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Like Christa, the past few days I've been desperate for something shiny to distract me from, well, you know. For me it's been movies. I've watched a heck of a lot of them this week, starting with three by Mario Bava, who was featured on IFC on Halloween night. I'm not usually a big fan of horror, but Bava was supposed to be very influential on American horror movies, and he also directed Diabolik, which was goofy (so much so that they showed it on MST3K) but visually stunning, so what the heck. IFC showed an hour long documentary about Bava before running the movies, which was nice because it gave me a little background.

Black Sunday. Like all Bava's movies this had a lot of titles in the US but I think this was the most common. The Italian title was La Maschera del demonio (Mask of the Demon). It was one of the first post-war horror movies made in Italy (apparently the genre was banned during the fascist era): a gothic tale about a resurrected witch terrorizing a Russian village. It was fun though pretty tame compared to my expectations, based on what I knew of Italian horror. But I guess it's not fair to expect a 1960 film to be as intense (or as gory) as Dario Argento's work. Black Sunday did have some really memorable images, notably the witch's face all scarred from an iron maiden-type mask. In the documentary they said that Tim Burton had appropriated this visual for Sleepy Hollow. (ripped off, homage, what's in a word?)

Twitch of the Death Nerve. This is what they called it on IFC but I think it might be more commonly known in English as Bay of Blood. The original title is Reazione a catena (Chain Reaction). This was credited with being the first slasher film & being a primary inspiration for Friday the 13th. I think I mentioned that I'm not a huge fan of horror, and slasher films are probably my least favorite of the genre. But what the heck, it was so outrageously gory that it was kind of funny. There did seem to be a very convulated plot about people vying for property rights to a bay, but mostly the movie just sped from one set piece to the next, everyone killing everyone else in imaginative ways. There was a much-hyped "shocking twist ending" which was completely predictable if you knew there was a twist coming, simply because there was literally no one else left to perform the final killing.

Baron Blood. The original title of this one was Gli Orrori del castello di Norimberga (The Horrors of Castle Norimberga). Joseph Cotton plays a resurrected evil baron who buys back his ancestral home and rebuilds the torture chamber in the basement. Unlike the witch in Black Sunday, Cotton looks like a normal person when resurrected and has an unexplained source of funds. It was kind of sad to see an actor of Cotton's caliber in a cheap horror film, but like Vincent Price he gave it his all. This was made after Twitch of the Death Nerve but with a much lower body count and less gore overall.

The Bava documentary didn't say anything about Dario Argento, but I'm assuming that as Italy's first big horror director Bava must have had some influence on Argento. Argento started directing in the late 60's but I think I read that he mostly did "giallo" movies, crime thrillers, until Suspiria in 1977, the year Bava's last film was made. Which reminds me that I've had Suspiria on tape for years and have been trying to work up the nerve to watch it. Georg won't watch it with me and I'm too wussy to watch it by myself. Anybody up for seeing the ultimate horror film with me? I hear it's brilliant.