SusannahKill Baby....Kill
January 29th 2007 11:12
Kill Baby…Kill on DVD (1972)
Directed by Mario Bava.
Written by Mario Bava and Romano Migliorini.
Starring: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Erica Blanc, Fabienne Dali.
From the title alone I would almost have expected this to be a go-go dancing Russ Meyer cleavage-a-thon. But no, it is not. Instead it is a deliciously dark and dreamlike Gothic fable from ever-talented Italian filmmaker Mario Bava (see also Twitch of the Death Nerve).
Dr Paul Eswai – a man so square-jawed and heroically dashing he ought to have “leading man” tattooed on his forehead – is sent to a tiny isolated village to examine the body of a local woman. We get to see how she dies in the pre-credit sequence. It isn’t pretty. At first glance the death would appear to be suicide but there are a good many things that just don’t sit right, and who is responsible for embedding a gold coin in her heart post-mortem?
The inhabitants of the village, as ever, are suspicious, secretive and occasionally openly hostile towards our hero but among them he finds an ally in Monica Schuftan – a woman newly come to the village whose enigmatic past may see her bound to it in the most terrible of ways.
Strange fogs roll and belch across the weirdly-lit pathways and crooked alleys of the town. A ghostly little girl stalks the streets. The church bell tolls late at night and every time it does, another person dies.
Ruth, the town sorceress, performs rather unpleasant-looking chastising rituals designed to protect a young woman marked for death.
Then there’s the extremely ominous Villa Grapps and the sinister widow who lives locked away in its dark rooms (in one particularly unnerving scene we see her commune with the spirits via a distorted camera lens and a sequence of weird zooms).
Essentially a Gothic melodrama with a substantial body count (although nothing to rival Twitch’s final count of thirteen) this dark delight of a film has a profound visual design: utilising Expressionistic angles and harsh noir-shadows. It also produces its fair share of genuinely startling sequences – one scene of hallucinatory brilliance sees the protagonist pursue a fleeing figure over and over through the same room until at last he catches the running man by the elbow and pulls him back to reveal…well, that would be telling. Needless to say, it’s an ingenious and surreal moment.
And creepy kids are always effective in horror movies – this one is as fine a ghoulish innocent as any.
The restored print on the Region 0 DVD is excellent (it’s intense use of chiaroscuro and unusual colours reminding me of the artwork that graced the first Black Sabbath LP.)
Over the years this film has won its fair share of notable admirers.Scorsese’s a fan and it’s hard to imagine that Tim Burton would have made Sleepy Hollow were it not for Mario Bava’s twisted fairy-tale.
Directed by Mario Bava.
Written by Mario Bava and Romano Migliorini.
Starring: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Erica Blanc, Fabienne Dali.
From the title alone I would almost have expected this to be a go-go dancing Russ Meyer cleavage-a-thon. But no, it is not. Instead it is a deliciously dark and dreamlike Gothic fable from ever-talented Italian filmmaker Mario Bava (see also Twitch of the Death Nerve).
Dr Paul Eswai – a man so square-jawed and heroically dashing he ought to have “leading man” tattooed on his forehead – is sent to a tiny isolated village to examine the body of a local woman. We get to see how she dies in the pre-credit sequence. It isn’t pretty. At first glance the death would appear to be suicide but there are a good many things that just don’t sit right, and who is responsible for embedding a gold coin in her heart post-mortem?
The inhabitants of the village, as ever, are suspicious, secretive and occasionally openly hostile towards our hero but among them he finds an ally in Monica Schuftan – a woman newly come to the village whose enigmatic past may see her bound to it in the most terrible of ways.
Strange fogs roll and belch across the weirdly-lit pathways and crooked alleys of the town. A ghostly little girl stalks the streets. The church bell tolls late at night and every time it does, another person dies.
Ruth, the town sorceress, performs rather unpleasant-looking chastising rituals designed to protect a young woman marked for death.
Then there’s the extremely ominous Villa Grapps and the sinister widow who lives locked away in its dark rooms (in one particularly unnerving scene we see her commune with the spirits via a distorted camera lens and a sequence of weird zooms).
Essentially a Gothic melodrama with a substantial body count (although nothing to rival Twitch’s final count of thirteen) this dark delight of a film has a profound visual design: utilising Expressionistic angles and harsh noir-shadows. It also produces its fair share of genuinely startling sequences – one scene of hallucinatory brilliance sees the protagonist pursue a fleeing figure over and over through the same room until at last he catches the running man by the elbow and pulls him back to reveal…well, that would be telling. Needless to say, it’s an ingenious and surreal moment.
And creepy kids are always effective in horror movies – this one is as fine a ghoulish innocent as any.
The restored print on the Region 0 DVD is excellent (it’s intense use of chiaroscuro and unusual colours reminding me of the artwork that graced the first Black Sabbath LP.)
Over the years this film has won its fair share of notable admirers.Scorsese’s a fan and it’s hard to imagine that Tim Burton would have made Sleepy Hollow were it not for Mario Bava’s twisted fairy-tale.
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Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Oh and this is a must see film for horror buffs and one of Mario Bava's finest..
Comment by Cibbuano
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