A Bay of Blood (1971) / Mario Bava / Shudder / Notes

 I laughed out loud at how easily Claudine Auger's Renata just willy-nilly kills people to hopefully gain control of property once owned by her mother. Luigi Pistilli, who was in a bunch of Giallo, as her husband, isn't quite as comfortable just strangling Leopoldo Trieste, for instance, as he tries to call the police, while Auger unflinchingly beheads Leopoldo's wife, played by Laura Betti, without a hitch! Being a good husband, Pistilli spears Claudio Volonté (Auger's brother, an illegitimate son of their mother, left with a cottage on the property, to fish on the bay) while she approvingly looks on. It is all this absurd, ultra-violent slasher. I think the only reason "Twitch of the Death Nerve" (Bava's "American" title for the film he preferred) is referred to as a Giallo is because of Bava's association with that genre and that his film is Italian. Other than that, I just fully believe A Bay of Blood is a slasher film. I mean, just the bodies of two couples, friends in a jeep on a drive through the area, stopping for a bit of fun, piled up and found by Auger is a scene American slashers are known for. The machete to the face, a Carlos Rambaldi work of art, is particularly a grisly highlight because it shows the blade go into the face, with the killer prying it out with the open gash exposed. It really is incredible, if in bad taste for those who despise graphic violence of this specificity. That spear through the couple making love in the bed of a room found in a home unoccupied and how the bodies squirm even is actually quite an impressive special gore effect for 1971! Yes, special effects for gore would surely improve in the next decade and a half for the genre before the 90s would render the slasher briefly on life support, but for a film like A Bay of Blood, a machete to the face is quite a task to pull off due to the time. The kids with the shotgun, playfully blowing away their parents, who have murdered folks and feel all confident about inheriting the property, then taking off to run around the bay without a care in the world had me just saying aloud, "Bava, you warped genius, you!"

It really is just a domino effect. The matriarch of this property is rope-choked by her second (and estranged) husband when said husband is goaded into it by his lustful desire to bed the secretary of a real estate agent hoping to secure the bay, because this is ideal for a profitable tourist attraction. The murdered matriarch's heirs also want it, so that greed and avarice "encourages" their worst natures to emerge. And this is the kind of film that has one person kill another and get killed himself afterward. The bodies drop dead frequently in this film. There is even a skinny dip where the luscious Brigitte Skay strips nude and takes a swim, only to nag her foot on a rope attached to the body of the matriarch's husband. Wet, in her dress, Skay flees into the woods, very much like a lot of slashers (and Giallo, for that matter), unable to avoid the inevitable, the machete of Volonté slicing into her neck. While plenty of slashers had better special effects, that this film was ten years before the American slasher genre truly took off is astounding. I will admit that while I still really enjoy A Bay of Blood, it has dropped just a peg from where I rated it upon first and second viewings. A solid ****/*****