Flavours of the Month: February 2016...

Flashlights in the dark, classic European frights and thrills, the return of the walkers, and more are some of the things that have been guiding the feel of my February 2016...

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Rabid Dogs (Mario Bava, 1974) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“You're just crazy! Crazy and cruel!” Italy in the 1970s was a turbulent place and time, rocked by socio-political change and rife with organised crime. Drug cartels, kidnapping schemes, and young gangs left the police scrabbling to catch up and the public locking themselves away. Reacting to this period of fear, the film makers of the era unleashed a series of hard-as-nails crime pictures and hard-bitten 'poliziotteschi' films. Menacing rogue cops modelled on Dirty Harry dominated, but sometimes the violent criminals took centre stage. One example would be Umberto Lenzi's Almost Human (1974), but not to be outdone – even in the twilight of his career – Mario Bava (best known for horror films like Black Sunday or Kill Baby Kill) dived into the fray with Rabid Dogs. However, it was sucked into a nightmarish legal limbo before the low budget production had even finished. The film, which many feared to be lost forever, remained unseen for more than twenty years before, at long last, it was pulled from the ashes and given new life...

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Five Dolls For An August Moon (Mario Bava, 1970) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

Find more giallo reviews here.

“It looks like we'll all wind up in this damn freezer.” Heavily indebted to Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Indians', Five Dolls For An August Moon – scripted by Mario di Nardo – is a project, with director Mario Bava's own confession, that he made 'under protest'. Denied extra time to rework the script, and never fully investing in its making as a result, the Black Sunday filmmaker nevertheless crafted a lush vision of privileged degenerates on an island retreat allowing their greed and blood lust get the better of them...

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The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

Find more giallo reviews here.

“Don't you see it over there? Blood. Blood everywhere!” Originally intended to be a frothy romcom about tourists on an adventure in Rome, when horror maestro Mario Bava (Black Sunday) entered the project, it changed into something altogether darker. Not only did Bava transform the film, but he altered the face of murder mystery cinema. Tracing its roots through Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, the German 'Krimi' films, and Hitchcock, the giallo film – named after the yellow colour of pulp novels detailing lurid murders and twisted crimes – was birthed by Bava.

The genre, which he would finesse the following year with the technicolour terror of Blood and Black Lace, was turned – by Dario Argento (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage), Sergio Martino (All The Colours of the Dark), et al – into a hugely popular cinematic movement. So successful were the gialli, in-part through their sexuality and blood-splashing violence, that the American slasher film came to pass (Bava's own A Bay of Blood gave particular inspiration to Friday the 13^th Part 2). The importance of giallo films in the history of genre cinema cannot be overstated. The transition, from paperback to celluloid, happened here: The Girl Who Knew Too Much...

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Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

Find more giallo reviews here.

“Guaranteed! The 8 greatest shocks ever filmed!” Mario Bava (A Bay Of Blood) established the basic thematic template of the Italian giallo film with the Hitchcock-influenced The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1963 before laying out – in full-bodied colour – the visual essence of what would become an iconic movement in Italian cinema. Vibrant splashes of pink and blue, red and green, filled the off-kilter frame as the camera glided through shadowy corridors. Bava, a former lighting cameraman, also made full use of the frame in all dimensions, with action frequently taking place throughout the entirety of his meticulous compositions – side-to-side, top-to-bottom, front-to-back. Excess, violence, and sex are common visual and narrative themes in gialli, and here in Blood and Black Lace – essentially the second ever giallo film – Bava unleashed a beast...

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Hextuple Bill Mini Musings: Limos, Aliens, Monsters, Soldiers, Savages, and Murders...

Cosmopolis:
What's it about?
A successful rich bloke hops in his limo to go and get a haircut. He then proceeds to talk utter bollocks with a random collection of arseholes for 105 interminable minutes.
Who would I recognise in it?
Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton, Kevin Durand, Mathieu Amalric, Jay Baruchel.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Exceptionally stylish, David Cronenberg's "psycho-thriller" is a visual treat, but the script (by DC, based on Don De Lillo's novel) is wilfully obtuse and keeps the audience at a belligerent arm's length for the entire duration. Side characters drift in-and-out for vignette's where people we don't know, or understand, talk in the most poncy, inaccessible manner about stuff we - at best - only half-get in general terms. It's an audience-splitter to say the least. The DVD comes with a making of as-long as the film itself - but I've not braved it yet - perhaps that'll shed a bit of light on all this malarkey, but I just couldn't access this Cronenberg outing. It's a shame as I usually enjoy his work so much (I recently checked out A Dangerous Method, and rather dug it). Alright.

Click "READ MORE" below for aliens, soldiers, savages, and hatchets...