five dolls - bay of blood

It’s tempting to give great directors a free pass when it comes to their, shall we say, “weaker” films. John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, even the great Alfred Hitchcock had his fair share of clunkers but suffered little ill effect to his reputation in the annals of cinematic history. So shouldn’t Mario Bava get the same treatment? The maestro of gothic-giallo Italian horror films has several certified classics to his credit (Black Sunday and Blood and Black Lace the most notable), but stretched out his career with several films that, even by his own admission, weren’t up to his high standards.

As explained by historian Tom Weaver in the disc’s commentary, Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) was a bit of a slog for Bava to complete due to the usual budget and time constraints plus intrusive producers. And it’s a bit of a slog as a viewer, too. The story – several couples on an isolated island retreat fighting over a million-dollar business deal that leads to murder – has all the elements of his previous gialli, but only brief flourishes of his usual style and wit.

The lovely Edwige Fenech, no stranger to the genre, makes for a lively introduction as she shakes and strips her way across the screen. But it’s only filler, padding out the running time until we get to the string of murders, each nicely punctuated with a shot of the new victim tagged, bagged and placed in a meat locker. Careful attention to the plot is a wasted effort, though. Events often seem to happen out of order (ironic considering Bava edited it himself), character reactions are muted or overtly hysterical, subplots bubble up and fizzle with no resolution and the finale’s big twist is so confusing you’re guaranteed to be left scratching your head.

In the “plus”-column, the score offers some retro appeal and the set design is amusingly future-chic, but Five Dolls for an August Moon is almost unrecognizable as a Bava film. And at first glance, so is A Bay of Blood (1971), a slasher-flick progenitor that made an obvious impact on American filmmakers as the genre exploded in the US soon afterward. Bouncing between typical horny teens in jeopardy and a more complicated grudge match between the scheming heirs of a murdered widow, again there’s not much reward for keeping track of who’s killing who. But A Bay of Blood does reward gore fans with some bloody effective kill scenes and opens with a beautifully shot murder sequence that’s as good as anything the director ever put on film.

After that elegant prologue however, the film devolves into more off-the-cuff camerawork, full of illogical zooms and flat lighting that seems out of place in the director’s oeuvre. Even the amped-up gore, soon to become common in Italian horror, is an odd point of emphasis for Bava who was most effective in the realm of the supernatural. He gets much more mileage from a brief image of a squid’s tentacles wrapped around drowned corpse. Overall, the material seems beneath a man of his talents, even though the formula he concocted proved to be as enduring as any in the horror genre.

Kino knows that Bava fans are completists, so it’s hard to imagine fans of their past few titles not picking these up. Especially when they look this good in hi-def and contain solid commentary tracks from Weaver (author of Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark) who makes even the most mundane film sound unbelievably interesting after the fact.