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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 11/01/2025

Mario Bava

Mario Bava is as emblematic of Italian cinema as Federico Fellini, Vittorio di Sica, or Roberto Rossellini. Moreso, perhaps. His dreamlike visions of gothic horror, that which he's known best for, is part of a package that includes spaghetti westerns (The Road to Fort Alamo and Jay Colt and Winchester Jack), Giallo horror (The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace), and sword and sandal epics (Erik the Conqueror and Knives of the Avenger), all popular genres in Italy that sold as well, if not better, than the more high brow counterparts and contemporaries aforementioned.

But he's not taken seriously because he worked in genre, which the critical crowd long held as impersonal and beneath serious consideration. That's changed recently (a positive change in the critical community matched by a host of negative things that far outweigh it), so it makes me wonder what would Bava's career had been if he had made Black Sunday or Kill, Baby, Kill in 2015 rather than the 60s and 70s.

The story of Bava's career is far from smooth, though. Working in the Italian film industry, looking to entertain and without some kind of cult following of investors willing to throw a million dollars at him just to make anything, he was constantly working with independent producers, trying to get anything off the ground. That's what really created his varied filmography of different genres, a good bit of which were chasing trends rather than trying to create them. Still, when Bava worked...he worked.

Style over Substance

Style over substance is typically viewed as a bad thing, an empty exercise is formalism without anything to say about the human condition in order to connect with audiences. However, I do think that it can mesh well and create really entertaining packages that Bava exemplifies.

Take his first film, Black Sunday. A black and white gothic horror piece, it's a very simple story of a witch, trapped by magic (or something), broken free by modern men in the late 19th century and then goes on a terror rampage in the vaguely Eastern European backdrop. Characterization is thin, and the plot is barely existent, but it's a really fun ride in large part because the storytelling is so wane. This gives Bava plenty of space and a simple palate on which to paint his gothic horrors. This gives him time to use images to actually heighten the simple storytelling, creating implicit thematic meaning through explicit imagery that no one actually talks about. It becomes a heavily Christian film about the power of the Christian belief over evil, and it's in large part because Bava has the time and space to use imagery to help imbue meaning.

I'm not here to imply or explain that that's how all of his films work, or even all of his best films, but there is something to embracing stylistic excess that can lead to increased meaning. I mean...I don't think there's anything like that in Blood and Black Lace, but it does heighten the realities of movies like The Whip and the Body and Planet of the Vampires, creating moods and atmospheres that become compelling on their own. I mean, the smoke-filled dreamlike realities of the sadomasochist nightmare that is The Whip and the Body and the Technicolor alien landscapes of Planet of the Vampires are just fascinating to look at, even if the actual stories are threadbare. That's a specific skill that Bava brings to the table, and it's his strongest attribute. However, like many directors, he had weaknesses.

Narrative


Holding together the needs of a film production in one's head is not a small task. You write down everything you can and you delegate to department heads to handle much of the work, but holding a vision in one's head to provide orders to writers, set designers, cinematographers, and actors all while fighting off producers is difficult. Combine that with the normal hectic nature of a film set where things constantly change because locations become unavailable, planned shots can't be executed, actors resist direction, and lights blow out, and the director must keep the production moving forward, all while having to pivot and improvise doesn't undermine the basic ideas of the script. Assuming the script is worthwhile at all. Which is to say that the toolbox a director needs to master is very large and very difficult to master.

Having the skillset to manage all of that is rare. Most directors are workman who can find perfectly acceptable solutions to these kinds of problems, but rely on the script to support them. Bava was seemingly like that, I think, with the added benefit of being visually stylish. He had writing credits on most of his films, but never sole writing credit, the credit he did receive being usually one of at least three, sometimes as many as six total writers. And the writing quality varied greatly, but the key for Bava was matching his stylistic approach with the right kind of script: spare horror, mostly.

The real problem came when he was matched with the rising popularity of Giallo cinema. Largely started by Bava's own The Girl Who Knew Too Much (retitled The Evil Eye in its American release), the genre grew to develop its own conventions without him, largely dictated by other Italian filmmakers like Dario Argento, and they were almost all whodunit proto-slashers that relied on investigation, larger casts of characters, and playing coy with the audience (often by outright lying to them about the secret identity of the killer). This sort of complexity was something that Bava seems to have had real trouble matching with his dreamlike stylings, so he could create works of deep frustration like Blood and Black Lace or Five Dolls in August or Hatchet for the Honeymoon that simply don't connect like they should because he doesn't have the space to play stylistically because he has to dedicate so much time to movements of plot and keeping track of large casts of characters, some of whom could be the real killer.

The Hunt for the Genre Killer


Bava is really known for his early career, dominated by gothic horror, and his later career which includes his most obviously influential film, A Bay of Blood, which is a massive inspiration for the Friday the 13th franchise and American slashers in general. However, its his middle period, from about 1964 to 1970, that I find the most interesting but deeply frustrating. It's where he became lost in the search for box office success by mimicking other people.

The big signal is the spaghetti westerns, The Road to Fort Alamo and Roy Colt and Winchester Jack. The first is a largely dull and uninteresting entry in the genre, made in the same year that Sergio Leone made A Fistful of Dollars, but the second is perhaps more interesting. Roy Colt and Winchester Jack was Bava taking on the assignment of a film and deciding to purposefully make a hash of it by turning it into a comedy. He made three comedies in his career (Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl-Bombs and Four Times That Night are the other two), and only one of them is anything close to good (the last, which is like Rashomon while considering a failed one-night stand). Roy Colt is deeply unfunny and frustrating as it navigates the conventions of the spaghetti western, which I found to be a very interesting choice. It was obvious that Bava was allowed to just make whatever he wanted, and instead of pushing the film towards his obvious natural inclinations like turning it into a gothic horror western (which would have been awesome, possibly), he went the "easy" route and tried to turn it into a comedy. I say easy because directing actors to be silly is less demanding financially than building and lighting sets to accommodate the needs of something like gothic horror.

This is also the period where he was most obviously chasing the runaway success of the Giallo genre. Giallo means yellow in Italian, and it refers to the yellow binding on cheap pulp novels, most of which were horror, that animated Italian pop culture for a time and influenced the genre. The conventions ended up being mysteries about a killer, usually of women, the killer typically being dominantly portrayed as a pair of gloved hands holding some kind of weapon like scissors for most of the runtime while a policeman or often an American actor playing a writer or something would pair up with a young woman to investigate, eventually finding the killer to have some kind of perverted motive. As I previously indicated, Bava's talents did not lend themselves to this kind of complicated storytelling, so we end up with damp squibs of films like Five Dolls for an August Moon.

Late Stage and an Early Death


My favorite Bava film (this is very much an unpopular opinion, by the way, its IMDB rating is in the low 6's) is Shock, his last filmed project (Kidnapped was filmed before but released in one form about fifteen years after Bava's death). And it represents what I think could have been his evolution into a new era where the gothic horror didn't sell. It's set in modern day, about a woman with a new husband and a child from her first marriage. There's a haunting, potential possession, and lots of creepy imagery that reminded me, in particular, of the creepy visuals from John Carpenter in Prince of Darkness.

And I think it works because the narrative is very spare, giving Bava time to dwell on the eerie. There's little to no plot as the mother tries to figure out why her kid is being so creepy (yeah, it is one of those movies), and things just get weirder, lines between reality and her nightmares blending the more the film goes on. It's the kind of narrative structure that Bava needed to flex his stylistic skills even if removed from the obvious original visual space of gothic horror.

It was obvious that the money side of things was becoming extremely difficult, though. That movie Kidnapped that he didn't get to finish and was only released fifteen years after his death? He'd filmed, reportedly, about 99% of it, missing only some inserts to tie scenes together, when the producer went bankrupt and took the print away from Bava so he couldn't finish it. Bava's son, Lambardo, eventually put together a cut that is probably pretty close to what Mario intended, and Mario died in 1980 of a heart attack at 60.

He'd spent twenty years in the film industry before he ever directed Black Sunday in 1960. He was an uncredited title designer on Scipione l'africano in 1938, working his way through assistant cameraman on projects to cinematographer for people like Rossellini on a couple of his short films, eventually becoming an assistant director in the late 50s, even completing projects for people like Riccardo Freda, and finally getting his shot at directing which he blew out of the gate with Black Sunday in stylish fashion.

He probably made films in the wrong era, but when he worked, he was cookin'. His stylish features like Black Sunday, The Whip and the Body, Planet of the Vampires, and Kill, Baby, Kill match with less obviously Bava-esque successes like Four Times that Night and Knives of the Avenger (Shane but with Vikings) to create an interesting, worthwhile body of work that may be uneven (Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl-Bombs is...not good) but has real gems within.

The Ultimate Bava


I am always on the search for the film that can define a filmmaker in microcosm. Usually it's some kind of example of their unique traits in the most obvious form (North by Northwest for Hitchcock or Gremlins 2 for Joe Dante) or the culmination of his talents in the most unified form (The Age of Innocence for Scorsese).

With Bava, I could go in two directions. There are the films that are most thoroughly and distinctly his, that most encompass his cinematic style. Films like Black Sabbath or Kill, Baby, Kill, filled with horror, the macabre, and Technicolor visuals.

However, I end up trending towards another film: Danger: Diabolik. I think of it because it feels like the perfect encapsulation of both the stylistic highs that Bava reached for but also the narrative struggle lows that hit him time and time again. It's essentially two films in one. The first focuses on the eponymous Diabolik, the master criminal, and his girlfriend Eva, and it's all dreamy looks at Mod-esque attitudes and ornate set design that is just weirdly compelling to watch. The second is this slapdash of a host of revolving door characters, almost all policemen, who are trying to come up with ways to catch the criminal which is deeply frustrating and not all that entertaining.

Is there a better microcosm of Bava overall? I don't think so. Danger: Diabolik is definitely not his best film, but it is the one that most fully defines him, I think. I'd sooner watch Planet of the Vampires, though.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Bugonia

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Knives of the Avenger (Rating 3/4) Full Review "IHonestly, it feels like he's growing as an artist, which is a very nice thing to see." [Library]

Kill Baby, Kill (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's a stylistic flex on his part, throwing as much fog and shadow and color into frame to make every moment interesting." [Personal Collection]

Danger: Diabolik (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, it's frustrating as a whole." [Kanopy]

Four Times that Night (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Something of a small gem in Bava's career, all the more noteworthy for its differences from his more well-known work." [Library]

A Bay of Blood (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "However, I end up enjoying the film a decent bit simply because Bava tries so hard. I really wouldn't call it good, but it's a fine, thing, stylish entertainment." [Amazon Prime]

Baron Blood (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I'm far from hating the film, but this is less than what I had hoped it would be. It's...fine. Not terribly engaging, but with moments of fun." [Amazon Prime]

Lisa and the Devil (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It's not some great piece of horror cinema, but it's solidly entertaining and showing that Bava could disappear a bit into gothic horror, subsuming his more outrageous stylistic flourishes in favor of a more muted visual tone. I'm kind of glad that Bava didn't rewrite it, is all." [Kanopy]

Shock (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I don't know if he would have been able to replicate the quality here, but I think it's evidence that he wasn't done yet." [YouTube]

Contact

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