Exploito All’Italiana: Five Dolls For An August Moon (Mario Bava, 1970)

Quite possibly the least celebrated of Mario Bava’s many contributions to the horror / giallo field, ‘5 Bambole per la Luna d'Agosto’, realised in Italy in March 1970, is unlikely to find a place on many Bava fans’ top ten lists… or even many Edwige Fenech fans’ top ten lists, for that matter. If you’re a dedicated viewers of European genre movies, perhaps it won’t even make your top ten William Berger films. Hell, even top ten films for which Piero Umiliani did the music might be pushing it. But, nonetheless, I still retain a huge soft spot for this underachieving body count picture. Taken purely as a compressed dose of pure 1969/70 Italian Riviera decadence in fact, I actually find it pretty unbeatable. (1)

It is well-known by this point that Bava directed this film under protest, after the producers refused him the extra time he had requested to rework Mario di Nardo’s script into something he considered workable. And, watching with almost fifty years hindsight, I think we can probably share Mario’s pain, for it is di Nardo’s shoddy and derivative plotting – and the production’s dogged determination to stick to it – that is ultimately responsible for ‘Five Dolls..’ failure to attain the same level of quality as the classics Bava usually seemed capable of banging out like clockwork whenever he was allowed near the horror or giallo genres.

Vague and incoherent (though not in a particularly fun way), this Agatha Christie-derived island-bound whodunit scenario revolves – thrillingly - around the formula for a new kind of industrial resin. This is held solely within the bonce of Berger’s grumpily moralistic Herr Dr Scientist (who is immediately differentiated from the conniving playboys around him through his decision to wear an uncomfortable-looking woolly jumper to his sunny island retreat).

Needless to say, the aforementioned conniving playboys and their equally conniving wives are all on the case to obtain said formula, and soon million dollar cheques are being idly tossed around as inconvenient corpses concurrently start to pile up, the latter generating a sense of mild annoyance in the surviving characters roughly equivalent to which might be expected if they discovered that, say, the meat for their dinner had gone bad or something.

Such is the overwhelming disinterest generated by this scenario that, when the characters start indulging in sordid extra-marital liaisons and accompanying back-stabbing, the sense of transgression is somewhat muted by the fact that we can’t quite remember who most of them were supposed to married to in the first place.

Unfortunately, my own (non-conniving) wife tends to be a stickler for all this bloody “plot” rubbish, so, after the film’s spectacularly nonsensical attempt at a twist ending rolled around, we were obliged to spend a good ten minutes vainly trying to establish what was going on – including replays of certain key scenes – before she’d let it be. In the end she reckoned she’d solved the mystery to her satisfaction, but I remain happily and uncaringly mystified.

Never fear though, because, more so than ever in Italian genre cinema, IT DOES NOT MATTER what is actually going on here. Effectively leaving the script for dead at the side of the road, Bava instead wisely concentrates his efforts upon distracting us from its all-too-evident shortcomings, doing his utmost to make each shot more striking, more gloriously opulent and packed with more weird, incidental detail, than the last. And when Mario Bava sets his utmost in that direction, you know you’re in for a good time, regardless of overbearing producers, lazy-ass writers or budgetary constraints.

As is often the case with Bava, the environment in with ‘5 Dolls..’ takes place is almost entirely illusory, with the beautifully executed matte shot that creates the impression of a ultra-kitsch space age beach house perched precariously upon an overhanging cliff-top forming a kind of late ‘60s take on the twilit gothic vista the director created for Whip and the Body – a film that is also recalled by the assorted trysts amongst the rock pools that pad out the concluding act of ‘5 Dolls..’, suggesting perhaps the early stirrings of a self-reflexive tendency in Bava’s work that would reach full bloom in ‘Baron Blood’ a few years later.

Within this fictitious beach house meanwhile, the fantasia constructed by the hard-working set builders in Rome’s Dear Studios is really a sight to behold, mixing wide, circular rooms with asymmetrical vertical lines provided by weird-looking door frames and staircases. Strewn with extravagant soft furnishings, unlikely glassware and garish abstract art adorning the walls, this joint is one of the best ‘space age bachelor pad’ fantasies that Italian genre cinema has to offer (chronic lack of bachelors notwithstanding), even as its unfeasible curves and angles are gradually transformed into a human scale ‘Mouse Trap’ game for the surviving, increasingly paranoid characters, to bounce around in.

(This metaphor that perhaps enters my mind as a result of one of the movie’s more memorable and overtly surreal sequences, wherein the shock of a character’s murder is closely followed by the spectacle of a load of entirely inexplicable silver balls cascading down a spiral staircase.)

Despite working here with what was presumably a fraction of the budget assigned to his earlier ‘Danger! Diabolik’ (1968), Bava nonetheless still manages to bring a sliver of that film’s incomparable aesthetic cool to proceedings, creating a vibrant, endlessly enticing moving postcard from a supremely artificial utopia of myopic self-indulgence; a realm of gleaming chrome, gaudily patterned upholstery, hallucinatory interior décor decisions, crashing waves, hazy J&B-induced stupor and artfully deflected sunlight so spectacularly sensual that not even a series of brutal slayings can harsh yr buzz. (Hey, the characters initially don’t seem to mind them too much, so why should we care?)

Meanwhile, Piero Umiliani’s score – perhaps one of the first to wed harpiscord-heavy orchestration to a driving rock rhythm section in a manner that would soon become de-rigour in the giallo boom of the early ‘70s – ensures that ‘5 Dolls..’ is a splendid film to listen to as well as to look at, whilst the mighty, fuzz-rock blowout – ‘Ti Risveglierai Accanto a Me’ performed by Italian psyche/prog stalwarts Il Balletto di Bronzo – that plays over the movie’s closing credits is an absolute banger, it’s in-the-red roar only enhanced by the dusty distortion of the film’s scrubbed up mono soundtrack reels.

Though the murder sequences in ‘5 Dolls..’ are somewhat on the mild side for a Bava giallo (such is the scope of the director’s achievements, it’s easy to forget that he pushed on-screen violence to new extremes across two decades via ‘Black & Black Lace’ (1964) and ‘A Bay of Blood’ (1971)), they are all nonetheless magnificently staged, making full use of hazy, sun-dappled day time photography and an almost comical excess of looming, foreground foliage.

(Critics might be inclined to point out that, for all the accolades Bava has received for his technical prowess, he gets pretty damn goofy with the zoom lens in this one, but, I’ve got fifty plus Jess Franco films under my belt at this point, so watch me care.)

Repeated shots of plastic-sheeted corpses swinging upon hooks in the house’s meat locker meanwhile add a welcome touch of icy, macabre atmosphere to what is otherwise a weirdly sunny and relaxed take on horror film-making, and the unexpectedly gory demise of the fabulous Ms Fenech provides a genuine jolt that feels like a warm-up for the shock tactics of the aforementioned ‘Bay of Blood’.

Speaking of Fenech, I hope I won’t drift too far into dirty-old-man territory in pointing out that, as per usual, her frame provides a pretty substantial boost to the movie’s production values in and of itself, and, quite frankly, I don’t know if she ever looked better on screen than she does here (and yes, I realise that’s quite a claim). Elsewhere in the casting department meanwhile, ‘5 Dolls..’ pursues the usual giallo pattern of pairing up a selection of quote-unquote ‘foxy babes’ with a crew of craggy-faced, shady-looking and (for the most part) somewhat older gentlemen. I suppose at a push you could make a case that this reflects the fact that these characters are supposed to be a bunch of high-powered industrialists and their trophy wives… but to do so would be to imply that these people bear some kind of loose similarity to believable, real world human beings, and frankly nobody wants that.

Instead, let’s just accept that this was the dawn of the ‘70s, and that’s the way things were done. Then we can all settle back and enjoy the scenery – which was certainly the point of the exercise as far as Bava was concerned.

Of course, it could be argued that ‘5 Dolls..’ was not an *entirely* cynical exercise on Bava’s part. In his commentary track for the film, Tim Lucas is keen to place ‘5 Dolls..’ within his own auteurist take on the director’s work, specifically with regard to the his palpable distaste for the greed, excess and inhumanity of the film’s privileged characters. Compelling as Lucas’s case may be however, such theorising must inevitably remain a secondary concern in film that sees characterisation and plot machinations so comprehensively pushed to the sidelines in favour of a gloriously garish, over the top celebration of this period’s unique visual style.

Resorting to an iffy music metaphor to try to summarise my feelings for ‘5 Dolls For An August Moon’, I suppose you could say that, whilst this one is definitely never going to be the eternal, always-in-print, take-it-to-the-grave classic album in anyone’s collection, it still feels very much like the filmic equivalent of the cheesy charity shop lounge-jazz LP you bought because you liked the cover and just keep playing all the time because, hey, it makes you feel kind of happy.

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(1) In case anyone is interested, I’m currently going with: 1. Kill Baby Kill, 2. Danger! Diabolik, 3. Lisa & The Devil, 4. Black Sabbath, 5. Black Sunday, 6. Blood & Black Lace, 7. Baron Blood, 8. Whip & The Body, 9. Planet of the Vampires, 10. Rabid Dogs. I don’t have a Fenech list. Bring it on in the comments, fellow list-makers.

#10 Black Sunday / La Maschera Del Demonio (Mario Bava, 1960)

Ok, I’ll level with you: right up until I sat down to write this, I’d been torn as to which Mario Bava film to include on this list, “Kill Baby Kill/Operazione Paura” (1966) or “Black Sunday”. The former is probably my favourite Bava horror, its haunting imagery, stunning Technicolor production design and delirious psychedelic plotting all second to none. “Black Sunday” by comparison is somewhat stagey and linear in its non-setpiece scenes, its black & white photography admittedly brilliant, but perhaps not truly representative of a director best known for his use of colour. But on the other hand – “Black Sunday” has the immortal iconic value of it jaw-dropping opening scene, its status as the all-time definitive example of ‘60s gothic horror, and, most importantly, it has Barbara Steele.

I thought long and hard, I considered reviewing both of them side by side, but… “Black Sunday” wins, I think. “Kill Baby Kill” might be a masterpiece, but it’s a pretty obscurist masterpiece. A jewel in the crown for aficionados of loopy Euro-horror cinema maybe, but probably too disjointed and strange, too specialist in its appeal, for many. “Black Sunday”, on the other hand, is a film for everyone! Watch it with the family, and bar the door if they try to leave! Who in the world could watch that opening sequence for the first time and not be completely floored?

Words failing me, I am forced to quote from “The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to The Devil in Cinema” by Nikolas Shreck (not that one), which I conveniently happened to find knocking about in a pile of old books this week;

“‘One day in each century it is said that Satan walks among us. To the God-fearing this day is known as Black Sunday,’ a portentous voice has told us. Surely this is that day, and the face that glares at us from the screen, transfixed in a seeming ecstasy of evil, is Satan incarnate in bewitching mortal form. The glaring depths of her eyes radiate pure hatred, but strangely, this in no way obscures their beauty. A predatory joy in her savage expression imbues the pale visage with an inhuman quality. Her lips are thin, yet sensuous. Wild black hair frames the pale cheekbones. A study in chiaroscuro, her luminous portrait is delineated in shadows worthy of the brush of an unknown master. The exquisite face is cruelly marred by a pattern of wounds, impressed upon her flesh by the spiked mask she has worn for centuries.”

Quite so! Thanks for that, Mr, uh, Shreck.

The unforgettable moment of stylised violence that closes the film’s prologue makes clear that “Black Sunday” is going to be extremely strong medicine for its era, and it is slightly unfair I feel to claim, as many reviewers have done, that “Black Sunday”s script subsequently follows a hackneyed, predictable path, the film drawing its power entirely from Bava’s virtuoso direction and stunning production design. That may seem an accurate enough assessment from a modern POV, but it is easy to forget that to a great extent “Black Sunday” defined the gothic horror conventions that we now see as hackneyed. It is often assumed these kind of films have been around forever, such is their anachronistic hoariness, but it seems to me that throughout most of the ‘40s and ‘50s, there was little resembling gothic horror to be found on-screen. The Hammer films of the late ‘50s, whose success presumably inspired the Italian film industry to start bankrolling horror flicks, can to some extent take credit for pioneering the kind of self-conscious archaicism and theatrical mannerisms seen here, but “Black Sunday” is still probably the earliest film I’ve seen in which the conventions of full-blown ‘60s gothic (the “come, you must be tired from your long journey” syndrome, you might call it) come into full bloom. Not that that’s necessarily a recommendation I hasten to add, but for those such as myself who feel irresistibly drawn to this weird sub-genre, it’s an interesting point to note.

Something else I’ve noticed about “Black Sunday” – something it shares with just about all of the later, less vital Italian gothics that appeared following this film’s success – is it’s reliable on an unremittingly dreamlike, incorporeal atmosphere that almost completely undermines the importance of a linear narrative. Just as in the films of directors like Ricardo Freda or Antonio Margerheti, or indeed Bava’s later gothic reveries in “Kill Baby Kill”, “Whip & The Body” or “Lisa & The Devil”, it is almost impossible to recall the precise details of what went on in “Black Sunday” a few hours after viewing. After a certain point, who did what to whom when and what it meant simply ceases to matter: what you remember of the film is rather the incredible images, burned upon your waking mind with a strength that seems to plunge them straight through to your sub-conscious. And also, you remember the overall feeling of the film, as if it were some dream that seemed incredibly important, but that you just can’t quite recall the details of, until they return the next night, ready to bite.

In the avalanche of cheaper, less celebrated horror films and giallos that went on to characterise the next two decades of Italian cinema, this incorporeal spirit is often mistaken for bad filmmaking, as movies are written off as lazy, slow-moving, incoherent. But Bava, in his indisputably masterful realisation of this film, proved once and for all that there is a lot more to the Italian approach to horror than simply random, woozy-headed weirdness. It is incredible in fact that a thriving commercial industry could be built up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, centring around the obsessive presentation of this kind of disturbing, almost subliminal, oneiric imagery. Chuckle all you like at those Italians with their barmy, gas-huffing scripts, but they know a thing or two about what makes us tick - the dark magic of “Black Sunday” runs in their veins.

Whip And The Body (Mario Bava, 1963)

Over the past year or so I have been making a concerned effort to watch as many Mario Bava movies as is humanly possible… not that you’d know it from the content of this weblog thus far.

It’s the old problem I guess – I can harp on for pages about some film that’s weird or confounding or terrible, but many of my favourite films – particularly my favourite horror films – cast a spell on the viewer that requires no further explanation: they are what they are. And Bava’s work, even his non-horror films, are a case in point. Great though they are, it is often hard to find anything of substance to say about a given Bava film, beyond “this is great, you should watch it!”

Bava experts (and I’d really like to think that there are recognised Bava experts out there somewhere, who all get together on academic panels to say “this is great, you should watch it” to audiences of eager students) may beg to differ, but I find Bava cheerfully defies the doctrines of the original auteur theorists at every tun, by virtue of making films which are instantly recognisable as his work whilst simultaneously being invested with very little material that relates to the intellectual or emotional concerns of their maker.

I’m sure some writers could be inclined to drag some weighty psychological exegesis out of his work (the sadism, the sensuality etc), but personally I don’t think that’s gonna float. Thematically, there is little in his films which stands out as particularly unusual in the world of ‘60s/’70s European b-movies, even if he was able to express things more powerfully and memorably than most of his contemporaries. And yet…. you can spot a Bava film a mile off – his framing, production design, camera movement – all are utterly unique.

Bava really stands as the preeminent example of the ‘craftsman-director’, casually rolling with whatever genres and story set-ups the weird whims of the producers and studios deemed relevant or saleable at a given moment, humbly positioning himself as just another jobbing director amongst many helping to keep Europe’s screens supplied with regular doses of girls, blood and monsters through the all-important mid-century cinema boom. What really sets him apart though is a) a sense of aesthetic vision and technical talent that puts just about all of his more lauded American counterparts in the shade, and b) a dedication to making sure that whatever today’s movie happened to be, he would do his utmost to make it *really fucking good*, never patronising his audience or succumbing to laziness or cynicism, and always delivering a beautiful, professional, kick-ass movie that really gives us our money’s worth, whether on a grindhouse triple bill in 1965 or on a DVD reissue in 2010.

I guess it must have been recognised even at the time that Bava’s way of doing things gave him a particular affinity with the gothic horror genre, and as such he managed to make a whole bunch (a BUNCH, no less) of films within that milieu, all of them freakin’ amazing to a greater or lesser extent, in the period between his unforgettable directorial debut ‘Black Sunday’ aka ‘Mask of the Devil’ in 1960 and ‘Baron Blood’ at the tail-end of the gothic horror’s viability as a commercial proposition in 1973. But beyond that, whatever brand of ‘60s/’70s popular cinema you’re into, chances are Mario took a bash at it at some point and delivered the goods.

Fancy a wacky space adventure? His astounding 1965 sci-fi/horror hybrid ‘Planet of The Vampires’ goes one better, pretty much providing the blueprint for a whole swathe of American SF cinema, from ‘Alien’ through to ‘Event Horizon’. Does a kick-ass Viking-based sword n’ sandal movie float your boat? They don’t come much better than ‘Knives of The Avenger’ (1963). Or hey, how about the single greatest pop art adventure film / comic book adaptation ever made? I know I won’t have to justify that hyperbole to anyone who’s seen 1967’s endlessly incredible ‘Danger: Diabolik’. Hell, even Bava’s sex comedy, 1972’s ‘Four Times That Night’, is pretty good, making me wish more than ever that I was Italian, born into a country capable of producing something so stylish, witty and genuinely sexy whilst the rest of Europe was busy churning out eight million variations on ‘The Naughty Cheerleader’ and ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’.

Back to the gothic horror though, and today we’re looking at yet another bone fide Bava masterpiece, but one that for a variety of reasons is more rarely screened or referenced than his early classics of the genre or even his early ‘70s weirdo/kitsch blow-outs – 1963’s provocatively titled ‘Whip And The Body’.

It was I suppose sadly inevitable that Bava’s ‘60s classics were often treated pretty shoddily when they found themselves distributed overseas (particularly by AIP in America), falling into a chasm between two eras of horror film-making and not fully emerging until their resurrection as acknowledged classics in the DVD era. Today, Bava’s gothics play out like beautiful reminders of a more elegant era of horror, in which oneiric atmospherics and creeping, devilish unease took precedence over graphic violence and fast-paced thrills. But in the more censorious climate of the early ‘60s, these films’ occasional flashes of lingering sadism and sexuality were deemed beyond the pale by many critics and guardians of decency, a situation probably not helped by AIP’s typically lurid marketing campaigns and English retitling.

All this of course would change only a few years later, when the floodgates of cinematic perversity burst forth into the sleazoid madness of the early ‘70s, but for many of Bava’s best works the tide turned too late, leaving them chopped up, denigrated, critically reviled and all but forgotten in the English-speaking world. As Michael Weldon notes in the entry for ‘Whip And The Body’ in his Psychotronic Encyclopedia, Bava’s films were “treated like cancer” when they appeared in American inner-city theatres, whilst less than ten years later similar but inferior films were regularly being presented as major Hollywood releases.

(Not that the man himself could give a damn by that stage, happy as he was to roll with the new freedoms, upping the ante once more with blood-curdlingly gruesome shockers like ‘Twitch of the Death Nerve’ and ‘Hatchet For The Honeymoon’, still somehow managing to exude pure class even as he pushed the envelope for gratuitous boobs and gore, prefiguring the ‘80s slasher craze by a further decade.)

Anyway, whether by accident or design, ‘Whip And The Body’ seems to have suffered especially badly from the ill-judged hypocrisy of ‘60s distribution. The film’s suggestions of S&M would have seemed tame stuff even by 1972 standards, but in 1963 the very idea that the beautiful Daliah Lavi is maybe reacting with pleasure as her husband’s caddish brother sets about her with a horsewhip was enough to reduce the film to the most lowly obscurity, to the extent that VCI’s Region 0 DVD (yay for Region 0 DVDs, by the way) represents perhaps the first opportunity most Bava fans have had to see the film in its entirety with an acceptable print.

Of course, ‘Whip And The Body’s commercial prospects probably weren’t helped by the fact that it’s also one of Bava’s most austere and old fashioned horror films, featuring very little in the way of violent action or recognizable ‘horror’ thrills, and blessed with an early example of one of those gloriously bong-addled Italian scripts that kinda-sorta-mostly makes sense, but basically drifts around in a stupor for eighty minutes wondering how the hell it ended up being a movie script, as opposed to a dream a minor aristocrat had in 1875 after indulging in too much port and cheese.

The narrative, concerning the return of Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee) to the family home which he left under a cloud of scandal several years previously, his rekindling of his adulterous relationship with his brother’s wife Nevenka (Lavi) and his subsequent murder, is unapologetically slight – a Poe gothic by numbers, mixing in only a thin veneer of the supernatural and wrapping everything up neatly in the final reel with the same plot twist that would later resurface in seemingly about 80% of ‘70s Giallos. But all this matters not. Frankly ‘Whip And The Body’ could be the heart-warming tale of a rural baker searching for the perfect recipe for scones and it would still be a breathtaking work of haunting cinematic artistry. We’re talking Mario Bava here – that’s just what he does.

It is often said that Bava – whose pre-film background was in painting/sculpture - approached his films with a painter’s eye for texture and composition, and nowhere is this more evident than in ‘Whip and the Body’. Often, Bava took on a triple threat role in his films, working as director, production designer and cinematographer, and looking back over the credits for ‘Whip..’, I was surprised to see that this wasn’t actually the case here: Ottavio Scotti is the designer, and Ubaldo Terzano takes credit as DP. Regardless, the film still manages to attain an aesthetic purity and unity of vision that is rarely achieved in the world of low budget commercial cinema, utilising a highly specific visual palette which, together with the flimsy narrative, help to turn it into what is in effect a vast, moving painting.

If ‘Diabolik’ could be said to be Bava’s great pop-art masterpiece, and ‘Black Sunday’ – at a stretch – his tribute to expressionism, then ‘Whip..’ is more than anything his Pre-Raphaelite showstopper. Full of rich, old world detail and drenched in dense, autumnal colour, it is a film that, appropriate to the gothic tradition, seems to shrug off any suggestion of modernity, drifting instead through a slowly unraveling tableaux of carefully wrought, beautiful things, displayed for us because they are beautiful, and because we, the movie-going connoisseurs of such things, deserve the opportunity to drink them in at our leisure. Acting almost more as a nostalgic memory of unquestioned, aristocratic grace than as a horror movie, ‘Whip And The Body’ often seems like the kind of confection the Prince from Guiseppe Di Lampedusa’s ‘The Leopard’ might have enjoyed, were he to unexpectedly sidle into a 42nd street fleapit one balmy mid-sixties afternoon.

The soft light of the sunset across the bay overlooked by the film’s castle (is it a real location or a miniature? – I’ve honestly got no idea, which tells you something about the quality of the film’s artistry), the loving pans across the details of daggers, candlesticks and chandeliers, the horses galloping across the sand, the gaunt shadows across the faces of the male protagonists, the whole thing flaring up into a Rossetti fever dream whenever Nevenka enters the frame…. what more can I tell you? It’s just bloody marvelous.

In terms of cinematography, Bava is of course best known for his almost psychedelic use of bright and unnatural colour, but here things are tad more subtle than usual, sticking primarily to a palette of blacks, browns and golds, with jarring bolts of lightning flashing the sets bright blue, and violent splashes of red and green only intruding into the frame occasionally, serving as signifiers of more extreme emotional states (green is to LOVE, red is to KILL, if I’m not mistaken, with the two colours groovily entwined on the roses which surround the dagger used to perpetrate the maidservant’s suicide and Kurt’s murder – a motif Bava would return to in ‘Hatchet For The Honeymoon’).

Bava may have later taken pleasure in smashing down the walls of gothic horror convention in the delirious ‘Kill Baby Kill!’ (my all-time favourite Bava) and the bizarro ‘Lisa & The Devil’, but in ‘Whip & The Body’ he seems perfectly happy to embrace the most creaky clichés of the genre, perhaps unconsciously fitting them into his overall aesthetic picture of (literally) fading light and crumbling aristocratic ideals. The film’s fluid and unsettling camera movement and slow, eerie build-ups may speak of Hitchcockian tension, but to anyone who’s watched and enjoyed even a handful of these kinda movies (and let it be said that I could watch ‘em till the cows come home, and frequently do), easy comfort and recognition is assured throughout.

Acting is mannered and theatrical at all times. There’s an aged father, a nervous young bride and a limping, craggy-faced servant. There’s a secret passage behind the fireplace in the master bedroom, leading to unknown subterranean chambers. Waves crash hypnotically against the shore, candles flicker, lightning strikes, and if anybody wants a drink, they’ll have it from a fucking chalice. And hark, is that a ghostly piano, playing itself? Naturally we don’t have to wait around long before someone ends an awkward conversation by saying “come, you must be tired after your long journey”.

It’s all good, in other words. Lavi gives an amazing performance as the film’s central female dynamo, her character acting very much like a lascivious sixties starlet, trying her hardest to assume the corset of a demure gothic heroine as funny, repressed feelings tear her up inside, but her male counterparts (including drippy good guy Tony Kendall and an elderly father who looks about the same age as his children only scruffier) are uniformly stiff as boards, talking around the dinner table as if they’re delivering a report to their sergeant major. Which again is fine by me – stern, emotionless acting suits the genre trappings perfectly, the contrast helping to heighten the implicit fear of ‘feminine’ expressivity and emotion that lurks behind many a gothic yarn.

Even ol’ Christopher Lee tones down his ham-munching considerably here, delivering one of the most low-key performances of his career. Often it seems like he wants nothing more than to fade into the background, in stark contrast to his usual grandstanding, despite portraying a character who could easily have been turned into a bellowing, power-mad villain. Whether Lee was cowed by the films overbearing production design, whether he was uncertain (or pissed off) about appearing in an Italian production, or whether Bava simply kept him in check, who knows, but whatever the case, this is about the only Christopher Lee movie you’ll ever see where you don’t even feel compelled to exclaim “hey, it’s Christopher Lee” when he makes his grand entrance.

And I couldn’t finish this review without mentioning the role played by Carlo Rustichelli's excellent and unusual score in enhancing ‘Whip..’s uniquely languid atmosphere. Drifting, sustain-heavy string textures perfectly match the lethargic pace of the on-screen action whilst the central piano motif that cycles through the film manages to pull off the same rare trick as Angelo Badlamenti’s theme for Twin Peaks – somehow soothing and unnerving at the same time, its constant repetition taking on an almost ritualistic quality as the drama it accompanies becomes gradually darker. By the time Nevenka slowly picks it out on the heavily echoed piano in the castle’s great hall as the camera menacing shifts around her and into the air (very Lynchian blurring of the boundaries between music within and without of the film world, wot?), the initially slightly syrupy theme has assumed a breathtaking power. Much like the Twin Peaks theme, I didn’t much care for it at first, but by the time the end credits rolled I was dying to track down a copy of the soundtrack.

And… that’s about all I have to say on the matter, really. Those yearning for violent, event-filled horror certainly won’t get much out of ‘Whip And The Body’ except perhaps a pleasant nap, and the same goes for anyone who likes their cinema to come with a strong central narrative and challenging, thought-provoking themes. But to any lover of dreamy, romantic horror movies and anyone able to appreciate the aesthetic conventions of gothic horror in and of themselves, the film is an absolute banquet, brought to you by one of cinema’s all-time greatest visual artists, cookin’ it up like a bastard. Just dim the lights, crack open a nice bottle of red (or three) and let Mario take the reins; no further explanation required. ‘Whip And The Body’ is good, and you should watch it.