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Since the late 1950's, Italy has had a rich history in horror cinema, and
it has spawned quite a number of cult genre directors, Dario Argento and
Lucio Fulci [Lucio Fulci bio -
click here] immediately come to mind, maybe also Ruggero Deodato [Ruggero
Deodato - bio click here] and Sergio Martino, and probably
many many more ... but there is one director without whom the Italian
horror film wouldn't have become what it is (or at least what it was
during its heyday in the 1970's and 80's), and that man is of course Mario
Bava. Now Mario Bava did not start Italian post-war horror cinema
altogether (though he did collaborate on the initial post war
shocker), and on a plot level, most of his films were less than
exceptional (and not even all that original actually) - but he gave to the
Italian horror movie that one element that sets it (or at least its best
examples) apart from shockers from almost everywhere else in the world: style. Mario
Bava's films might often have been slightly silly and derivative, but they
were always exceptionally stylish, something which can also be seen in
virtually all of Dario Argento's films, in Lucio Fulci's best, and in at
least the early gialli of Sergio Martino. That Bava's films always featured an
incredibly rich imagery should come as no surprise though since before
becoming a director he was trained as a painter and could also look back
on a long career as cinematographer. Plus his father ... but I'm getting
ahead of myself here.
Early Life, Early Career
Mario
Bava was born in 1914 in San Remo, Italy. Mario's father was Eugenio Bava,
who was a learned sculptor and painter, but in the early Italian film
industry he made himself a name as a cinematographer and special effects
pioneer, and he worked on many an Italian classic of early cinema, like Quo
Vadis (1912, Enrico Guazzoni), according to some sources the first
feature film and first epic movie ever, and Cabiria (1914,
Giovanni Pastrone), the film that gave the world Maciste (in the form of
actor Bartolomeo Pagano), on which Bava senior worked as special effects
director and was among other things responsible for the outbreak of Mount
Vesuvius and the destruction of the Roman fleet - effects that look
impressive to this very day. Cabiria, international success that it was,
is said to have influenced D.W. Griffith when making his groundbreaking Intolerance in 1916. Based
on this, it's save to say that Mario Bava grew up with film, even though
his father was in films only second and a sculptor first, mainly making
sculptures for churches - an influence that can be felt on Bava's
gothic films at least. Growing up, young Mario Bava studied to
be a painter, but financial difficulties and restricive university
politics in fascist Italy eventually forced Bava to give up his studies
and join his father at the Istituto LUCE (= L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa),
where Eugenio Bava was head of optical effects, and as his father's
assistant, young Mario soon learned how to handle a camera as well as can
be - and by the end of the 1930's, he had become a cinematographer in his
own right.
In the 1940's, Mario Bava, not
forgetting his love for the fine arts, directed a series of documentaries
on art-subjects, but it was his work as cinematographer for various
name-directors that have influenced his work much more, directors like
Roberto Rossellini (the 1939-shorts La Vispa Teresa/Lively
Teresa and Il Tacchino Prepotente/The Bullying Turkey
and 1942's feature La Nave Bianca/The White Ship), Pietro
Francisci (Natale al Campo 119/Christmas in Camp 119 [1948],
Antonio di Padova/Anthony of Padova [1949], Orlando e i
Paladioni di Francia/Roland the Mighty [1956], Le
Fatiche di Ercole/Hercules
[1958] and Ercole
e la Regina di Lidia/Hercules
Unchained [1959]), Vittorio De Sica (Villa Borghese/It
Happened in the Park [1953], co-directed with Gianni Franciolini),
G.W.Pabst (Cose da Pazzi [1954]), Jacques Tourneur (La Battaglia
di Maratona/Giant of Marathon [1959]) and Raoul Walsh (Esther
e il Re/Esther and the King [1960]), as well as his personal
friend, Riccardo Freda (I
Vampiri/The Devil's
Commandment [1956] and Caltiki
- Il Mostro Immortale/Caltiki, the Immortal Monster [1959]) - with especially Freda's films being
important for Bava's later career, and The Devil's
Commandment being widely credited as the first Italian post-war
horror film ever.
Fact is though, Bava's involvement with many of the
films he worked on in the late 1950's has been vastly exaggerated, if you
believe certain sources, he has virtually directed the two Hercules
films, The Devil's
Commandment, Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, Giant of Marathon and Esther and the King
as well as Ulisse/Ulysses
(1954, Mario Camerini) and Le Meraviglie di Aladino/The Wonders
of Aladdin (1961, Henry Levin) - with some sources even going so far as crediting
half the Italian movie output of that era to Bava (and the other to Sergio
Leone, for that matter) -, but the truth is probably much more mundane:
While it is true that he directed some special effects sequences in Ulysses
(which would qualify him as special effects director, not director as
such, a significant enough difference) and was second unit director on The
Wonders of Aladdin, and while even Freda admitted that he
finished both The Devil's
Commandment and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster
as a director, and he probably also put some
finishing touches on Giant of Marathon and Esther and the King, it remains questionable at
best if he had any creative input in either of these films or if he
simply followed a shooting script/storyboard made up by the respective director - which is my
best guess actually because neither of these films had the Bava-touch that
very distinctively came to the fore in even Bava's very first film as a
director, La
Maschera del Demonio/Black
Sunday (1960). In fact, both The Devil's
Commandment and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster
look exactly like Freda-films, even if he
didn't finish them, and Giant of Marathon is just your typical
peplum ... Another legend tells that Freda deliberately left both The Devil's
Commandment and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster
to virtually push Bava, whom he knew to be
talented enough, into the directing chair ... which once again might be a
slight exaggeration, it's much more probable that Freda left the films
over monetary reasons or because he just didn't feel treated right, but
whatever - saving Caltiki, the Immortal Monster
and Giant of Marathon eventually
prompted production company Galatea
Film to give young Mario Bava (who was by that time already 45
years old) a shot at directing his first film as director in his own right
...
Mario Bava, the
Horror Director of the 1960's
Why Mario Bava's first film would turn out to be La
Maschera del Demonio/Black
Sunday (1960), an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's The Viy, is
once again obscured by legend, legend that states that Galatea
were giving Bava carte blanche for his very first feature film,and
he just happened to choose that story - once again highly unlikely a tale, since studios who give someone the chance to make his directorial
debut are not likely to just give him carte blanche - in the world of
commercial filmmaking, that would be suicide. But of course, they might
have discussed possible projects with Bava, and since thanks to Hammer's
gothics horror has once again become a bankable genre, they might have
agreed on The Viy, a period piece on witchcraft, rather quickly,
especially since it was to be co-scripted by Ennio De Concini, a versatile
scriptwriter frequently in employ of Galatea
Film.
Be that as it may, Black
Sunday turned out to be a milestone in Italian horror, an
incredibly stylish shocker and an extremely impressive debut film - that
clearly shows Bava's cinematographer origins, because while the story of
the film about a resurrected witch (Barbara Steele, whose horror career
was launched with this film [Barbara
Steele bio - click here]) wanting to be reborn in the body of her
offspring (Steele again) is less than special (and actually a bit
silly), the film is virtually a visual feast, using its black-and-white
cinematography to the fullest (and most creepy) effect, and ably
demonstrating that horror relies not so much on story as it does on
atmosphere ... and even in his first film, Bava demonstrated there's
hardly anyone better than him when it comes to creating a haunting
atmosphere.
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The Italian film industry as a whole however did not
immediately put its trust in Bava as a horror director, and thus after the
success of Black
Sunday, he was assigned to two period pieces, the peplum Ercole
al Centro della Terra/Hercules
in the Haunted World (1961) and the viking-movie Gil
Invasori/Erik
the Conquerer/The Invaders (1961). The
Invaders on one hand was your typical (if rather campy) genre stuff with
Cameron Mitchell (who was previously cast as a viking in L'Ultimo dei Vikinghi/Last
fo the Vikings [1961] by Giacomo Gentilomo) in the lead plus twins Alice and Ellen Kessler playing -
well, twins, one good one evil. On the other hand though, with Hercules
in the Haunted World, Bava went over the top, and enjoyably so, as
he sent mythical strongman Hercules
(Reg Park) straight to Hades to battle a vampire-like Christopher Lee,
then a hot new horror star. As to why Hercules has to do that is actually
only of minor importance, the film is once again less carried by its story
than by its atmosphere - though Hercules
in the Haunted World certainly is no Black
Sunday, and its atmosphere is made up from a campy clash between
sword-and-sandal and horror motives, with Bava proving (if nothing else)
his ability to get the most out of cheap sets often obviously made from cardboard. And
it has to be stated, Hercules
in the Haunted World certainly is no classic, no classic of any
genre - but that said, it's also much fun to watch !!!
While
both Hercules
in the Haunted World and Erik
the Conquerer were shot in colour (and both saw the use of primary colours in a way
reminiscent of comicbooks), it was back to the black and white of Black
Sunday for his next film, La Ragazza che Sapeva Troppo/The
Girl who Knew too Much (1963) - but it was also back to the horror
genre ... or at least the thriller to be more precise. And while for Hercules
in the Haunted World and Erik
the Conquerer Bava was little more than a hired hand - even if he left personal touches
on both of them -, The Girl who Knew too Much is closer to Bava's
own predilections in both style and plot: The film tells the story of an
American girl (Letícia Román) witnessing a murder in Rome, starting to
investigate on her own with the help of a sympathetic doctor (John Saxon [John
Saxon bio - click here]) -
and all of a sudden, she finds herself on the run from a psychotic
serialkiller. From today's point of view, the story of the film might
sound hardly exciting, but seen in its historical context, The Girl who Knew too Much
is nothing short of the prototype of the giallo genre, the specifically
Italian version of the murder mystery often involving a serialkiller,
horror motives, and style-over-content directorial efforts, a genre that
didn't come into full swing until the late 1960's/early 70's and that Bava
over the years helped to develop. It should be pointed out though that The Girl who Knew too Much
is not a full-blown giallo - sure, Bava's direction is suitably
stylish (it seems he can't direct another way), and the story elements are
all there, but the film lacks the violence of your typical genre film and
the murder setpieces that would become a fixture of later movies
(including Bava's).
While The Girl who Knew too Much
was only borderline horror, Bava's next film, I
Tre Volti della Paura/Black
Sabbath (1963) was once again a full-blown shocker ... or three
shockers rather, since it is a anthology movie. In this film, very loosely
based on the works of Guy de Maupassant, Aleksei Tolstoy and Ivan Chekhov, Bava ably demonstrated that he could master the
many variations of the horror genre, since each of the film's episodes
differs from the others rather vastly: The first episode is a suspense
piece set in present times that once again anticipates giallo motives, the
second story is a period piece, a gothic tale about vampires set in snow
covered Eastern Europe starring Boris Karloff [Boris
Karloff bio - click here], and the last segment is a
particularly mean ghost story - with the three stories only having that
much in common that they are all extremely effectively directed (and once
more in glorious colour, too). Now one could probably fault the film for
being quite as heterogenous as it is and missing a recurrent theme holding
its segments together (which is probably why in many foreign releases -
including the American release - the order of the stories has been changed
quite deliberately), but based on the strength of each of its three
stories alone, Black
Sabbath is well worth a look.
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Bava followed up Black
Sabbath with La
Frusta e il Corpo/The
Whip and the Body in later 1963, a gothic starring Christopher
Lee, Daliah Lavi and Tony Kendall. But though The
Whip and the Body is stylishly enough directed, makes excessive
use of primary colours, shows strong sadomasochist undercurrents, and it's
a favourite with many of Bava's fans, it is not one of his better films,
its story is just too clichéed and too convoluted and at the same time
pretty silly and unbelievable to really stand out in his filmography (even
if taken by its own merits, the film is still totally watchable).
Bava's
next film, Sei Donne
per l'Assassino/Blood
and Black Lace (1964) would be a much more important movie, not so
much for his own career but for Italian genre cinema as a whole, as it is
generally considered to be the first ever giallo. In the film
starring Cameron Mitchell and Eva Bartok as a murdering couple in the
fashion world, all the elements only hinted at in The Girl who Knew too Much
fall into place quite comfortably, from the overly convoluted plot to the
masked killer, from horror and S/M undercurrents to gruesome murders, all
held together once more by Bava's stylish direction. Despite its
historical significance though, Blood
and Black Lace is once again not among Bava's best films, his
very visual directorial style clashes with the over-convoluted plot a
few times to often, but once again, this is not to say the film isn't
totally watchable. Despite having made a name of himself as
horror director, Bava next left the genre behind once more to make a
Western, La Strada per Fort Alamo/Arizona Bill/The Road
to Fort Alamo (1964), which came out only a few weeks after Per
un Pugno delli Dollari/A
Fistful of Dollars (1964, Sergio Leone), the film that got the
spaghetti Western genre as such started in the first place. However, while
Leone's film was great and trailblazing, Bava's was unimpressive and
pointless. Bava did however, return to the Western genre one more time,
with the rather comedic Roy Colt e Winchester Jack/Roy Colt and
Winchester Jack, made in 1970 at the height of the spaghetti Western
boom. The film, starring Brett Halsey and Charles Southwood in the title
roles, was hardly more impressive than The Road to Fort Alamo
though. (According to some sources, Bava did also direct some portions of Ringo
del Nebraska/Savage Gringo [1966] by Antonio Román, however,
he didn't get any credit on the film, and [as with many other films in his
filmography, see above] it's unclear to what extent he was even involved
in it.)
In 1965 however, Mario Bava made another one of his
masterpieces and a landmark in sci-fi horrors, Terrore
nello Spazio/Planet
of the Vampires. The film features a very feeble plot - a
spaceship lands on a planet apparently populated by vampires who take out
the crew and turn them into vampires one by one -, and its not exactly
convincing cardboard sets and weird futuristic outfits don't help the film
much either ... but what Bava was able to make out of the little he had
was simply astonishing, as he has turned Planet
of the Vampires into a virtual textbook example of creating
suspense and stylish direction alike and made what essentially looks like
silly sci-fi on first sight into one of his tensest movies - and Planet
of the Vampires has also influenced countless sci-fi horror
movies that came after it, most prominently of course Alien
(1979, Ridley Scott).
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As
ever so often though, after making one of his best horror films, Bava
would once
again leave the genre as such behind for his next feature, which turned out
to be another viking-movie with Cameron Mitchell, I
Coltelli del Vendicatore/Knives
of the Avenger (1965). But while Bava's earlier viking effort The Invaders
was almost excessively campy, Knives
of the Avenger is less so, being rather slow in pace and relying
on moody landscapes rather than kitsch-sets - and in anything but costumes
and sets, Knives of
the Avenger actually feels more like a Western than a viking flick
- particularly like George Stevens' classic Shane (1953) that is,
which Bava's film is highly reminiscent of. The film has certainly not
turned out to be one of Bava's better films, but it's still an interesting
watch, and when keeping in mind that it (allegedly) took no more than one
week to shoot, it turned out remarkably well.
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With Operazione
Paura/Kill,
Baby ... Kill! (1966), a film about a(n alleged) ghost roaming a
Carpathian village, Bava returned to horror cinema once again, horror
cinema of the gothic variety this time around. And once again, he
demonstrates his mastery as a director, as on a story level, Kill,
Baby ... Kill! is rather feeble as well as silly, but Bava uses
every trick available to him to make the film on one hand as stylish, on the
other as suspenseful as possible, and at times the film even defies logic
to attain a nightmarish feeling - and what says horror better than
a nightmare. All that said, Kill,
Baby ... Kill! is not among Bava's best films, quite simply
because its story as a whole is just a bit too silly, but it features some
images that are hard to forget ...
Speaking of silly: Even sillier was Bava's next film, the
Italian-American co-production Spie Vengono dal Semifreddo/Dr.
Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966), a sequel to Dr. Goldfoot and
the Bikini Machine (1965, Norman Taurog) on one hand (and thus once
again starring Vincent Price [Vincent
Price bio - click here] in the title role but replacing Frankie
Avalon with Fabian) and a vehicle for popular Italian comics Franco
Franchi and Chiccio Ingrassia on the other. The outcome was, simply put,
desasterous, maybe mainly because Mario Bava was never big on comedy in
the first place
After Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs
turned out to be Mario Bava's very probably worst film though, he seemed
to turn around completely and make (another) one of his best movies, the
comic-adaptation Diabolik/Danger:
Diabolik (1968). Sure, in story-terms, Diabolik
would be a rather silly superhero (or rather supercriminal) tale, and it
was produced by Dino De Laurentiis primarily to cash in on another
comic-adaptation of his, Barbarella
(1968, Roger Vadim) - hence the same lead, John Phillip Law - but the film
is quite simply incredibly slick and stylish (if stylish in a campy way)
that it's just a joy to watch. And if you're a comic- or pulp-fan you
can't help but loving Diabolik
for its pretty much constant over-the-top elements. And even if the film
might objectively not be in the same league as Black
Sunday, Black
Sabbath and Planet
of the Vampires, it's nothing short of a masterpiece in its own right.
Bava however did not feel too comforatble working for De Laurentiis.
Sure he was granted a bigger budget than ever before (and
managed for the film to come in under budget by far, actually), but with
more money came a loss of control, something which Bava, used to work on
slim budgets in relative independence, couldn't come to terms with, so all
he did for De Laurentiis after Diabolik
was some special effects work on the TV-miniseries L'Odissea/The
Adventures of Ulysses (1968, Franco Rossi, Piero
Schivazappa), together with Carlo Rambaldi.
Still, Mario Bava needn't have worried, because the golden age was
just around the corner ... or at least so it seemed.
Climax and Decline in the
1970's
As mentioned above, with his films The Girl who Knew too Much
and Blood
and Black Lace has pretty much invented the giallo genre,
but it wasn't until Dario Argento released his L'Uccello dalle Piome
di Cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970 that the genre came
into full swing and became commercially viable - and all of a sudden,
everybody in Italy was doing gialli (just like everybody was doing
peplums in the early and Westerns in the late 1960's) ... and since Bava
had pretty much fathered the genre, he didn't want to be left out - and of
course he wasn't.
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5 Bambole per la Luna d'Agusto/Five
Dolls for an August Moon (1970), a film starring William Berger, Ira
von Fürstenberg and Edwige Fenech, was the first of Bava's 1970's gialli, and it showed all the strengths and weaknesses of the genre,
even in the hands of a director of Bava's talents: On the plus side, the
film is of course stylishly directed and features many an inventive scene,
but the film's plot about businessmen being killed off on an idyllic
island is silly to the point of being incomprehensible and is
the movie's major letdown.
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Il Rosso
Segno della Follia/Hatchet
for a Honeymoon (1970) on the other hand is quite a bit different
from your typical giallo inasmuch as it added black humour to the
genre-typical proceedings - and somehow the film about a fashion designer
specialized in killing women in bridal gowns until he is haunted by the
spirit of his own wife works like a charm, as if irony was the thing the genre
had always been lacking (but of course it also helps that Bava's direction is once again flawless and stylish as could be).
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After
another excursion into the Western genre with above mentioned Roy Colt and
Winchester Jack (1970), Bava returned to the giallo once more with Ecologia del Delitto/Bay of Blood/Twitch
of the Death Nerve (1971), a film that was influential not so much
because of its quality, but because it perhaps more than any other giallo
anticipated the slasher genre of the late 1970's with its many for its
time quite graphic gore scenes, and especially inspired Friday
the 13th (1978, Sean S. Cunningham) - but apart from being an
influence on a not particularly great genre and quite some screen
violence, Bay of Blood
is definitely one of Bava's lesser shockers,
once again let down by its underdeveloped script.
For Gli Orrori del
Castello di Norimberga/Baron Blood (1972), Mario Bava once
again turned his back on the giallo genre and returned to gothic horror.
However, Baron Blood,
despite the presence of Joseph Cotten, probably the biggest name Bava has
ever worked with, isn't the triumphant return it could have been: Sure,
Bava's direction is stylish as ever, Cotten gives a creepy performance as
the titular bad guy, and the main set - an authentic Austrian castle - is
almost breathtaking ... but unfortunately, the plot about a young couple (Antonio
Cantafora, Elke Sommer) resurrecting a bloodthirsty baron who died 300
years ago is simply too silly and not at all helped by its even sillier
finale.
After Baron Blood,
Mario Bava went off into a different direction altogether, making Quante
Volte ... quella Notte/Four Times that Night (1972), a slightly amusing
but not all that important sex comedy that pays hommage to Akira
Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) by telling the same story from four
different perspectives - but that's making the film sound more interesting
than it actually is. But while Baron Blood
was rather silly and Four Times that Night rather pointless, and
while both these films were produced by Italian American Alfredo Leone,
Bava's next film, also a Leone-production, would turn out to be his
masterpiece: Lisa e il
Diavolo/Lisa
and the Devil (1973).
Rumour has it that producer Leone
was so pleased with the (commercial) results of Baron Blood
that he gave Mario Bava a virtual carte blance for his next film (though
he probably insisted that it had to be another horror film). The resulting
film, Lisa
and the Devil starring Elke Sommer and Telly Savalas in the
respective title roles, turned out to be unlike any other horrorfilm
though, a film that deliberately abandons logic and rational storytelling,
and instead of a narrative as such it presents a triplike experience more
reminiscent of a nightmare than anything else. Basically the film is about
an American tourist (Sommer) in Toledo, Spain losing her group and ending
up in a mansion where Savalas seems to be a mere servant, but more and
more he turns out to be a Satanic puppeteer (in more senses than one). But a
mere synopsis can't even come close to describing the film as such, which
is at once Bava's most poetic and most disturbing film, and while his
earlier films often suffered from confusing scripts, this time around, the
confusing plot works to the film's advantage, is actually the very core of
the film as such.
Lisa
and the Devil opened in 1973 at the Cannes film festival to
ecstatic audiences, and had a few other very successful screenings, but it
failed to find a distributor - not all that surprising actually, since it
was (and still is) a far-out film that doesn't in the least meet
with mainstream audience expectations (which in fact is the very reason
the film is such a masterpiece in the first place). Anyways, since producer
Alfredo Leone needed to make his money back, he told Mario Bava to shoot a
few more scenes featuring a priest and demonic possession to make the film
more like The
Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) - and thus, Lisa
and the Devil went into distribution in 1975 as La Casa
dell'Esorcismo/The House of Exorcism, in a violated version
that bore little resemblance to Bava's original intentions. And while Bava
was particularly pleased (and rightly so) with Lisa
and the Devil as such, he disowned The House of Exorcism. Thing
is, for Alfredo Leone, the changes paid off and The House of Exorcism
ultimately became successful enough on a commercial level to make more
than its money back. But for years it looked as if he had
derived the world of Mario Bava's greatest film by having it recut and
reshot - and it wasn't until after Bava's death that an original print of Lisa
and the Devil resurfaced, which is by today generally favoured
over The House of Exorcism (even though the latter film is often
included as a special feature on DVD-releases of Lisa
and the Devil as a sort of injoke).
But if Bava's
experiences with Lisa
and the Devil were bad, his experiences with Cani
Arrabbiati/Rabid
Dogs/Kidnapped
from 1974 were even worse. Rabid
Dogs was another attempt to break away from the horror genre, this
time with a hard-hitting kidnapping drama that was much grittier than
Bava's usual output and had a rough edge to it. And it could have been a
whole new direction for Bava's career - but that was something that was
just not going to be, as the film's production company went bankrupt only
days before shooting was wrapped up, and all the shot material was
impounded. For decades to come, Rabid
Dogs spent its time on some shelves wherever, until in 1997, it
was rediscovered, finished and released, reportedly at the express request
and with the participation of lead actress Lea Lander, with a few linking
scenes directed by Bava's son Lamberto. The resulting film
probably disappointed quite a few Mario Bava films expecting something
alont the lines of Lisa
and the Devil and being way too geared up by heightened
expectations, but in all, Rabid
Dogs is a competent and tense thriller that even today still packs
a punch.
Mario Bava returned to the horror genre one more time, with Schock/Shock/Beyond
the Door II (1977), which would eventually be his last theatrical
feature. But reportedly, during most of the film's shoot, Bava was too
sick to actually be on set directing, so for the most part, his son
Lamberto Bava, also his assistant director for more than a decade, took
over direction from Bava's detailed storyboards - and unfortunately it
shows in the resulting film as such that Mario Bava's soul was not in the
movie: Gone is the visual richness, replaced by a flat TV-thriller style,
the horror setpieces sometimes border the ridiculous (especially when lead
actress Daria Nicolodi is menaced by a cupboard [!]), and the whole film
has a strangely impersonal feel to it. In a word, Shock,
a silly little tale about a haunted house and a boy possessed by his ghost
dad, is definitely not the film Bava should have ended his career with
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After
Shock it seems that
Mario Bava gradually faded away, he made one more film, this time for
television, in 1979 together with his son Lamberto, the Prosper
Mérimée-adaptation La Venere di Ille/The
Venus of Ille starring Daria Nicolodi and Marc Porel, and while this
today little-seen film is surely a step up from Shock,
it's hardly a classic. Bava's last contribution to (horror-)cinema was
doing some matte paintings for the now legendary if overrated Inferno
(1980) by Dario Argento, who is widely considered as Bava's successor and
who interestingly enough took Bava's son Lamberto under his wing after
Bava quit directing, employing him as
his assistant director and eventually producing some of his movies. However,
Bava died in 1980, only months after Inferno's
premiere, from a heart attack. He was only 65 years old.
Legacy
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Just
like Mario Bava's father Eugenio introduced him to the film industry it
was Mario Bava who gave his son Lamberto a start in the industry. After
spending more than a decade as his father's assistant, Lamberto, who was
born in 1944, eventually started his directing career with his father's
last (TV-)movie The Venus of Ille in 1979, only to make his first
film on his own, Macabro/Macabre
in 1980, which was released a mere 10 days before his father's death. And
just like his father, Lamberto Bava would concentrate on the horror genre
for most of his career. But while his early efforts as a director are
interesting to say the least, Lamberto's output quickly deteriorated,
hitting lows with such films as A
Cena col Vampiro/Dinner
with a Vampire (1988) and La Maschera del Demonio/Black
Sunday (1989), a pointless remake of his father's timeless classic,
not to even mention the Fantaghiro TV-series of the 1990's. But
while over the years, Lamberto Bava's significance for the horror genre
has become only marginal as best, his father's star has grown and grown,
especially after his death, when he was rediscovered by genre fans who
seized the opportunity to get his films on video and later DVD, and today,
most of his films are readily available worldwide, and even by serious
film scholars he has been acknowledged as one of the most important horror
directors ever ... and rightly so, if you ask me.
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