G is For Gothic Giallo

The golden age of giallo didn't last more than a few years from the late 60's to early 70's. But it was just the latest fad in Italian horror movies. Before all that we had gothic horror movies, as established by Mario Bava. That one used stark visuals on haunted castles, torture chambers and classical melodrama. They cashed in on the popularity of Hammer Horror films in the UK and  Roger Corman's Poe films in America at the same time. Besides Bava, there were plenty of other talented directors working on the subgenre as well. Let's take a look at a few.

Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra, 1960)
Director: Giorgio Ferroni

Ferroni is someone that's a bit controversial in some circles due to his actions in WWII, but you can't say he wasn't a talented and effective filmmaker. This film is set in the Netherlands and in the similar art circles that Corman also sometimes depicted. A young art student travels to a Flemish village to see a windmill filled with stone sculptures of legendary women. He finds a mysterious woman and falls for her hard, but doesn't realize she harbors a horrible secret.

The ominous setting, with the gloomy Holland winter and ominous sound design from the mill's gearwork make the film's athmosphere of foreboding dread quite unique. Color photography wasn't that common this early, so that makes Ferroni's movie shine out compared to his contemporaries. It also emphasizes the meet of artistry and mad science also on display in the story.

 The major downside is the third act that gives a rather ludicrous explanation to all the murder and mayhem. The plot's romanticism also rings a bit hollow. Similar plot points were common in many contemporary movies, so it's a bit disappointing Ferroni couldn't top them in this one too.

★★★★

The Horrible Dr Hichock (L'orrible segreto del Dr. Hichcock, 1962)
Dir. Riccardo Freda

The Italian horror cinema owes a major debt to Hitchcock, of course, but still it's a bit much to use a misspelling of his name in a movie title or a major film villain. The titular doctor, played by Robert Flemyng, takes a new, young wife (Barbara Steele) to live with him in his vast old castle. Taking on the story of Bluebeard, the wife goes on to find out what happened to her predecessor and the doctor's deadly secrets.

 

This is another movie that takes a turn in the third act, but this time to be more outlandish and hysterical. It's a trick Italian horror movies tend to do perticularly well. Particularly as we've endured the uptight and very British manners of Flemyng for the first hour or so. This film was very taboo-breaking for its time since it's plot heavily circles around necrophilia. This started a sort of trend in Italian movies to try to up one another. Still, at this point everything was done mostly in good taste and avoiding explicit scenes of sex and violence.

Steele was one of the great leading women of the period, and she did admirable work here, too. The sets are lavish, gloomy and dark, as they should be, but otherwise this film seems to suffer a bit of lack of suspense being built until the final reveals.

★★★

The Whip and the Body (La frusta e il corpo, 1963)
Dir. Mario Bava

Our old buddy Bava again, with one of his filmograhy's most dark-toned movies. The movie is all dark moors, stormy seafronts, damp cellars and unlit torture chambers. Christopher Lee had a few days to shoot his role for the film, but he was put in good use. After all, in Hammer's Dracula films he usually didn't show up for too long.

He plays a cruel and ruthless nobleman that likes to whip girls. The puritans around him don't much care for him, so he soon winds up dead. Or does he? Something unexplained, perhaps a ghost, begins to haunt the mansion. At the same time his would-be bride (Delilah Lavi) seems to start to desperately pine for him and perhaps develop a relationship with the ghost. The increased scares and bodies beginning to pile up cause and investigation on the matter.

Bava was a filmmaker that used minimal elements to maximum effect, and this is a clear textbook study of that work. His use of minimal light in particular makes his film a lot more eye-popping than any of his contemporaries managed. Then again, his use of sound and music isn't quite as good, and his disregard for reasonable plot development may be a bit long-winded to follow. The name implies for more S&M but it's actually left mostly to our imagination.

★★★ 1/2

Castle of Blood (Danza Macabra, 1964)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Corbucci

 A true Italian answer to Corman's Poe films, it also features a connecting opening scene that features the author himself. A rival author bets that he can spend the night at a haunted castle. While there, he enconters various lost souls and is forced to live out the ways they have perished within the castle's history. In the end, the ghosts demand a blood sacrifice themselves.

Margheriti's step to the scene also meant for the genre to take a step more to psychedelia.The film was shot in black and white, but makes the most out of strong contrasts with candle-lit scenes and visible cobwebs in almost every frame. The film's castle is built so as to have a mystery or a secret attached to each room, corridor or nook. 

Legendary western director Corbucci worked as the co-director, yet was not credited for it. Barbara Steele is on top form in here as well, playing a sad remnant of a love lost. It's as melodramatic as they come and the finale takes on for a bit too long, but still, it's one of the brightest spots of the genre.

★★★ 1/2

The Long Hair of Death (I lunghi capelli della morte, 1965)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti

A true historical epic, this one takes place in the 15th century, witch a lover scorned threatening to burn his would-be wife on the stake for witchcraft. Death follows the entire family, until one of the daughters is old enough and the situation is apt to get revenge on the lord. A nice idea is to have everything revolve around the same castle through time, but I guess it's for the cost-effectiveness to limiting sets.

Another Barbara Steele classic that sees her do a dual role. The story and music repeat one another a bit too much with the witch-hunt, paranoia and hauntings going on. The cast of actors is particularly good here, as they manage to find a nice balance between hysteric melodrama and small nuances.   

The morality tale on display here is very Catholic indeed, utilizing the iconygraphy of the Church and basically be about a post-generational vendetta. I think Michele Soavi was very influenced by this.

★★★

The Possessed (La donna del lago, 1966)
Dir. Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini

Shedding light on how the development from gotchicness to giallos came about, we have this slow-moving arthouse movie, shot in black and white. At this point, it feels a bit odd to have this kind of cinematography used in modern setting, though it does help to make the film's athmosphere.

The film is a murder mystery where Peter Baldwin's Bernard arrives for a seaside holiday in order to be able to write. Even as he had spent time therein before, he notices most of the locals give him the cold sholder and act weird. He finds out that Tilde, the chambermaid he had been in love with, had killed herself during the year. But is there something more to the case?

The film depicts the gloom and depression present in neo-realism, with surreal images of leavless trees and the cold embrace of the lake in question. The film doesn't have too strong a pull though, and it's mostly due to the uncharismatic lead turn by Baldwin. Nevertheless, it is a sense of styling that proves you don't need ghosts or spooky castles in order to have some good old-fashioned gothic dread.

★★★

H is for Hill and Spencer

Some people love 'em, some loathe 'em. But there's no denying the films of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer aren't some of the most essential if one wants to understand Italian Genre Cinema. For one, their punching-and-burping brand of humour brought down the spaghetti western. In some ways the overly cynical subgenre was a parody in itself, but after these guys were done with it, it was impossible to take seriously any more.

So let's take a look at the work done by them in the spaghetti western play field. Hill in particular was used quite a lot as a cowboy, as you might remember. As this post takes its H from his name, it shall focus more on his work, though Spencer was also alnong for the ride in most cases.

The Colizzi Trilogy 
(Director: Giuseppe Colizzi)

God Forgives, I don't
(Dio perdona... Io no!, Italy/Spain 1967)

The first starring role of the Hill/Spencer duo. At this point their mishaps were still a bit more violent and cynical than later on, reminiscent of the rivalry of Blondie and Tuco in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Colizzi's tongue in cheek approach was to create a sort of animal fable in the west, with Hill and Spencer taking attributes of a cat and a dog, respectively, and the main villain played by Frank Wolff being, of course, a wolf. Or maybe a cunning fox.

The film's plotting is divided into several viewpoints, but the core is that two buddies with a dangerous bandit on their tails, are traveling across the west to find loot that has gone from person to person after a train robbery. As it's a study of power dynamics, cheating to win, gambling and poker are also very important aspects of the film.  

 
This was the point still when spaghetti westerns were racing to have ever more epic scopes and bigger action scenes. As a spectacle, the movie also delivers, even though the wandering across deserts takes a bit too much of the running time. The film is explodable and at times even brutal, which makes for an odd cocktail with all the animal-based slapstick, but it holds together surprisingly well.

★★★ 1/2

Ace High
(I quattro dell'Ave Maria, Italy 1968)

This film starts off straight from where the last one left off. The two buddies are wandering across the desert, with their loot packed in. But things get complicated when they meet up with a bandit (Eli Wallach) who has survived from a hanging, and starts to swindle them out of their earnings and perhaps enlist them to help him get revenge.

It's the longest and limpest part of the trilogy, that allows Wallch's Leone-tested maneurs and charisma to drive the film rather than more intricate plotting, humour or character dynamics. But . this time around the film's balancing of epic action, cynical brutality and comedy doesn't fit together as well, leaving a taste a bit too dry.

Once again there's a long heist sequence, here saved toward the end of the film, that shines as the best part of the movie.

★★ 1/2

Boot Hill
(La collina degli stivali, Italy 1969)

As the trilogy closes, the film explores more themses such as aging and settling down. Hill's scoundrel has a new get-rich plane, but he has to try to convince Spencer who has settled as a gold-digger with a new partner, to join him and a grizzled gun-fighter (Woody Strode) to battle a bandit (George Eastman) who has taken over an entire town.

At this point the comedy aspects are starting to take hold, and there are more jokes here than in the previous two films. The film's major plot concerns a traveling circus that is used as a Trojan Horse in order to gain access to the closed city. But the film works mostly as a cavalcade of nice stunts and gun-fights, it doesn't have the well-thought out plotting and character work of the first film in trilogy.

The circus acts foreshadow the reliance of slapstic and acrobatics in lieu of gunfire later on, but in here the bodies still pile up and people get a proper lead poisoning.

★★★

They Call Me Trinity
(Lo chiamavano Trinita..., Italy 1971)
Director: Enzo Barboni (E.B. Clucher)

This was a turning point for the spaghetti western genre and a major box-office hit. I would think audiences were getting tired of the over-the-top cynicism on offer in so many spaghetti westerns (that were done in just an 8-year stretch of time. The intended audience for this one were born around the same time as the whole sub-genre.

The plot concerns the lazy bounty hunter Trinity meet up with his brother Bambino who has escaped the law in plain sight and become a sherriff for a small town. A rich dandy hires a group of Mexican thugs to create trouble, which threatens to hit also the small religious community out on the prerie, trying to build their own town. Trinity and Bambino, who walk on a morally grey line, must decide who they want to help build the west.

As a film, Trinity is overlong and uneven. The best secenes see Trinity and Bambino bickering, but neither is much fun by themselves. Barboni's greatest invention was to replace the final gundown with a beat-em-up free-for-all. This has since been topped in many ways and many times.

★★ 1/2

A Man From the East 
(E poi lo chiamarono il magnifico, Italy/France 1972)
Director: Enzo Barboni

Hill is playing solo here, as a New York dandy who gets an inheritance. It turns out to be not that much in money, but more in cameraderieship with a gang of rootin'-tootin' frontier men. They are in turn tasked to grow the young greenhorn into a real man. On the way, Hill also falls in love with a beautiful young lady (Yanti Somer).

So it's more or less a romantic comedy that's only set in the old west. Even though the films with Spencer weren't exactly that raunchy, this one has even less edges than them. The most memorable things regarding this film are a quite good barroom brawl scene, and a nice scenery-chewing turn of the film's villain, gunslinger Morton Clayton (Ricardo Pizzutti). Most of the actors playing Hill's gang members do their best to even out the buddy-comedy partnership, but none of them can really hold a candle to Spencer's irritability and Obelix-level imperviousness to any physical harm. 

★★

My Name is Nobody
(Il mio nome è Nessuno, Italy/France/West Germany 1973)
Director: Tonino Valerii

Sergio Leone himself executive produced another spaghetti vehicle to his favorite star, Henry Fonda, and also secretly co-directed several scenes in the film. It turns out he preferred to do the more comedic parts of the film. Most of the film's more stylized scenes were done by the dependably talented director Tonino Valerii.

Hill plays a wild west weirdo who happens upon an old gunslinger Jack Beauregard (Fonda) who thinks of peaceful retirement. Much as the Italians had done in real life, he decides to stage a final showdown so that legends might be written in his name. In doing so, he messes up with some powerful enemies, and soon Beauregard and Nobody are facing the men of the Wild Bunch alone.

Fonda being more of a straight man requires Hill to play his basic character shtick even more unhinged (and annoying) than usual. The film has its share of cool setpieces, including a comicbooky Funhouse shootout. But the movie also had the bad luck to come out the same year than Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, which had plenty of more insightful ideas on comedically deconstructing the westerns. But it's still one of the better films Hill ever did, and Ennio Morricone's theme song is an ear-worm for the ages.

★★★ 1/2

Blow Up, Blow Out

 Did you just accidentally capture a murder on film, or a sound of evidence for one? Can the truth be found on details or does it just send its seeker to the path of obsession? There's a trio of films much studied and appreciated that riff on a very similar subject. I think it appeals to film directors, as the job often includes getting easily distracted on the moments they weren't set out to capture. That's why this idea lingers on, and what's more it epitomize the styles and ides of each of their respective auteurs. Each could also not have been done in a different time, they are the image of the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's.

So, let's talk about Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981).

Blow-Up (UK, Italy 1966)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

One of the essential depictions of the image of 1960's Swinging London, Antonioni's most famous film sees David Hemmings as a wealthy, self-centered and womanizing photographer. Much of the film we also see odd and off-putting public performances of Flower People through his eyes. Like in many of Antonioni's films, much of the mood and ideas are put between the lines. Even as Hemmings' Thomas tries his best to be a hip mod, it is obvious that he does not feel comfortable or let his guard down.

But his boredom and uneasiness also allow him to push boundaries and operate on a morally gray area. As he's secretly photographing a mysterious woman in the park, it seems that his camera captures something odd. The woman confronts him later on and demands the roll. The instance haunts Thomas and as he's studying his secret negatives he starts seeing things by blowing up smaller and smaller elements to bigger pictures. But we as an audience also never get any closure or reinsurance of the fact throughout the film.

The obsessions related to the sexual nature of how Thomas uses the camera makes the film basically about the male gaze and voyeurism. Antonioni had a knack of combining his themes to the plot. Empty hedonism and sex where his every whim is filled still doesn't satisfy, and by pushing morals, the main character is left a giant void. These days, one could also see how his masculinity turns more and more toxic, as he treats women disposable and has the entire world revolving around his wants and needs. The film is a fascinating look at details and visually wondrous, but the strictly male navel-gazing it provides is a bit out of time by today's standards.

★★★★

The Conversation (USA 1974)
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

As Antonioni was exploring life in the 1960's, then Coppola took the idea to the paranoid 1970's and brought a more political aspect to the proceedings. It is probably still the best movie ever made about surveillance and the endless hole of compromizing ideals it leads to.

It's not to say Coppola is stealing the idea from Blow-Up, rather he's using it as a key influence. A most notable difference is that as Antonioni's film was about a wealthy and cool young artist, Coppola centers around a sweaty and mousey middle-aged man that considers himself a public servant. Actually Gene Hackman's Harry Caul is a surveillance expert, and with his company, follows around those his clients point out to him with very little regard on the moral aspects of his work.

By contrast to his job description, Caul himself is very much an introvert, careful of his own privacy and keeping his private life private (I wonder what he would make of the modern day when American and Chinese apps follow your every move and sell them to the highest bidder in a bat of an eyelash). But as he is very much a loner, there's a perverted aspect of him following young couples around and listening their conversations. One particular conversation might contain some damning information, but it is not clear and could be interpreted multiple ways. Nevertheless, Caul is horrified to learn that the couple he is listening in might be stalked by a murderer.

Coppola's film has an amoral man grow a conscience but as one would expect, he is not rewarded from it but rather, having his whole life come crumbling down and things going from bad to worse quick. He blows his few relationships, work and most of all, his safety, which means all his posturing around privacy concerns was basically for naught as his enemys could still get to him. Coppola is also careful not to make his film into your basic thriller, but having the tensions come from very slow development of the plot, and as Antonioni, reading moods and implications from between the sparse lines of dialogue.

It's a jazzy and alienating, often frustrating and deliberately off-putting film. The use of sound is brilliant and I think would warrant a seeing seemingly such a small-scale character drama in theatres. This is one of those films you get to appreciate properly only second or third viewing. It is very multi-layered, but I think well worth the effort.

★★★★ 1/2

Blow Out (USA 1981)
Dir. Brian De Palma

Easily the most garish of the trio, De Palma was never afraid of "borrowing" stuff from even well-known cinema, so his answer to the same theme takes more out of the previous movies, as well as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Visually, though it looks more like it's director. As the ideas stretch far beyond just plucking them from previous work, it is among the director's finest works with particularly a climactic image lingering on long after the curtains have closed.

John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a character that is something like an amalgam of Hemmings' and Hackman's characters. On surface he may seem like a brash and cool film sound engineer, but below he's tormented and traumatized, as well as feeling empty and lonely. He is recording ambient sound at a park one evening as a car crashes into a pond. He manages to pull out a woman, Sally (Nancy Allen) and helps her to a hospital. But it turns out she was dealing with an important political figure and thus someone might be out to get her. Terry finds evidence on the sound he recorded that the car crash was not an accident.

The film makes fun of the misogynism of murder movies and by-the-numbers stalk-view that De Palma and many of his copycats have used. The movie opens with a film-within a film that seems like a cheap Halloween knock-off and a sub-plot of the film concerns on trying to find the right kind of scream to be used on the film. De Palma presents himself to be more detail-oriented. The actual film has a murderer stalking women too, played by thorough iciness by John Lithgow. But the movie goes out of its way to show how pathetic and disgusting this messy killing actually is, not just stalking girls in a house with a bread knife. De Palma uses plenty of underutilized tricks to emphasize the suspense, such as exciting camera shots and suspending expectations. He is a true follower of Hitchcock in that, carefully limiting on what the audience knows and what he shows.

But in its core, it is a tragic love story of a man who has lost his wife being unable to protect another woman he has developed feelings for. It has similar qualities also to Vertigo in this regard, with the love being really as much about obsession. The final punch of the film also depicts a more cynical end to the character arc than the more open-ended predecessors allowed. In a way all of these are about a man being destroyed by thier obsession in multiple ways. The film also draws parallels to the political decay of the loss for truth and the withering of cinematic artistry in a way I'm not really enclined to agree with, but find fantastically entwined within the plot. De Palma is just as angry as Coppola was, but comes to different conclusions on the same issues.

The cycle of inspiration carried on, as the film itself proved very influental to Quentin Tarantino (particularly Death Proof, which features the same love theme) and Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio.

★★★★

Three laughs: King Kong Escapes

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #18:
King Kong Escapes (Kingu Kongu no gyakushû, 1967)
Director: Ishiro Honda

About time to talk about giant monsters in this column. One of my favorites of the genre comes from the deal of the Toho company to have King Kong fight Godzilla. They did an independent sequel/spin-off after that which sees Kong take on a Mecha-Kong, 7 years before Godzilla met his own robotic doppelganger. I think the idea was to have Kong fight against a giant Frankenstein's monster. Ol' Frankie did later get his own two Japanese kaiju movies, but without Kong, whose rights reverted back to Universal.

Nevertheless, this one is fun precisely because, even though Kong is a King, he tends to be a very vunerable character in his fights, even more so than Godzilla, which creates some more excitement. But here much of the fun is due to the grotesque ape costume they have on the main character with its droopy eyelids and sharp brown teeth. And wobbly way of moving.

The villainous doctor and builder of the giant ape robot is named Dr. Who, in a probably another copyright-infringement I seem to love so much. The robot, which has Kong's famed abilities, is used to drop bombs in a crack in the Antarctic in order to obtain some radioactive material. But the radioactivity makes the robot malfunction, and thus Who must scheme a group of scientists heading to Skull Island to grab King Kong to do his dirty work for him. But Kong does not like to be held captive...

Three laughs (Spoilers):

1. On Skull Island, things are same as always. When a really grumpy-looking dinosaur growls a bit at a woman, we get the first glimpse of the film's hero. Glassed-over eyes slowly opening, staggering around and revealing its rotten teeth, this Kong is a thing to behold. After a tender moment with the blonde, he soon gets into a drunken brawl with T-rex, though. The japanese have some extra flourish in their monster mashes, though, like when the dying T-rex starts foaming at the mouth.

2. Later, helicopters arrive to dose Kong with sleeping gas, but it just makes it seem like ten beers and six vodka shots did the guy in as his eyes start drooping. And as with these kinds of cases, he has to be carried away from the bar, I mean, island. When he wakes up in a ship's hull he even seems appropriately hungover.

3. I takes a while, but we finally learn excatly what Dr. Who wants with Kong, and it's his world-famous digging skills, of course! One could have thought Kong wouyld be more famous climbing, though he gets to do that on the famed Tokyo Radio Tower late in the film, too. But long arms appear to be as useful as any machine when it comes to tunnel-digging. Swirling his arms away at the Earth's crust he still acts as mind-numbingly clumsy that he seems as drunk as ever. In-story, he's drifting in and out of sleep. A fun drinking game would be to take a drink every time the film shows a close-up of his golfball eyes. One would be as drunk as Kong in no time!

B is for Bava

A director whose films frequently feature festive lighting, blood, death and religious undertones is particularly suited for Easter viewing. As it happens, many of legendary horror director Mario Bava's greatest works not only follow that formula, but are also among his most influental works, and have an English title that begins with B. Previously we have taken a look at his viking pictures and one of his classic giallos, but there's plenty of more aspects to the Great Master. So, let's take a look at Mario Bava films that begin with B.


Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio, 1960)

Bava was there from the beginning of Italian horror movies, having worked as a cinematographer and 2nd unit director on films like I vampiri and Caltiki. But even if it wasn't the first, the impact his proper directorial debut is had to overestimate. Bleak and shocking, Bava certainly pushed the envelope from the very beginning, thus creating a mutitude of subgenres himself. For while Black Sunday may be indebted to British horror movies of the time, it is unquestionably of Bava's twisted mind.

A witch is executed in Medieval times, but before her death, she curses the offspring of her inquisitors. 200 years later, archeologists find the tomb and accidentally set the evil of the witch back to the world of the living. There's also romance attached to the modern descendant of the witch, which is somewhat reminiscent of the Universal Horror classic The Mummy.

Though Bava works in clichéd ancient tombs, cemetaries, gothic castle halls and fields in November, he has a sort of knack of making it all look spectacular and exciting, no matter how many movies you've seen the setting before. Bava certainly has a knack for gothicness, and I mostly prefer his historical horror to more modern endeavours. He also hads the means of using more violent visuals than his American and British counterparts dared, starting a sort of race with the bloody special effects in horror films.

The film's downside is than the actors are a bit stiff and some dialogue as spoken by them is simply atrocious, which takes away from the athmosphere of the movie. For a film as old as this, one can forgive this, but if this were in colore and on the style of later 60's movies, it would be a bigger fault. But otherwise it's a rich film that has visual delights on offer on almost every scene.

★★★★

Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, 1963)

In most other horror directors' work, doing an anthology horror would be a middling work, a small, cheap thing to do in between some more substantial movies. But Bava did things differently, and created parobably the best and most stylish anthology horror movie ever made. He might have also given the name for the first heavy metal band, but the truth on that is not within our grasp.

Bava goes for some Russian classics by adapting stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol (albeit quite freely). The first is quite a risque giallo story of a woman being tormented by threatening phone calls, which has a strong lesbian subtext. The second is more gothic, which sees Boris Karloff (also the narrator of the film) as a fiend who returns undead after going out to slay a mythical monster. The last movie is the most colorful and the most obvious morality take, where greed over a dead woman's ring gets a woman haunted to madness.

The three films have each a particular athmosphere to them, each highlighting a particular strength in Bava's toolbox. While the film starts out very slow, almost tv episode-like, it gets going. And it gets scarier, too. The first film creates fears out of the unknown grudges of those closest to us, the second of natural powers beyond our grasp. And the final one has perhaos the most horrifying ghoul ever to put on film, as well as colorful lights and inventive angles used to the benefit of creating paranoia.

The film is classy enough horror in that the Karloff opening and ends with their Creepshow-like cackling feel a bit much and spoil the interest one might have for the classic litereture it is based on. And it doesn't hold particularly well as adaptation as these classics as well. But Bava does better characters and directing the actors than many other times in his career. he's truly firing on all cylinders here. Too bad he never got around of making the sequel, which would have seen an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror with Christopher Lee.

★★★★

Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino, 1964)

Pioneering works of Bava were often indebted to either Hitchcock or Hammer horror films. But in the end he managed to find a subgenre totally Italian, and started the giallos with this film. A giallo as I understand one is a horror/suspense movie with a mystery with a race against time as a secret killer going around murdering people one by one. Bava usually had the victims be well-off models so he could have an excuse to have plenty of beautiful women, but also lavish interiors and colorful costumes. At the height of the suspense scene he often would pull out his favorite coloured lights.

Bava's favorite actor Cameron Mitchell plays a fashion-house owner, whose models are being offed one by one. There's foul play afoot and a plot concerning the lives of everyone in the house with a secret diary being a key piece of evidence everyone is looking for. So far, so Twin Peaks. It is both clearly a picture made in the 60's and utterly timeless, as a sense of style as strong as Bava's never goes out of fashion. The film has a musical score of jazzy easy listening which makes me think this has also been a major influence on Pedro Almódovar. 

Later giallo directors had various perks over this, such as Dario Argento having a stronger sense of inventiveness, creating a horror athmosphere and the use of architecture, Lucio Fulci had more nightmarish and surreal visuals, and Sergio Martino had better female characters and reasonable psychology in his movies. All of them upped the gore a lot from this point, which leaves Bava's pioneer work seemingly quite innocent in comparison. But it is a film anyone with a strong sense of cinema can appreciate, not just horror movie fans. Like with many of Bava's films, I would wish the characters were more interesting and less campily acted as a lot of the movie is spent on just them talking. That's the main reason why, as good as it is, it feels like a bit of a chore to sit through this.

★★★ 1/2

Bay of Blood (Ecologia del delitto, 1971)

Being ahead of the curve, Bava also managed to create one of the first films that can be classified as slashers. The film involves teenagers going out to a remote cottage to get slaughtered. But the reason why is some soap opera scheming about inheriting an estate that's not that unlike the plots of his giallo movies.

Bava's violence is a downward spiral of brutality where the cycle of violence can't be stopped once began. The scenes of kids getting brutally killed in bed with very phallic instruments has since become a cliché of the genre, but more nasty for the modern viewer might be the scenes depicting the brutal murders of the elderly characters. Some killings have obviously influenced the later works of the likes of Argento and Fulci.

The film is not visually one of the most captivating of Bava's films, even though he worked also as a cinematographer. Nevertheless, the claustrophobia of small cabins and the silent threat of the nature within is captured well enough. It's not as captivating as some of his more sophisticated movies and at times a bit boring. Nevertheless, it's a film worthy of respect due to everything new it brings to the table of the developing horror movie DNA.

★★★

Baron Blood (Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga, 1972)

The time had long since passed gothic horror when Bava gave his last knack at the genre. Two dopes are investigating a witch's curse and thus think they have resurrected the notorious Bloody Baron when people around them start to die. Bava is at his best visual tricks here, the film features more exciting scenes of a torchlit castle at night and a city under fog than a season of DuckTales.

There's a bit of a retread of ideas first presented at Black Sunday, but also rewriting and re-conseptualizing them. Nevertheless, compared to the previous film this can't help but to pale a little by comparison.

For fans of more classic horror, the film also has some cleverly graphic deaths in an iron maiden, a cool finale of a witch sabbath, and the make up on the Baron's face that surely was a precursor to Freddy Krueger. On the downsides, the script doesn't really hold together, the music is cheap and the acting is way too campy. The Bargain-store Vincent Price main villain is particularly annoying.

★★★

Bloody Vikings

Vikings has very rarely gotten their due in cinema history, which I find it a bit odd. Even though a complex Nordic culture with interesting gods and a drive for both exploration and pillaging in early Medieval settings might seem like prone for exciting historical adventure movies, more often than not, something goes awry with these. Anyway, let's take a look at several of the more interesting ones.

Erik the Viking (UK/Sweden 1989)
Dir. Terry Jones

Freed from obligations from Monty Python, director Jones was free to do whatever he wanted. His interests in medieval history, comedy and children's books met with an adaptation of his own book. He should have aimed the film more obviously for children. As it is now, the film has problems with its tone, as there are parts where there's too few jokes to be a comedy, and parts where the adventure doesn't advance at all. As a visualist or a mythic world-builder, Jones is clearly secondary to Terry Gilliam and doesn't quite get how to work his more fantastic ideas into the story properly.

The worst thing about it is that the comedy itself is often lacking. The movie opens with some rape humor which certainly hasn't aged well. Jones seemed to have made the same mistake as Graham Chapman with Yellowbeard thinking that rape is a good source of laughs. It does introduce us to the timid lead character, but it is a bit of a cheap way to get sympathy when he has performance issues during a pillaging event, and have him turn on some of the more rapey vikings.

Tim Robbins does do a good job, and there are some actual good laughs to be had from Tim McInnery's childish viking complaining about sitting arrangements to John Cleese's cheery sociopath order people getting flayed. The contrast between the awfulness of the violence and people might have worked better today as a kind of parody of Game of Thrones -like sadist entertainment. Jones himself pops as a clueless leader of a lost continent. I admit I have a soft spot for the film and have seen it a lot more times than its actual qualities would warrant.

★★1/2

Erik the Conqueror (Gli invasori, Italy/France 1961)
Dir. Mario Bava

Bava's historically inaccurate film sees Vikings clash against the Brits in the 8th century. This is contrasted by having one of orphaned twin boys being raised by the Brits and the other by Vikings. A fate of countries laying on the schism between siblings of course has been seen used from the Book of Moses to New Gods by Jack Kirby. It is a reasonably epic, if not terribly original way of presenting conflict.

As is often the case in the director's works, visually it is purely stunning, with elaborate color lights and psychedelia. There are many Technicolor epics with a lot bigger budgets that never were this inventive in their visuals. The film was mostly shot in a studio, but several battles are also shot on location with natural light and the landscapes a Medieval Nordic adventure warrants. These scenes bring a little contrast, but are just as good-looking, with merciless natural powers highligting the brutality of the warriors fighting on the same canvas.

But Cameron Mitchell is not a very interesting leading man, and in the film his voice is in fact dubbed. I like him better on 80's trash movies phoning it in while visibly drunk.


★★★ 1/2

Knives of the Avenger (I coltelli del vendicatore, Italy 1966)
Dir. Mario Bava



Bava did another viking picture, with his star Cameron Mitchell also attached. As the audience's tastes have swithed from large epics to smaller, more spaghetti western -like character studies, this one is more akin a western set in the viking era. The obvious comparison is 1953's Shane from which the movie's plot is pilfered. A disgraced viking warrior becomes a protector of a woman and her child when a group of more violent warriors come calling for his past mistakes. If the previous film was about brotherhood, this one circles again around family, with its themes finding redemption in adopted fatherhood.

The film's look is decidedly more down-to-earth in tones and settings than his previous viking film. Nevertheless the gloomy athmosphere is strong and Bava has a knack for keeping things interesting with some wild camera angles and a nice sense of misé-en-scene. A lot of the action is set on limited sets, darkly-lit farmhouses, taverns and even caves. The pacing is quite slow and one does get a bit bored in the meantime, whereas Erik moved along quite swiftly.

I feel Mitchell has a better role here, having him act more of a stone-faced loner with undelying guilt and growing warmth, is more suited to his talents, as he manages to give his character an air of mystery. In action scenes, though Bava can still play gritty and dirty even if its not quite the blood bath that would warrant such a title in my opinion.

★★★

Viking (Russia, 2016)
Dir. Andrei Kravchuk



With several popular tv series set on either the viking era (Vikings) or a mythical age quite similar to it (Game of Thrones), there has been several small-budget films that have tried to capture that same audience. Some of them are laughable (like 2014's Northmen - a Viking Saga), and many of them have a similar boring gray scale, predictably boring plots and nothing interesting to say. From modern viking films I remember Nicolas Wingding Refn's Valhalla Rising to at least try a little as compared to most of them.

I feel the Russian Viking is a case in point. I would have wanted to like this a lot more since it took seven years to make, and expected more of a Russian flavour to the story, as opposed to just do the same thing everyone else is. It sells itself for being historically accurate, which is itself a very dubious claim, and doesn't really do the boring story any favours. In many parts it is confusing and goes off in rails when compromised would have at least made the plotline somewhat understandable. Plus, it's nearly 2,5 hours long so there's an extra hour of suffering through this when compared to most other films on this post.

The title in and of itself is false marketing. While it takes place roughly in the Viking era, it is more concerned with the goings-on in Russian Novgorod in Prince Vladimir's reign, his brother, the warlord Kievan Rus and the Slavonic wars during that era. The virtues of the film are firstly to generate interest in Russian history, and secondly of its (very expensive-looking) battle scenes, which are in parts very impressive looking. If you really want to see the movie, read up on history before viewing, so the logic between characters making decisions and the context of many actions are more easily understood.

★★

The Raven Flies (Hrafninn flýgur, Iceland/Sweden 1984)
Dir. Hrafn Gunnlaugsson

My favorite Viking film comes from Iceland, which I feel is the best-suited country in the world to tackle the history, since most of the country's occupants are descendants anyway. I wouldn't call this any truer to history, though, even if more care than usual is made to the Medieval costumes and armors. The film is basically a spaghetti western revenge story, with tiny ponies instead of horses, and I love the film for it.

The film captures the dark and gloomy nature of Nordic countries in a way a film like Knives of the Avenger attempted, but didn't quite feel genuine. Life is hard, cheap, brutal and over in an instant. Blood feuds reign from generation to generation. Yet the film concerns ways of trying to break a never-ending cycle of violence. It sees a Celtic underdog prevail by using his wits and knowledge of viking's superstitions against his enemies. With plenty of close-up shots and ugly glances.

The genuinety from the actual settings makes this feel a lot more down-to-earth and less exoticized than most viking movies. It pays a lot to show the real Icelandic shore line and the right kind of houses so it doesn't feel like a general Hollywood epic. One can practically feel the cold wind and the dread of the upcoming winter.

The film spawned a number of sequels, none of which I have sadly seen.

★★★★