Hooptober 10.0 – Bay of Blood (1971)

Being Film #27 for Hooptober 2023

NOTE: Using this opportunity to revisit a review I wrote for this film fifteen years ago, slightly cleaned up and reflecting my recent re-watch of this classic.

Although now armed with with experience of many of the Master’s films, prior to my first viewing of Bay of Blood, aka the much better titled Twitch of the Death Nerve, most of what I know about Mario Bava came from reading: the grandfather of Italian Horror, a founding father of giallo as a film genre and a prime influence on generations of filmmakers, notably Dario Argento (and now Sergio Martino), who would go on to refine and bring the genre to legions of fans across the globe. But my practical film experience with Bava was limited to Black Sunday, a terrific film with tons of mood, but not indicative of what I would later come to see in his colors films, or in the proto-slasher mayhem he would unleash in this nasty piece of work.

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Hooptober 8.0 – Lisa and the Devil (1973)

Being Film #21 for Hooptober 2021

By the time the “Master of Italian Horror” got around to 1973’s Lisa and the Devil there was really nothing left to prove. Since 1960’s Black Sunday Mario Bava had crafted numerous classics that would grow to influence not just to the Italian horror genre (particularly giallo) but to the international film world. So it’s interesting to see a filmmaker whose legacy is firmly in place continue to work, and in Lisa and the Devil he weaves a slightly convoluted tale of demons and doppelgängers that – while ultimately not entirely successful – shows a nightmare logic that reminded me of David Lynch. It works here, even when it kind of doesn’t.

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