| Product: |
Bay Of Blood (DVD) |
| Date: |
04.04.08 (73 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A lot of bloody fun
Disadvantages: Unrealistic, I guess
A review of just the film.
This is an Italian film from 1971, directed by Mario Bava, the granddaddy of Italian horror. It's often described as the first of the stalk-and-slash bodycount films, in which a collection of characters in a remote location are killed in a variety of inventive ways. It's yet another video nasty, but it's highly enjoyable and certainly much better than a lot of 70s Italian horror. It's also gone by the name 'Twitch of the Death Nerve', which makes no sense but is probably more eye-catching than 'Bay of Blood'.
A wealthy old lady is murdered, and it's made to look like suicide. She owned a picturesque bay, and various relatives and opportunists descend on the place to try to claim their inheritance. But someone starts murdering them.
The plot is thoroughly silly, and clearly intentionally so. There are so many red herrings it becomes ridiculous, and as twists are piled on top of each other it comes to resemble such comedy body-count films as Clue or A Shot In The Dark. It's difficult to work out what the film was trying to do; the absurdity prevents any sense of suspense or nastiness, and even potentially tense moments are a bit perfunctory. But on the other hand the gory bits are quite explicit, and it isn't really laugh-out-loud funny (except perhaps for the ending, which comes out of nowhere and is clearly a piss-take). None of the characters are remotely convincing, ranging from horny students to spiteful tarot readers, but their deaths are a slightly uneasy mix of cartoony and unpleasant.
The film looks beautiful. Bava was also a very good director of photography, and it's all lush, saturated colours and striking shot compositions. He makes nice use of unfocusing his camera to do scene transitions, a neat trick. The day-for-night filming is unconvincing and the dubbing very slightly off kilter (the film is in English), but I've seen much, much worse.
The acting is perfectly decent; no one disgraces themself (except perhaps for one actress who is very obviously still breathing after she's supposedly been killed). The only familiar face is Claudine Auger, who was the Bond girl in Thunderball (she only turns up halfway through the film, despite getting top billing). The bloody special effects are great - not always convincing, but great nonetheless. There's a guy getting a machete through the face years before Romero used the same shot in Dawn of the Dead, and a fornicating couple gets killed by a single spear.
The soundtrack, by Stelvio Cipriani, is a lounge-y treat, all bongos and electric piano. It's similar to the kind of thing Ennio Morricone churned out when he wasn't doing spaghetti Westerns. It frequently pastiches Rachmaninov's second piano concerto's slow movement (the one from Brief Encounter), which is pretty funny in the context of the scenes it accompanies. Another one I'd buy the soundtrack album for if it were to be released.
This is unusually well-made and intelligent for a video nasty (especially an Italian one; most of the Italian films on the nasties list are cheap and cheerfully offensive). I think it's overstating things to call it the first slasher film - it's more like a giallo that gets a bit out of hand and has little in common with Halloween or Friday the 13th. It's a bit of an oddity, but then Bava's films aren't as well known as they should be in the English-speaking world (he was Italy's Roger Corman but none of his films has any real name recognition in the English-speaking world). This can be bought on amazon for less than £5, but you could invest in the second Bava boxset (region 1 only) for about £17 which also has six other films (the first Bava boxset isn't bad, either). Bay of Blood is frivolous and not terribly substantial, but it'll keep you entertained and you can't really hope for much more from a film of its type.
Summary: A surprisingly classy Italian horror
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