A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
By the 1980s a certain stereotype prevailed about Italian genre cinema. The Italians, it was presumed, simply imitated American successes by making similar pictures more cheaply. That may have been true for post-Star Wars space operas and even for spaghetti westerns, but the Italian horror genre bucks the trend. Its founding film, this 1956 production directed by Riccardo Freda but finished by cinematographer Mario Bava, looks like a more lavish imitation of some of the cheapest American films: the Poverty Row horrors made by Monogram Pictures and PRC in the 1940s. It most resembles Monogram's 1942 film The Corpse Vanishes, a Bela Lugosi vehicle in which a mad scientist kidnaps and kills virgins for their spinal fluid -- the elixir vitae of the day -- in order to keep his wife alive and beautiful. Like many a Monogram movie, I Vampiri has a nosy reporter in an important role, but it differs from Wallace Fox's movie on the most obvious pictorial level -- Bava's black-and-white widescreen cinematography is often beautiful stuff, despite having hardly more production time than Poverty Row would assign -- and in its focus on villainy. Corpse Vanishes is a Bela Lugosi vehicle in which the mad scientist obviously dominates the proceedings while his wife is little more than a whiny prop. In Vampiri the woman getting the treatment, a French aristocrat desperate to stave off aging, is the true villain, while the scientists are mere minions. The spinal fluid fad is over by the Fifties; Giselle du Grand (Gianna Maria Canale) sticks with good old fashioned blood; hence the title.
By coincidence, Freda and Bava's project appeared around the same time as a spate of American B-movies that attempted to modernize classic monsters. If I Vampiri seems to be a generation behind in its story ideas, that probably has a lot to do with a Fascist-era ban on horror films that persisted into the 1950s until Freda went to work. The overall sensibility is more modern, however, because the horror is grounded in sexual desire as well as a longing for youth. Which is to say it also looks back far past the pulp tropes that influenced Poverty Row USA and hints at a more complete return in years to come of what went repressed in American pictures.
I Vampiri approaches the truly supernatural in the special effects sequences shot by Bava in which Giselle youthens or withers depending on her fresh blood count. It's the old trickery with makeup and filters that dates back at least to Rouben Mamoulian's 1932 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, but the magic works as well as ever here as Canale emotes her way through the transformations. The actress strikes the right notes throughout, murderously imperious yet always just a little poignant. The movie grows more entertaining as it grows more gothic and the protagonists enter a castled world of hidden prisons and secret laboratories. It never entirely transcends its derivative nature, and it reportedly flopped in Italy, but it's an often-attractive, retrospectively significant film for the preview it offers of the world that Mario Bava would soon make his own.
As a vampire-movie fan, my friend Wendigo is also a horror-film fan, but he doesn't necessarily judge vampire films by horror movie criteria. I asked him recently whether any vampire movie had ever actually scared him. He said that he couldn't recall one doing so, and then he recounted three films that did scare him. The first that came to his mind was the original version of The Blob; the mere concept of the creature and the fact that it could kill you while you were sitting in your chair simply by brushing against your foot spooked him as a kid. A more surprising film was Gore Verbinski's The Ring, as opposed to the Japanese original, which he has also seen. The American version didn't shock him as he watched, but the memory of the dead, wet girl's awkward, unnatural movements haunted him for nights afterward in troubled dreams. The other film was Mario Bava's landmark gothic horror from 1960, that annus mirabilis (or terribilis) of global horror cinema. But Wendigo had only the dimmest memories of what frightened him, though he remembered the spiked masks the condemned Satanists were forced to wear and the holes in Barbara Steele's face when her mask was removed -- not to mention her big, creepy eyes. It just so happened that I have Black Sunday in an Anchor Bay box set of Bava films, so I played it to jog his memory -- and it was then that we realized that it is, in fact, a vampire film -- or at least a film with vampires in it.
Wendigo remembered two characters, Asa and Javutich, being condemned as witches and cursing their Moldavian persecutors before the masks of Satan were hammered onto their faces. The shot of the mask being driven into Steele's face, and the mask bleeding blood (in black and white) brought back uneasy memories for him. It's about the most gruesome form of execution that he can imagine. The visceral though not gory quality of this scene set the tone for everything to come.
Two hundred years later, Steele plays Katia, a lookalike descendant imperiled when a visiting professor breaks the glass window of Asa's coffin while beating a bat to death, lifts the mask of satan from her eyeless and spike-pocked face, and cuts his hand on the broken glass. The blood revitalizes Asa (who wasn't burnt as she should have been in the first place because rain put out the bonfire), starting with her once maggot-infested eye sockets, but she expends her reviving power to resurrect Javutich, who still has to dig his own way out of his grave and pull his own mask off.
He eventually lures the professor back to Asa's crypt to watch her blow up her coffin. She mesmerizes the professor with a promise of power and pleasure and takes more of his blood. The professor becomes her instrument to avenge herself on the descendants of her persecutors, killing Katia's father before the professor's innocent assistant and a knowledgeable priest destroy him in his daytime resting place. By now Asa and Javutich don't need him any more as they aim to destroy the rest of Katia's family and have Asa herself take Katia's place. It's up to the assistant, the priest, and a helpful mob to save the day....
Asa's dependence upon blood, and blood's capacity to resurrect her, make Black Sunday quite like a vampire film, and by the time a victim is described as having puncture marks on his neck there was no more room for doubt. This film taps into Eastern European folklore and literature (namely Nikolai Gogol's "Viy") including the unusual detail of destroying a vampire by staking it through the literally evil eye. Wendigo may have been thrown off the scent way back when, however, by the emphasis on Satan in Bava's film. While western folklore often traces vampirism to demonic possession of corpses (hence the vulnerability to crosses and other holy symbols) the idea that vampires are primarily servants of Satan is downplayed in the Anglo-American post-Dracula tradition. There's a hint of Satanism is Hammer's vampire films, but when you hear about a "vampire cult" you usually assume that the cultists are worshipping Dracula himself or some other master vampire. Black Sunday is almost unique among movies in stressing the vampires' Satanism (though The Satanic Rites of Dracula is another obvious case), and Wendigo would even concede the point if someone would still rather see Asa as a witch or Satanist rather than a vampire. It might not be deemed a vampire film if your sine qua non is the money shot of someone biting a neck, since that never happens here. But for his purposes it's a vampire film because vampiric powers allow the villains to come back from the dead and attempt to fulfill their curse. In any event, Wendigo doesn't consider categories mutually exclusive, so define Black Sunday as you please.
European horror films are still a tough sell for Wendigo despite his admiration for some of the movies I've shown him for our series. Black Sunday goes back before Euro horror got arguably too "European," however, and his recollections made him willing to rewatch the film. He's very impressed by Bava's direction, set design and cinematography, though even this master of making the most out of limited resources couldn't do a decent bat effect. The film has a strong gothic atmosphere throughout, a visual quality Bava enhances with remarkable events like the swirling sky as Javutich whips his carriage down a dark road. It probably represents the summit of black-&-white horror, from a director who would prove only more masterly in color. It also has a human special effect in the form of Barbara Steele in her star-making performance, ably assisted by Arturo Dominici as Javutich, equally creepy masked or unmasked. Wendigo finds Steele both stunningly beautiful and frightening, thanks to those powerful eyes. Her meteoric rise to horror stardom, not to mention Bava's rise to global fame, are perfectly understandable to him based on this film.
Barbara Steele: The good (top), the bad (middle), and even with the makeup there's no ugly here.
Wendigo didn't find the film very "European" because Bava didn't sacrifice narrative substance for the sake of style or sensation. Black Sunday doesn't deal in "dream logic," but tells a good old-fashioned yarn. It's more than the sum of its set pieces, while Wendigo finds many Euro horrors to be less. More to the point, it was just about as creepy as Wendigo remembers from his childhood. It's a film anyone will remember, even if disturbingly dimly, long after they've seen it. It isn't a landmark of the vampire subgenre, but it's certainly a classic of horror in general.
The American trailer was uploaded to YouTube by ennemme.
Mario Bava's black comedy has what the literary critics call an unreliable narrator. How unreliable is John Harrington? "Nobody suspects that I am completely mad," is one of his first utterances while introducing himself to us. But when you go in with that attitude, you're probably not as unsuspected as you think. At least the local police inspector seems to think that Harrington, the proprietor of a bridal fashion shop inherited from his beloved mother, has something to do with the numerous disappearances of bridal models. It's a good guess: John, unhappily married to Mildred, a shrew with an occult obsession, seduces models, puts them through a sort of mock wedding in a room full of bridal mannequins, and kills them. They "disappear" beneath his greenhouse or via his incinerator, depending on circumstances. "A woman should live only until her wedding night, love once, then die," he believes.
Combine a murder spree in the world of fashion and a mother-obsessed murderer and you have a movie somewhere between Bava's own classic Blood and Black Lace and Hitchcock's Psycho. The Psycho side comes to the fore the more we learn about the death of John's Mom, though the closes he comes to full-blown Oedipal transvestism is when he dons a bridal veil to finally bump off Mildred. Interestingly, the long-suffering hubby only decides to do in wifey when they belatedly achieve something like emotional intimacy. She was okay as long as he didn't love her. But once that certain something stirred inside him, she was done for.
Here comes the bride, there goes the bride. Stephen Forsyth decides to find out how the other half lives.
Sort of. Mildred's dead, you see, but she's not done. There was something to those books she read and those seances she attended, apparently, because she commences to haunt her husband. She goes about it in a really annoying way. John'll be out in some public place, and someone will start talking to Mildred. It's only then that he notices that she's somehow hanging around. Maybe he should have burned instead of buried her. He corrects his error, but people still see Mildred, or if they don't they wonder why the hell John is talking to, buying drinks for and often taunting that handbag he's started carrying around....
Laura Betti dominates the last acts of Hatchet...from beyond the grave!
Il rosso segno della follia ("the red sign of madness") most resembles in tone Bava's other black comedy from the period, Five Dolls for an August Moon, though Hatchet (a nicely alliterative English title) initially seems intended as more straightforward horror than Dolls. It's hard to tell how intentional the humor is in the first half, given what I take to be unintentionally funny dubbed dialogue. Once Mildred's ghost takes over the story, Bava's comedic intentions are obvious enough. But while the second half is entertaining enough, it leaves the whole slightly unsatisfactory simply because the whole ghost angle seems to come from nowhere. Nothing in the first half leads you to expect a supernatural intervention in the second half. Hatchet feels like two different movies smashed together, but because it's Bava it's a gorgeous mess with a Swinging Gothic atmosphere appropriate to the period. In the leads, Stephen Forsyth and Laura Betti are game, though they shouldn't be held responsible for the English dialogue put in their mouths, and there are plenty of pretty faces besides theirs. It looks as good as you'd expect from Bava and sounds as good as you'd expect from Italian cinema in general from this time. Il rosso segno is relatively minor Bava but as lighthearted horror it's like cinematic candy and even if you're not spooked you should be entertained.
Dig this wordless trailer, uploaded to YouTube by giantfish2, featuring the music of Sante Maria Romitelli.
In 1963 you could be an English-speaking actor in Italy and not be slumming. Burt Lancaster was there to lend prestige and box-office power to Luchino Visconti's superproduction The Leopard. Rod Steiger was there to add his evocative presence to Francesco Rosi's political drama Hands Over the City. Christopher Lee, meanwhile, had been lurking around Italy for a while, exploiting his Dracula fame in silly comedies and first working for Mario Bava in Hercules in the Haunted World. La Frusta e il Corpo is Lee's second and last team-up with the master of color gothicism, and in his typical display of dedication to international cinema, Lee did not bother dubbing his own performance into English for the Anglo-American release. Fortunately, the film is good enough that you eventually don't miss his distinctive sound.
Lee is Kurt Menliff, the returning black sheep of an Eastern European family, someplace where the priests are Orthodox if not the family relations. He'd been engaged to Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) before his father cast him out. Dad then imposed Nevenka on the younger son, Christian (Tony Kendall), though the young man still carries a torch for cousin Katya. Things might actually work out for everyone once Kurt resumes his romantic ways with Nevenka. He definitely has a romantic way with a whip, though I guess you have to like that sort of thing. Nevenka does. "You've always had a love for violence" Kurt says as he lashes away, throwing off his cloak as the work gets harder and hotter. Once he's whipped her into a proper frenzy, it's lovin' time. For the occasion, Lee may look as handsome as he ever did on film, with a bit shaggier head of hair than usual that makes him look younger, more Byronic, and from some angles (I dare say) just a little like Frank Langella.
"Taste the lash of Dra--, I mean Menliff. Taste the lash of the Menliffs! You know you like it."
How to explain this to Christian and Dad -- not that Kurt feels like he has to answer to either of them? Not to worry; the next thing you know, Kurt appears to be attacked by a curtain, which stabs him with a dagger with which he had once ill-used the maid's daughter, in whose memory the maid had set up a shrine before which she regularly vowed vengeance on Kurt. So there's a suspect, and given how Christian and his dad don't like Kurt, there are two more. Ruling out the supernatural intervention of an indignant drapery, we now find ourselves in the middle of a whodunit.
It's curtains for Kurt all too early into the story of Whip and the Body.
On the other hand, it may be a wuzitdun. You may think the situation is cut and dried what with the red-hooded Inquisition types tossing Kurt's body and coffin into a crypt, but Nevenka starts seeing her old flame tromping about the estate, always after having stomped through some local mud field first. Kurt's boots are a mud magnet, leaving an obvious trail except for the apparent fact that only Nevenka can see the boots or the mud. There, there: in her grief over the sudden death of her serial abuser, she must be hallucinating. If so, though, who just killed the paterfamilias with that dagger? And can a hallucination wield a whip with such welt-raising authority as our Kurt? We see the proof on Nevenka's back, after all....
"It came at me like a green spider." Daliah Lavi does well as a woman cracking under the constant assault of Mario Bava's colorful spook effects.
While the content of the whipping episodes was certainly extreme for 1963 audiences, Whip and the Body gets by today on pure atmosphere, and nobody does gothic atmosphere in color like Mario Bava. This is a film I wish I could have seen on a big screen in a darkened theater. Everything from Bava's own cinematography (in collaboration with Ubaldo Terzano) to the production design of Riccardo Domenici to Carlo Rustichelli's lush romantic score has exactly the overripe-bordering-on-corruption flavor that this kind of romantic horror needs. Bava used light like paint and his use of color for mood as well as balanced composition is masterful. This is a type of film that wouldn't be made for much longer, arguably because Bava and Roger Corman, between them, would cover all the bases of widescreen color gothic. Later films might be set in similar periods or places, but those would only be platforms for different kinds of entertaining decadence. Whip is a definitive film of its moment in cinema history.
There's a whip, and there's a body. What more could you want? A trailer, maybe? Here's one uploaded by giantfish2. It's in Italian, but if you've read the above you'll get the gist and then some.
Mario Bava's black comedy is set on an island somewhere. I'm tempted to say its in the Mediterranean, but I don't know if you can assume that, since all the characters have Anglo or American sounding names. That may be why Bava and screenwriter Mario di Nardo have such a snide attitude toward the characters. For a couple of Italians, they are the other on which they can project all the nastiness and depravity that makes what happens look like just desserts.
Let's nail down the genre up front. Some call it a giallo, I suppose, but it hardly qualifies. As I understand it, gialli are all about creative ways of killing people. Five Dolls, however giallesque [?] the title sounds, is all about finding bodies that have already been killed, except for a few very conventional shootings at the end. Bava is said to have liked this least of all his work, and the lack of creative killing may be the reason. Still, he found ways to occupy himself, and the film is a triumph of style over substance. I suppose we could also call it a body-count film, since apart from ogling the scenery -- outdoor, architectural and female -- there's not much to do but count bodies. But body-count films are always sort of a subset of black comedy, given how audiences usually respond to them, and we're clearly meant to laugh at this film.
How couldn't you? We have ten people in the cast, four couples and two singles. The island belongs to George Stark, married to Jill, and his guests are Nick and Marie Chaney, Jack and Peggy Davidson, and Fritz and Trudy Farrell. They're gathered so George, Nick and Jack can schmooze Fritz, a professor, into selling them his important secret formula for three million dollars. The prof. isn't interested in selling; a pall hangs over the formula for him because a colleague died while they were working on it. The men's united front doesn't last long, as Nick angles to get exclusive rights to the formula and urges Marie to seduce the Professor, while people start dying, starting with Jacques the houseboy. George's yacht has vanished and his wireless telephone isn't working, so there's no way off the island and no way to communicate with the mainland. There's nothing to do but put Jacques in the meat locker, wait for other people to die, and drink. Nick does most of the drinking, since "Death makes me thirsty." He has opportunities to get quite sloshed.
Professor Farrell (William Berger) struggles to resist all temptation in FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON (picture from images.movieplayer.it)
So who's the killer? Is it Isabel, the lone single female, who we see shooting the Professor with a rifle during a break from romping on the beach and stalking people? Well, this is the sort of movie where seeing someone shoot somebody else pretty much guarantees that she didn't kill everyone else -- or does it??? Any further elaboration of the synopsis would only spoil a plot that's pretty gamy already. This isn't the sort of film you watch for the story, and if efficient storytelling is your sole criterion of cinematic quality, you may as well stop reading.
The reasons to look at Five Dolls are the lush outdoor scenery, photographed by Bava and Antonio Rinaldi, the colorfully decadent indoor sets, and the uniformly luscious female cast, from Justine Galli as Isabel to the great Edwige Fenech as the particularly depraved Marie Chaney. The date is 1970, but this is still very much the swinging 60s, put to music by Piero Umiliani's swanky lounge score. It's still the era when it was hard to find an Italian film in which the music, at least, did not sound good. And Bava can't help but make the whole production look much more lavish than it actually was. However he felt about the story, he gets in a few excellent set pieces, including the mock human sacrifice bit at the beginning and a later sequence where we follow some spilt glass balls from the scene of a drunken fight down a flight of stairs into a bathtub where we find the latest victim. There's also one big scare moment near the end when Isabel has to nab a piece of microfilm (I think that's what it is) in the aftermath of a shootout in the meat locker -- which by that point is very well populated.
This is a body count film where you're almost certainly meant to root for nearly all the characters to die. They're such scumbags, such cartoonish incarnations of the idle yet greedy rich, that you most likely will cheer on whoever's doing the killing. But at the same time you can revel in their depravity, from cavorting on a rotating circular bed to puffing a cigarette from between a woman's bare toes. This film is eye candy: pure cinematic junk food that won't make you fat -- and it's okay to laugh. If you didn't, I'd wonder....
Try this clip on for size. It's Edwige Fenech dancing, stripping, and playing the sacrifice for Kraal. While I saw the Anchor Bay DVD in Italian from the Bava Vol. 2 box set, this clip is dubbed into English for your enjoyment.