In short: Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)

Original title: 5 bambole per la luna d’agost

Some rich businesspeople have invited a scientist (William Berger) for a bit of vacation time on an island. In truth, they don’t really want to give the guy a time of rest and relaxation, but wheedle, seduce, buy (the going price seems to be a million dollar – in 1970!) or threaten the formula for a revolutionary industrial resin out of him. Things start to go badly once the two only ways off the island disappear under strange circumstances, and someone starts murdering their way through the assembled horrible rich people. Well, at least they have a huge walk-in freezer and large see-through body bags for the body count.

When asked in interviews Mario Bava called the sardonic giallo Five Dolls for an August Moon one of his worst movies. It’s not much of a surprise he thought that way, really, for Bava was not at all involved in the pre-production of the film, only taking the directing reigns two days before shooting started, so he had little control over most of the cast and crew, and really couldn’t give the script by Mario di Nardo the rewrite he thought it needed. That sort of experience does tend to sour a director’s opinion of a movie.

However, as a viewer nearly fifty years later, I can’t say I agree with the great director at all here. Sure, the script is your typical giallo-riff of Christie’s “And Then There Were None” concerning a bunch of horrible rich people in an isolated location dying – or killing each other – in various ways, and the characters are so thin, they’re more like visual props, but Bava compensates – one might sometimes even say overcompensates – for all of this by turning this bog-standard plot about how horrible the upper classes are (you can certainly call it political subtext, if you’re of a mind) into a series of of shots and rhythmic sequences that seem to suggest meanings and double meanings not at all in the script, making internally very ugly yet outwardly beautiful people look even more beautiful in settings that present like something crazed interior decorators made up in their dreams, providing everything with a seductive sheen so intense it suggests the unhealthy and wrong with its sheer beauty. While he’s at it, Bava’s editing rhythms give what would be a slow and talky movie in the hand of most other directors a real kick in the behind, making the film feel fast and furious even when very little is actually happening.


Bava also has quite a bit of fun with how unlikeable all of his characters are, playfully suggesting some actual human feelings in some of the sociopaths only to gleefully reveal that whoever we thought might actually not deserve a horrible death is indeed even worse than the rest of the gang. Clearly, nobody innocent or even only half corrupt could make it onto this island. So it’s only consequent that the film treats their demise increasingly sardonically, its camera gliding through the freezer with a macabre chipperness.

In short: Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959)

A group of scientists (at first I took them to be archaeologists, but later developments show them to be of the fabulous two-fisted all-round scientist persuasion I highly approve of) explores some Mayan ruins to finally answer the question why the Mayans one day just up and left their cities to settle in a far away region.

After some rumblings of the local volcano open a hole in the wall of a ruin, they discover a hidden temple to the terrible god Caltiki and the answer to their question. Caltiki was a very real being, a gigantic monocellular organism with a healthy appetite for just about everything. When a radioactive comet came close to Earth, it turned out that Caltiki thrived on radioactivity and reacted with nigh unstoppable growth. Hence the Mayans' flight. But Caltiki is still very much alive.

Fortunately for the expedition, their leader Dr. John Fielding (John Merrivale) is a man of action who knows what to do with a giant monster and truck full of gasoline.

Less fortunate is the fact that the expedition takes a piece of Caltiki with them. And wouldn't you know, the radioactive comet is coming around again soon...

 

Most of the things I read about Caltiki let me expect this to be a typical middling Fifties monster movie, with the direction of Riccardo Freda and photography, effects and parts of the direction by Mario Bava as its only interesting features.

After having seen it in all its glory, I declare Caltiki to be one of the best monster movies of the Fifties. Sure, it has the usual silly science and standard plot points, but presents everything with a lot of verve and tempo. It helps a lot that the b-plot isn't the usual unromantic romance but the story of one of the expedition's survivors going mad and complicating the work of our heroes. It's a nice way to keep the level of interest up.

The special effects are cheap but fine. Caltiki (of the formless, pulsating mass variety) is a great monster and to my mind even a little Lovecraftian in type as a creature that just grows and grows and eats, while it never acts or thinks or plans still destroying everything that surrounds it through its mere presence.

Finally the film just looks gorgeous. Freda and Bava provide mood-building framing, great looking sets, a surprising amount of gore and every lighting trick known in black and white pictures, all the while keeping the movie dynamic; the last point being something that is often painfully absent from monster films of the era.

 

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