David Vining's Blog

This is better. This is much, much better. Where Bava was obviously lost in the wilderness of the western in The Road to Fort Alamo, he’s on very solid ground for his science-fiction/horror mashup Planet of the Vampires. Spare storytelling mixed with Bava drenching every moment in his sumptuous and dreamlike style creates an engaging and fun bit of genre fare. This was Bava fully in his wheelhouse, commanding every moment with skill and without ever falling out of balance between inherent ca...

There’s a quote from one of the writers on the film, Franco Prosperi, that notes that Mario Bava had no talent for making westerns while disowning the film, and I can see it. Bava’s first few films reveal a penchant for a very specific type of stylistic flourishes while his scripts trended towards the overly complicated and thin at the same time. Remove his stylistic flourishes, like getting him to make a straightforward Western (not even a highly stylized one like Leone‘s A Fistful of Dolla...

And…we’re back to the whodunit with too many characters. Granted, there was a whodunit aspect to The Body and the Whip, but it was more fully about mood and tone instead of trying to hoodwink the audience into thinking the killer could be anyone and juggling parts around until it finally reveals it. That’s really what Blood an Black Lace is, and it’s always a combination I find difficult to get into. I will say, though, that the twists and turns in this one feel more laid out and established...

The first film from Mario Bava that he has no writing credit on, The Whip and the Body is the best script he’s made a movie from since he started. The credited writers (Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra, and Luciano Martino) all used pseudonyms on the film itself, the same as Bava who is credited as John M. Old. I suspect this was done to help sell the film to English audiences since this is a rather brazen attempt to mimic Hammer Horror and even Roger Corman’s Poe cycle. However, no matter how d...

The first film from Mario Bava that he has no writing credit on, The Body and the Whip is the best script he’s made a movie from since he started. The credited writers (Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra, and Luciano Martino) all used pseudonyms on the film itself, the same as Bava who is credited as John M. Old. I suspect this was done to help sell the film to English audiences since this is a rather brazen attempt to mimic Hammer Horror and even Roger Corman’s Poe cycle. However, no matter how d...

Following a trend in Italian cinema to make anthologies in order to keep costs low, Mario Bava directs three short stories of terror and the macabre, and I think the reduced running time of each story gives Bava the kind of space he needs to focus on what he likes best. He’s a style man first and foremost, and stretching that embrace of style across a plot that goes for 90 minutes is harder to do than with a story that only goes for 30 and is largely in one location. It allows for greater fo...

I started watching the American International Pictures version of this, with English dubbing, and got about halfway through when I realized that it wasn’t quite right. The scene that told me it wasn’t quite right is actually in the original Italian version (an earlier scene that felt off was only in the AIP version), but still, the tone of the original version is far more uniform across the first half (can’t say about the second half since I didn’t finish the AIP version). Enough of that, th...

When I first looked over Mario Bava’s body of work, seeing his early period dominated by films in assorted genres like the Viking picture, I expected work more generic or chameleon-like from him. Instead, Bava, using his background as cinematographer and assistant director, was making everything his own visually from the start. So, Erik the Conqueror, Viking adventure, ends up kind of exactly what one would imagine a Mario Bava Viking adventure to be. Also, since Bava cowrote the film (along...

This was kind of like getting a Marvel gig after an independent success in Italy in the early 60s, wasn’t it? The second entry in a Hercules franchise produced by Achille Piazzi, Mario Bava was hired and immediately injected his phantasmagoric sense into the franchise (I assume; I haven’t watched the first one) into the film wherever he could. However, this is not the most natural fit for Bava. The plot-heavy story of Hercules having to travel the mythical world looking for a MacGuffin to sa...

Mario Bava bursts out of the gate with a moody, spooky bit of nonsense that understands the assignment and tries little more than that. It’s not one of the great feature film debuts, but Black Sunday is a shockingly solid bit of genre fun from the new director that heavily takes from the early Hammer Horror films, casts it into an Italian/continental context and just drips it with style. Sure, there’s no real emotion to latch onto, but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.

In the seventeenth ce...