A BAY OF BLOOD
Brian babbles about Bava's beautiful bloodbath
I'll bet there's many, many people out there who'd like to see a movie called A Michael Bay Of Blood - ninety minutes of nonstop Bay dismemberment, I suppose. I'd say that would go a little too far, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't pay to see the movie anyway.
Call me a sick fuck if you will, but the opening scene to this movie had my howling. An old lady in a wheelchair is killed, and her wheelchair knocked over. While the old lady slowly chokes away to her demise, director Mario Bava cuts back and forth between her and the one upended wheel on the chair that's just as slowly grinding to a halt in its spin. Lady dying, wheel slowing down. Lady dying, wheel slowing down. You can tell right off where this is going, but still, I couldn't help but chuckle as Bava gave us this lengthy moment, and howled at the of course completely predictable conclusion of it.
I first heard of this movie when I was in grade nine, which was...about ten or eleven years ago. (I remember specifically where I was sitting, too, front row room 9-16, second from the left) I've kept an eye out for it in video stores ever since. Never saw it around once. So my thanks go to our illustrious Mr. Shiflet for this one - given the dearth (oh no! Must not speak the Dread One's name!) of Italian horror movies around here, he's become my Italian horror source. I know, it's a terrible burden. I assure you, he'll be fine.
This baby is about as pure a slasher flick as you?re likely to find - most characters are introduced solely to die, and usually in cool ways that make you rewind it just to watch 'em die again. Zero points for plot, zero points for character...big points for fun, though. Mario Bava hasn't let me down yet, and he manages to pull off even such an unlikely prospect as this. It not only predates the American slasher craze by about ten years, but even predates Black Christmas.
I loved the Fulci-style ZOOM into one woman's spurting neck-stump - while Fulci wasted his (and our) time zooming in on people's faces (often for no apparent reason), Bava zooms in on something we wanna see close up! Betcha can't watch that just once.
There're also moments which I can't tell are intentionally or unintentionally funny - but I don't care. Like when one killer (everybody in this movie basically kills everybody else) impales his victim, never once cringing at the thought, but when he gets some blood on his hand he recoils in horror. I also laughed out loud at the way-out-of-left-field ending - not unlikely, persay, but hilariously unnecessary and it feels almost tacked on.
A hoot, a howl, and everything in between. Highly recommended. Also known as (hang on to yer butts) Antefatto, Twitch Of The Death Nerve, Last House On The Left Part II (it actually predates Craven's film), Reazione a catena, Ecology Of A Crime (what the hell's that supposed to mean?), Carnage, New House On The Left, Bloodbath Bay Of Death, and a slew of titles cobbled together from pieces of the above.