Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

A Bay of Blood Blu-ray Movie Review

Out of this bloody bay, the slasher genre was born.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater September 5, 2013

Cinematographer-turned-director Mario Bava is one of the horror genre's great transitional figures, and a particular influence on the development of the slasher. His first feature, 1960's Black Sunday, is a musty gothic chiller in the old-school Hammer Horror mold—foggy graveyards, crumbling castles, supernatural spooks—but by '63 and '64, with The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, he near- singlehandedly set the template for a modern form of distinctly Italian horror: giallo. Characterized by lurid colors, psycho-sexual stories, and black-gloved killers wielding phallic weapons, giallo was horror gone Freudian, and Bava was its key practitioner, inspiring a whole cadre of younger filmmakers like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Umberto Lenzi. In turn, their collective work inspired American filmmakers of the late '70s and early '80s—John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Black Christmas' Bob Clark—who further sexualized the form and doubled down on the limb-hacking, blood-spurting violence. Bava, then, is the progenitor of much of what horror hounds love about Friday the 13th and Halloween; some of his later films practically read like how-to instruction manuals for the future slasher sub-genre. This week, Kino-Lorber is releasing two of those films, 1970's Five Dolls for an August Moon and 1971's A Bay of Blood, both of which belong in any well-curated horror movie collection.

Better known as Twitch of the Death Nerve—a far more potent giallo title—A Bay of Blood is considered by many to be the first true slasher, built around a "body count" concept, staging one gross-out murder set-piece after another. It's easily Bava's most explicitly violent film, with thirteen gruesome kills engineered with the help of effects guru Carlo Rambaldi, who would later go on to win Oscars for his work on Alien and E.T. the Extra-terrestrial.

The creepy opening sequence is pure gialli: After peering lonesomely out the window upon the expansive bayside property she owns, the old Countess Federica (Isa Miranda) is suddenly pushed out of her wheelchair—which goes skittering backwards, terrifyingly—and hanged from a rope under a doorway, leaving her gasping, eyes bulging and tongue lolling out, her crippled legs unable to support her weight. The black-gloved murderer is quickly revealed to be her husband, Donati (Giovanni Nuvoletti), but no sooner does he plant a fake suicide note than a separate killer shows up to stab him to death, dumping the body in the water. A whodunit plot then gradually emerges, with a number of potential suspects. Crooked real estate agent Frank Ventura (Chris Avram) and his girlfriend Laura (Anna Maria Rosati) are conspiring to steal legal ownership of the waterfront property from Federica's rightful heir, Renata (Claudine Auger), who arrives with her husband Albert (Luigi Pistilli) to investigate her mother's death and step- father's disappearance. Meanwhile, Federica's embittered bastard son Simon (Claudio Volonté)—a fisherman who lives in a nearby shack—has his own claim to the land. And then there's the oddball couple who rent a house on the bay, insect-pinning entomologist Paolo Fassati (Leopoldo Trieste) and his deranged, tarot card-reading wife Anna (Laura Betti), who predicts that "the sickle of death is about to strike."

And strike it does. Suffice it to say that most all of these characters meet a grisly end—this is definitely an "and then there were none" scenario—as motivations and secrets are gradually revealed. This is standard gialli fare, a dead-simple but obfuscated story that's pushed forward by the inherent mystery and its visceral thrills. What launches A Bay of Blood into slasher territory, though, is an apparently unrelated side-plot that sets in place a number of the soon-to-be sub-genre's most cherished conventions. Does this sound familiar? Four horny young adults on a double date (Robert Bonnani, Brigitte Skay, Guido Boccaccini, and Paola Rubens) drive into a remote rural setting—in this case, the titular bay—and break into Ventura's empty vacation cottage to party and get laid. They're then hunted down by an unseen killer who hacks one in the face with a machete, slits the throat of another as she shuffles away screaming, and then sneaks up on the remaining pair mid-coitus and runs the beast with two backs through with a spear, the tip jabbing out the bottom of the mattress. Perceptive genre fans will notice that two of these kills were aped outright in Friday the 13th Part II, a clear homage from director Steve Miner.

If A Bay of Blood sounds overly grim here, it's not. There's a lot of black-as-dried-blood comedy in the script—which is attributed to Bava and three other writers—and the brisk pacing keeps the tone buoyant despite the heaviness of the film's underlying philosophy, which is that no one is good and everyone gets precisely what he or she deserves. We really don't have anyone to root for in A Bay of Blood. The men are weak-willed, lascivious, or murderous. The women are power-hungry, oblivious, or shallow. The entomologist is the closest we get to a likable figure—he reminds us that "If you kill for killing's sake, you become a monster"—but he's hardly a hero. We're not meant to empathize with these characters, or even necessarily fear for their lives; we're meant to take a sick pleasure in their bloody comeuppances, to be thrilled by the spectacle of death. This earned the film a negative critical reaction when it was first released in the U.S., but it came to signify a shift in the horror genre, which would soon become occupied with a game of oneupmanship in delivering the most over-the-top, blood-soaked kill sequences imaginable.

A Bay of Blood Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

In terms of picture quality, this latest batch of Mario Bava titles is the greatest yet. Both Five Dolls for an August Moon and A Bay of Blood look spectacular in high definition, with the latter taking perhaps a slight edge in clarity and overall cleanliness. Bay of Blood's print has a few minor age-related issues—occasional white specks, two or three scenes with short-lived vertical scratches—but nothing even remotely bothersome. (And compared many of Kino and Redemption's recent Jean Rollin and Jess Franco releases, this film is practically spotless.) The 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer has clearly been treated with care. There are no compression problems, no excessive noise reduction or edge enhancement, no wonky, over-pushed colors; the picture has a natural, filmic look, with a visible grain pattern and a great sense of dimensionality. Next to older DVD releases and Arrow Video's U.K. Blu-ray, the image seems to have undergone some effective color balancing. Contrast is stable, saturation is just where it needs to be—the Arrow version, in particular, was woefully flat—and there are no blown-out highlights or overly crushed shadows. (Check out the included Italian cut in the bonus features, with it's much poorer transfer, to see how bad the film could've looked.) Sharpness is also immediately improved, with a level of detail unseen in the film's prior home video outings. Barring some hypothetical 4K reissue in a few years, this is probably the best A Bay of Blood will look for some time to come.

A Bay of Blood Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's English version—the most widely distributed cut—is presented via a listenable uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 mono track. With some mild hissing, pops and crackles, and dubbed dialogue that occasionally has a hollow, echoey quality, there are a few source related concerns here, though none rise to the level of distraction. (If you watch a lot of low-budget Italian cinema, there's nothing out of the ordinary here.) If a little thin in the high end, the mix has good projection and gets to rock out a bit with composer Stelvio Cipriani's score, which goes from groovy to creepy and beyond. For the one or two instances where visible text needs to be translated, there are hard-coded English subtitles, but otherwise, no optional subs are provided.

A Bay of Blood Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary: Bava expert and Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas gives yet another illuminating audio lecture, discussing the making of the film and its eventual influence. If you've never been able to fully appreciate Bava's work, Lucas' exposition may open these movies up for you in ways you wouldn't expect.
• A Bay of Blood: Italian Cut (SD, 1:24:54): "Although sourced from an inferior master, this Italian-language cut of A Bay of Blood contains approximately one minute of variant footage, and is presented here in its entirety for the sake of comparison." With English subtitles.
• Trailers (HD): Includes trailers for A Bay of Blood, Black Sunday, Baron Blood, Lisa and the Devil, and The House of Exorcism.

A Bay of Blood Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mario Bava's most violent film is also arguably his most influential. A Bay of Blood, with its high body count, creepy POV shots, and machete- wielding killer—who takes particular relish in offing a bunch of horny young adults—essentially set the template for what would, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, become the slasher. For anyone interested not only in horror but also the history of the genre, A Bay of Blood—which sometimes goes by the more brutal title, A Twitch of the Death Nerve—is mandatory viewing. Kino's new Blu-ray makes that viewing all the more pleasurable, with a stunning new high definition transfer that solidly outdoes Arrow Video's undersaturated U.K. release, and a must-listen audio commentary from Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas. Highly recommended!