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Picking up from Volume 1 of Anchor Bay's wonderful
Mario Bava Collection, Volume 2 focuses on the director's later directorial career. The set more or less encompasses the highs and the lows of Bava's twilight years: after encountering unimaginable difficulties working in the "big leagues" on
Diabolik (1967), Bava retreated into low budget terrain where he felt more comfortable and in control. Increasingly frustrated by the flagging success of his films, the director would be granted carte blanche for a deeply personal pet project that would eventually turn sour, and his subsequent attempt to reestablish himself as a more 'modern' director would be met with similarly unhappy circumstances. But before we get too far ahead in the story, it is time to examine the films in (more or less) chronological order....
Four Times That Night (1969) Film: 4 out of 5
Gianni (Brett Halsey) and Tina (Daniela Giordano) go on a date, but when Gianni returns with scratches on his forehead and Tina's expensive designer dress is torn, four variations on what may or may not have happened unfold...
A shy and unassuming man by nature, Mario Bava ordinarily shied away from sex in his movies. True, his films are rife with occasionally disturbing displays of fetishistic erotica, but
Four Times That Night found him directing, in his own words, "a blue movie." Confiscated by the Italian censorship board - headed by Bava's friend and mentor Riccardo Freda, who incredulously tried to justify his actions by saying he was doing the director a favor - the film eventually surfaced in the early 70s, by which time its content looked very tame indeed. Ultimately,
Four Times That Night is less about T&A than it is about the nature of truth and the role of the storyteller, themes not at all foreign to the director's oeuvre.
Sometimes criticized for its overtly "fake" appearance, the film is really one of Bava's most disarming and charming films. In place of the funereal romanticism typical of his greatest films,
Four Times unfolds in a spry and entertaining manner. Visuals gags and puns abound, and the director appears to be having fun exploring the comedy genre after his initial disastrous experience with such subject matter on
Le spie vengono dal semifredo/Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966). The painfully low budget is evident only in the comparative lack of gloss afforded the picture, but Bava does typically impressive things with the scant resources at his disposal. Much of the scenery is achieved with matte paintings and miniatures, and some of the furniture is literally of the plastic blow up variety. As such, the film fits neatly into the pop art aesthetic established in
Diabolik and subsequently explored in Five Dolls for an August Moon (1969).
The ensemble is a small one, but they all do well by their roles. American actor Brett Halsey
(The Godfather Part III) brings sly wit and charm to the role of Gianni, whom he plays as alternately shy, aggressive, fey and normal in the various versions of events. Halsey got his start at Universal in the mid-50s - he can be seen as one of the victims on the beach in Jack Arnold's
Revenge of the Creature (1955) - before emigrating to Italy to work for the likes of Riccardo Freda and Lucio Fulci. This is one of his best roles in Italian cult cinema, and he clearly relished the opportunity to explore different facets of the character. Italian beauty queen Daniela Giordano (Paul Naschy's
Inquisition, 1976) is a stunningly beautiful presence, and she also proves quite able in the thesping department. She, too, is given the chance to run the gamut from naive and pious to animalistic and sexually insatiable, and she belies he relative inexperience by giving a delightful comedic performance. Cast as the
voyeuristic doorman who witnesses the events, Dick Randall - who also
co-produced this film, among many other trash classics, including the notorious
Pieces (1981) - is amusingly sleazy and rumpled; it doesn't seem much of a stretch for him, based on the testimony of actors and directors who worked with him, but he enters into the spirit with enthusiasm. Striking Brigitte Skay, later cast by Bava in
Bay of Blood (1971), shows up to play a dimwit before obliging the audience by removing her top.
Though arguably lacking the sheer style and visual panache of his very best films,
Four Times That Night is a worthy and winning addition to the director's body of work; as a comedy, it gives ample evidence of his versatility and ability to adapt to other genres without losing sight of his personality and vision.
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1969) 3.5 out of 5
An inventor (William Berger) is pressured by unscrupulous businessmen to hand over his latest discovery while on an extended holiday on a secluded island retreat...
Bava once referred to this insane variation on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians as his worst film. Many of his fans would disagree with this assessment, and while it remains one of the more hotly debated titles in his filmography, it nevertheless has enough going for it to rise above its incoherent screenplay. Indeed, Bava claimed to have begged for enough time to rewrite the script, but the producers refused this request: as it happens, he was hired on a Friday and filming commenced the following Monday! Rather than tie himself to a script he despised, Bava opted to ignore it altogether, improvising the action with an emphasis on sheer visual dynamite.
The film has been picked by some Bava fans as a personal favorite, and it's easy to see why: whatever its faults, and there are many, the film is rich and spontaneous, overloaded with endlessly inventive imagery and percolating with the groovy brilliance of Piero Umiliani's soundtrack. The cast runs the gamut from the inspired (Edwige Fenech, making her giallo debut, was never sexier) to the pedestrian (Berger doesn't seem overly interested in his role) but no matter: Bava chiefly uses them as ornamentation anyway, and the presence of so many beautiful actresses in various outre outfits or stages of undress adds to the film's visual texture.
There are some indications that the director was going beyond sending up the material, but actively seeking the sabotage it altogether. The film is crammed with plentiful zooms, a habit the director developed in the later part of his career, and while he often proved himself a master of this time-consuming device, here it is done to such excess as to alienate some viewers. The film sometimes resembles the charmingly disheveled aesthetic of Jess Franco's more rough edged movies, though the careful attention to framing, decor and color ensure that it's never less than interesting to look at. The opening party sequence is one of the strangest of his career: as the camera zooms in and out of Fenech as she does a sexy table dance, one can readily imagine viewers recoiling in distaste at such an obvious breach of directorial etiquette. That said, the sequence actually works and establishes the wacky and carefree spirit of the film in its opening moments. It may not be subtle, and it's certainly no match for the more mature and sober approach of the director's best films, but it gives the film an identity of its own. As Bava scholar Tim Lucas has noted, moreso than any other film - barring
Diabolik and possibly Rabid Dogs - it's the most alive and energetic of his films in spirit, feeling more like the work of a young man than a director pushing 60.
Nevertheless, Bava's obvious contempt for the material, the basic lack of characterization and a script that doesn't bear close scrutiny prevent it from being one of the director's best films. It's undeniably decorative and entertaining, but it cannot be ranked alongside his finest achievements.
Roy Colt & Winchester Jack (1970) 2.5 out of 5
Roy Colt (Brett Halsey) and Winchester Jack (Charles Southwood) are outlaws/best friends who fight at the drop of a hat while seeking to find a hidden sack of gold...
After his unhappy experience on Five Dolls, Bava found himself obliged to accept another poor script by the same writer (Mario De Nardo) and for the same producer (Luigi Alessi). The end result marked a return to the western genre, a format he showed little affinity for in
The Road to Fort Alamo (1964) and Savage Gringo (1966), though it is not without interest. Compared to his earlier westerns, the film is more overtly stylized and off the wall, but like
Five Dolls it again falls short in terms of coherence. Less a straight western than a satire of the genre, it often stumbles when striving for slapstick humor but some of the subtler touches are very amusing.
Brett Halsey again displays the charm and sly wit that made him so ideal in
Four Times That Night, but the same cannot be said of Charles Southwood (yes, that is the actor's real name) who tends to overplay Winchester Jack with too many broad grins and giggles. The supporting cast includes lovely Marilu Tolo (one-time lover of Dario Argento, with whom she worked on the TV series
Door into Darkness and The Five Days of Milan) as a resourcely Indian and Teodoro Corra
(Five Dolls) who more or less steals the show as an enjoyably theatrical villain with a passion for dynamite.
The film gives ample evidence of why Bava was never at home in the western genre - apart from an inherent lack of interest in the conventions of the genre, which are sent up at every turn in the film, it suffers from an abundance of location shooting which prevented the director from exercising absolute control over the visuals. Much of the film unfolds in an Earthy color scheme, with lots of browns and little in the way of highlights, but the film tends to become livelier indoors - notably during a rambling but sporadically funny sequence in a bordello that climaxes with a terrific sight gag. The humor runs the gamut from the sly to the scatalogical (the Reverend seems to be suffering from explosive diarreha, if you'll pardon the expression) but when it works, it works very well indeed.
Certainly one of the lesser films of his career, Roy Colt & Winchester Jack still has enough going for it to warrant a viewing or two. Whether it would appeal to anybody other than confirmed Bava fanatics, however, is open to speculation.
Bay of Blood (1971) 5 out of 5
Greedy heirs and interlopers vie for the beautiful bayside property of a recently slain Countess (Isa Miranda)....
Much has been written about this film, likely the most oft-retitled of the director's career. Many fans know it best as
Twitch of the Death Nerve, though I've never seen a copy with this actual onscreen title;
Bay of Blood has adorned every English language edition I've ever seen, though it's certainly also known by other titles:
Last House on the Left Part 2, Carnage, Bloodbath, as well as the original Italian titles
Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction) and Ecologia del Delitto (Ecology of a
Crime). No matter what the title, the film remains one of the director's most popular and influential films.
The film continues Bava's exploration of the nature of greed - as such, it is an ideal companion piece not only to
Five Dolls, but to his first color giallo, Blood and Black Lace (1964). The characters are presented as a mostly venal lot, comprised as they are of greedy heirs, clueless and horny teens, sadistic children and opportunistic businessmen. Compared to his earlier gialli, however, Bava seems intent on upping the ante, likely as a reaction to the success of his younger "disciple," Dario Argento. The murders are splashy and inventive, featuring far more overt blood and gore than before, and few of the characters
escape unscathed. Typical of the director, though, the action unfolds without any overt moralizing - the film presents a natural cycle of death and destruction as the characters attempt to outdo each other, effectively signing their own death warrants in the process.
Given the film's setting, as well as some of the gorier murder scenes, much has been made of the film's influence on Sean Cunningham's 1980 hit
Friday the 13th. In truth, some of this has been exaggerated in recent years - while Cunningham's film undeniably cribs elements from the Bava picture, it is not so much a "rip off" as all that. There are certainly recognizable elements ported over from Bava - even moreso in Steve Miner's
Friday the 13th Part 2, which copies the film's infamous "spearing the two lovers" bit - but it would be unfair to suggest that it is a literal carbon copy. Unlike Cunningham, too, Bava is less than concerned with maintaining an air of mystery: here, everybody is capable of committing murder, and many of the characters do so before being offed themselves.
Beautifully photographed by Bava and graced with a terrific Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack,
Bay of Blood remains one of the director's finest films.
Baron Blood (1972) 3 out of 5
An American student (Antonio Cantafora) visits Austria to do some research on his infamous ancestor, the witch hunter Baron Von Kleist (Joseph Cotte), but gets more than he bargained for when he accidentally brings the Baron back to life...
Coming as it does on the heels of the dynamic and modern Bay of
Blood, Baron Blood is something of a regression for Bava. The routine screenplay by Vincent Fotre is heavy on exposition and coincidence, and it would seem that producer Alfredo Leone prevented the director from retooling it to his own ends, even if the finished product offers up some of his most richly atmospheric imagery. Indeed, the film plays like a farewell to the Gothic genre which had served Bava so well throughout the early to mid 60s. Apart from revisiting the tropes of his earlier films,
Baron Blood often functions as a sly send-up of the genre - the contrast between the stately settings and Gothic ambience and the way in which they are intruded by modern technology and ultra garish 70s fashions gives the film a slyly humorous bent.
Impressed by his ability to make something out of nothing on Four Times That
Night, American producer Alfredo Leone talked Bava into leaving his beloved Italy to shoot on location in Austria for this picture. Leone secured an authentic castle for Bava, and it's obvious that the rich setting excited his imagination. The story is less than thrilling in many respects, but the director again makes the material come to life through sheer strength of style and imagery. Some of the sequences - including an extended homage to Andre De Toth's
House of Wax (1953) - rank among the loveliest of the director's career, and if one can carp at the deficiencies of the script, Leone is to be commended for giving Bava access to a top notch cast. Cast after Vincent Price turned the role down, Joseph Cotten
(The Third Man) does a fine job in the transparently villainous role of the Baron's human alter ego, Alfred Bekker. The script makes it obvious that Cotten is really the Baron, and Bava doesn't try to conceal this - part of the fun of the film is seeing Cotten as he plays cat and mouse games with the characters, while the audience is one step ahead of them. Cotten has been accused of walking through his role, but this is not the case: he invests the role with grim humor and gravitas, and when he finally stops the charade at the end of the film he makes for a legitimately sinister presence. It's fun to picture Price in the role, but it's likely he would have gone for overripe theatrics; Cotten's restraint and subtle humor is far more effective and
low key. Elke Sommer, who would be rewarded for her work here by Leone and Bava in
Lisa and the Devil, doesn't have much to do beyond screaming and looking beautiful, but she does fine by both. It's one of the least interesting female roles in the Bava canon, but this is compensated by the plum supporting role for Rada Rassimov
(The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), who plays a psychic who tells the hero and heroine how to fight the Baron. Massimo Girotti
(Last Tango in Paris), Luciano Pigozzi (The Whip and the
Body) and Gustavo De Nardo (Black Sabbath) are all veterans of Bava's work, and they all add an air of cozy familiarity to the proceedings.
Not really one of Bava's better films, Baron Blood nevertheless shows how the director's mastery of technique could rescue even the least inspired of scenarios.
Lisa and the Devil (1972) 5 out of 5
Lisa (Elke Sommer) gets lost while touring the streets of Toledo, Spain, before ending up at a macabre villa presided over by a butler (Telly Savalas) who bears an uncanny
resemblance to the painting of the devil on display in the main square....
While making Baron Blood, Bava confided to Leone that he had never been given carte blanche to make a film. Leone asked him, if he were given such freedom, if he had a project in mind. Bava told him of a project he had been nursing called
The Devil and the Dead, and the producer decided to reward him for his expertise and ingenuity by bankrolling the project. Though credited only to Leone and Bava in the English language prints, the film originated as a screenplay by Bava, Roberto Natale and Roberto Migliorini, who had
co-written Kill, Baby... Kill! in 1966. The story was likely
embellished and restructured beyond this original draft, however, and the end picture is as close to a truly dreamlike and unsettling experience as anything caught on celluloid. Budgeted at a comparatively rich million dollars, the film allowed Bava to explore various hidden facets of his psyche, and the film is so rich in meaning and detail that a single viewing can hardly do it justice.
The film unfolds slowly and deliberately, tracing Lisa as she descends into a macabre never-never land of death and decay. The oneiric structure and lack of a definitive resolution is maddening for some viewers, but those who have the right temperament are bound to be enchanted with the movie. Bava made many wonderful Gothic horror films with a dreamlike bent, but none were quite as elegant and deeply personal as this one. From the obsessive use of mannequins, recalling his father's workshop, to various allusions to Bava's favorite writers (notably a wonderfully macabre nod to HP Lovecraft), the film is alternately lyrical, sad, romantic, macabre and legitimately disturbing.
Leone once again enabled Bava to assemble a fine cast, though it still fell short of the producer's lofty goals. Telly Savalas is ideal as the Devil, here disguised as a menial servant. He plays the character as a sardonic onlooker, forever mocking his employers and complaining of being ill-treated and under-valued. Savalas has some marvelous improvisatory moments, as he talks to his mannequins and mutters to himself as he stalks through the villa, and he gives one of the most memorable performances to be found in a Bava film. Fresh off her unrewarding assignment in Baron Blood, Elke Sommer here proves that she is more than a pretty face: she is ideal as the naive innocent who wanders, a la Alice in Wonderland, into a macabre environment. Sommer capably portrays the bewildered state of mind of the character, while subtly suggesting that there may be more to her and her past than meets the eye. The supporting cast includes plum roles for Alida Valli as a blind contessa (Leone wanted Bette Davis), Olessio Orano as her necrophiliac son (Leone wanted Anthony Perkins) and Espartaco Santoni as the contessa's unfaithful husband (Leone wanted Burt Lancaster), as well as Sylva Koscina
(Hercules, 1957) and Eduardo Fajardo (Nightmare City, 1980) as fellow travelers whose lives are
unraveled in the strange villa.
With its haunting, romantic soundtrack by Carlo Savina which makes inspired use of Rodriguez's Concerto d'Aranjuez (Bava actually played the Paul Mauriat version, used so heavily in the film, on the set to get the actors into the right mood) and lovely cinematography by Cecilio Paniagua (the Spanish co-production financing ensured that Bava would not be allowed to serve as his own DP),
Lisa remains Bava's masterpiece - a haunting, ethereal gem that can truly be called a poem to death and decay. Alas, the film did not prove to be a commercial proposition - had it been signed by Visconti or Fellini, one can imagine the film being met with thunderous applause, but since it was "only" a Bava film, and a legitimately weird one at that, it ran into problems after its enthusiastic reception at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. After sitting on the film for over a year, having been unable to sell it anywhere other than Spain, Leone approached Bava with a plan to recoup his investment. Bava was proud of
Lisa and didn't want to touch it, but out of loyalty he agreed...
The House of Exorcism (1975) 1.5 out of 5
Lisa (Elke Sommer) is possessed by the Devil (Telly Savalas), and it's up to the embattled Father Michael (Robert Alda) to save the day....
If Lisa and the Devil was Bava's art film, House of Exorcism is the grindhouse perversion of his achievements. A lot of unkind things have been written about Alfredo Leone and his role in this project, but the truth of the matter is this: without Leone, Bava never would have gotten the freedom to realize Lisa as he wished. Leone invested a sizable chunk of money in the film and really felt he had an important property on his hands; much to his disappointment, he couldn't sell the film and his creditors were none too pleased. One can hardly blame him for looking to recoup his losses, and
The House of Exorcism allowed him to do so in spades. Though arguably the worst film Bava had a hand in directing, the film was a major international hit - and, for what it's worth, it remains one of the better Italian
rip-offs of William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973).
The film intersperses large chunks of Bava's masterpiece with new footage, some of it directed by Bava, and the rest by his son/assistant Lamberto and Leone himself when Bava felt it went too far afield of good taste. Understandably, the film is something of a mess. In trying to explain away the horrors implicit in the original, Leone merely made the film incoherent - as Sommer spews pea soup, vomits frogs and exercises a fine arsenal of profanity while confined to a bed in a hospital, it's up to Robert Alda (nowhere to be seen in the original film) to keep a straight face while doing his best Max von Sydow impression. Alda does as well as can be expected, but the dialogue is sometimes stilted to the point of hilarity ("Where do you come from?!" "From a cunt... you jerk!") and the new scenes jar unbelievably with the dreamy elegance of the original. Though not without entertainment value, the film chiefly serves to show how good Bava's original film was in the first place.
Bava didn't stick around for the entire reshoot, preferring to jump ship and make
Rabid Dogs - included in this set, but previously released in the same edition by Anchor Bay, where it is
reviewed here - a move that alienated him from Leone for several years. The experience of making
Rabid Dogs would end in tragedy, much as Lisa had done, and for the remaining years of his life Bava would direct one more theatrical film
(Shock, 1977), co-direct a lovely fantasy film for TV with his son Lamberto
(La Venere d'Ille,1978) and provide uncredited effects work and second unit direction for Dario Argento's
Inferno (1980) before dying suddenly of a heart attack in 1980. Bava died as he had lived, in self-enforced anonymity, but now thanks to sets such as these it is possible to review his entire directorial career and appreciate him as on the cinema's true "genius" filmmakers - a man for whom no problem was too big, no obstacle insurmountable.
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