Review: A Bay of Blood

An elderly, wheelchair-bound countess is murdered at her bayside villa, only for her murderer to be himself killed off by an unknown killer. They will not be the only ones who end up sliced and diced. Brigitte Skay plays a sexy hippie, whilst Claudine Auger and Luigi Pistilli play the countess’ daughter and her husband, respectively.

 

Controversially violent for its time, this 1971 giallo from director/cinematographer Mario Bava (“Black Sunday”, “Black Sabbath”, and the underrated pair of “Kill, Baby…Kill” and “Five Dolls for an August Moon”) is one of his most popular. It’s also one of his most influential, with “Friday the 13th Part 2” in particular clearly being inspired by what Bava offers up here. I loathe the first two “Friday the 13th” films (and most of the others for that matter), and feel that Mr. Bava is much better than what he offers up in this good-looking but extremely cluttered film. I don’t reject the film quite as outrightly as say the late Sir Christopher Lee who walked out of the film in disgust after having happily worked with the director previously on “The Whip and the Body”. It’s not a bad film, and I respect its place within the fabric of the beginnings of the ‘slasher’ film subgenre. However, there’s just too much unnecessary clutter here for me to recommend it, even with some pretty decent things in its favour here and there. It’s a mess.

 

It starts well, with particularly excellent use of a spinning wheel on a wheelchair during the first murder. In fact, the prologue is vintage Bava, and nothing like a “Friday the 13th” film. Unfortunately, once the film moves away from that to tell the main story, it quickly bogs down in a rather confusing narrative and extraneous characters. It never really recovers, though the scenes of violence are all well-staged and the film looks wonderful. Patient gore-hounds will eventually get their fill of the red stuff, the kills are nicely brutal and rather swift too. I particularly liked the decapitation. However, I was rather restless and annoyed by all the clutter in between. The lack of proper set-up for some of the characters/situations greatly annoyed me too, in addition to the overall overpopulation. By the time Claudine Auger and Luigi Pistilli finally became the focus, I no longer really cared. Given that there were at least five hands involved in the script for this, you’d think they’d get that kind of thing right. The narrative actually gets worse as it goes along, leading to one of the worst and most pointless endings to a film I’ve ever seen. Dreadful.

 

A landmark film in the genesis of the ‘slasher’ subgenre of horror films, but sadly not a good film, nor among the director’s more interesting pieces. It’s better than most of the “Friday the 13th” films it inspired, but that’s hardly a great achievement in my book. It’s…OK I guess, but very disappointing, particularly that awful ending. The screenplay is by Bava, Giuseppe Zaccariello (Joe D’Amato’s “Tough to Kill”), and Filippo Ottoni (writer-director of “The Night Before Christmas”, with Christopher George), from a story by Gianfranco Barberi (Bava’s mediocre final film “Shock”) and the prolific Dardano Sacchetti (“Shock”, “Zombie Flesh Eaters”, “The Last Hunter”, “City of the Living Dead”, “The Beyond”, “The New York Ripper”, etc). In some ways it’s an important film you might wish to see – if you can stomach the violence – but I’m not going to wholeheartedly recommend it.

 

Rating: C+

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