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The Telephone:
One night, Rosy (Michèle Mercier) receives threatening phonecalls from
a stranger, a stranger that eventually seems to turn out to be
Frank Rainer (Milo Quesada), her ex-boyfriend she once turned in. In her
desperation, Rosy calls her ex-lover Mary (Lidia Alfonsi) for help, not
knowing that she really is behind the phonecalls. Mary comes over, calms
Rosy down, even sees to it that she goes to sleep, then writes a letter
confessing to the calls, claiming it to be an attempt to get back together
with Rosy ... when the real Frank Rainer appears on the scene, strangles
Mary, whom he mistakens for Rosy, then goes after the real Rosy, who stabs
him with a knife though Mary has hidden under her pillow for self-defense.
The Wurdalak:
A vampires or rather a wurdalak roams the Eastern European countryside,
a creature that especially relishes in drinking the blood of those he
loves. In front of this background, Vladimir d'Urfe (Mark Damon) asks for
and is granted abode at a peasents' home, and soon enough, he falls in
love with Sdenka (Susy Andersen), the daughter of the house. However, the
whole family is waiting for the return of Gorca (Boris Karloff), the
patriarch who has gone out to hunt down and kill the wurdalak ... and
really, before long, Gorca returns with the wurdalak's head ... thing is,
now he has turned into a wurdalak and has become a menace to the whole
family - and ultimately he gets his way too. Only Vladimir and Sdenka
manage to escape, but during a night they spend at some shack, Sdenka
disappears and Vladimir tracks her back to her family's home. Meeting
again, the two embrace, but by now Sdenka has been turned into a wurdalak
as well.
The Drop of Water:
One night, nurse Helen (Jacqueline Pierreux) is called over to make the
dead body of a woman decent, but when the deceased drops a ring, she picks
it up and keeps it for herself. Later, back home again, Helen starts
hearing dripping water everywhere, just like in the dead woman's home,
then she hears cats meowing, also just like in the dead woman's home, and
finally, the dead woman seems to appear almost everywhere and ultimately
strangles Helen. When Helen's neighbour (Harriet Medin) presents dead
Helen to the police, the ring is gone from Helen's finger, and the
neighbour starts having a bad conscience ...
For this horror anthology, Mario Bava has taken on three big names of
world literature - though his adaptations are rather free to say the
least. Apart from that, Bava's choice of exactly the stories contained in
the film is rather questionable, as they seem to have little in common and
make this film an unexpectedly heterogenous experience ... but all of this
is not to say that Black Sabbath is a bad film, quite the contrary,
it's simply great: While The Telephone is a textbook example of
suspense and tension (apart from the rather disappointing ending), The
Wurdalak is gothic horror at its best and most economic, and The
Drop of Water is a horror short story with your typical macabre
surprise ending. And as a matter of fact, Mario Bava, then still towards
the beginning of his directorial career scores with all three stories
andreadily demonstrates his mastery as horror director.
Highly recommended.
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