester of college, ride their dune buggy into... this area. Not really a town or village, just a few lavish houses in the middle of nowhere.
Now we meet
Luca (Guido Boccaccini) owns and drives the dunebuggy and is in love or lust with,
Silvie (Paola
Reubens: THE OTHER HELL) who is flirty and flippant and wants both Luca and his friend,
Roberto/Bobby (Roberto Bonanni), a sexually confused schlub who is packaged with
Louise/Brunhilde (Brigitte Skay: THE LOVE FACTOR, THE AMOROUS ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG POSTMAN, ANGELS OF TERROR, BLACKMAIL, L'ENFANT DE NUIT), a free-spirited German gal who wants Bobby in every single way, doesn't realize that her dearest friend, Silvie, is jealous of her, and doesn't get that Bobby is confused about his sexuality, wanting either Luca or Silvie but not both at the same time.
Luca doesn't get what's wrong with Bobby, what with Brunhilde practically throwing herself at him and coming just short of presenting. He also doesn't like his girlfriend Silvie flirting with Bobby. Hell, if she wants Bobby, just say so and Luca will gladly go after Brunhilde. Except Silvie wants both men to herself and the bosomy Brunhilde can go to hell - even though the two women are like, the best of friends!
Brunhilde makes a gruesome discovery while trying to change Bobby.
The three Italian people aren't open about what they really want, it's all a mystery to Louise, she's had enough of their B.S. for the moment, and goes to swim in the bay.
None of them realize that, since they arrived, they've been watched.
Merry mishaps occur and it's particularly tragic as Brunhilde is probably the last truly innocent person in this film. Everyone else, to greater and lesser degrees, is a narcissistic jerk if not a murderous one.
Night falls and Mario doesn't leave us in the mysterious dark for long as he soon divulges all of the conspiracies, counter conspiracies, truces and betrayals all colliding together for one bloody night on the bay.
Filippo and friend
Giallo comes in the form of inventive (for its time) kills, and Mario had no reluctance about zooming into the gore shot and keeping it there while gouts of blood spurted toward the camera.
TRIVIA Actor Claudio Camaso (birth name Claudio Volante), who often played crazed and violent characters in movies, was not merely playing a role. Throughout his aduthood he was constantly in trouble with the law for pursuing violent agendas, often against Italian Communists, in the name of his Fascist Democratic Socialism, like his father before him. Only a few years after A BAY OF BLOOD, he murdered his friend Vincenzo Mazza, with a knife during an argument Claudio was apparently losing. Claudio ran off, then eventually turned himself over to the police, and hung himself in his cell. |
Because it's Italian cinema, it's all sex and whatever else the story is about. If there is an Italian movie that isn't about sex and whatever else they're doing (Creatures, Cowboys, Crime, Comedy, whatever) then I've never seen it, and I've watched plenty. Even the family film, Cinema Paradiso, is sex first and the theater second. It even features scenes of a local priest who furiously makes the projectionist cut all the sex scenes from the movies they get.
As inventive as the super low-budget A BAY OF BLOOD was for its time, it was largely riffed (a nice way of saying ripped) off of by the folks who made FRIDAY THE 13th, and these days, in the 2020s, no one is disputing that anymore.
Horror fans well-versed in international movies agree that there would be no FRIDAY THE 13th without John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN and Mario Bava's BAY OF BLOOD.
I watched this again, this time with my wife - who is a big fan of gory cop dramas complete with all of the bloody forensics and wotnot.
She was shocked and taken aback by A BAY OF BLOOD - and this is after living with me for 25 years!
By 1972 and alongside THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, A BAY OF BLOOD was among the hardest of the hardcore Horror movies. Over half a century later, it still stands.
Four Shriek Girls.
This review copyright 2022 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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