Being Film #27 for Hooptober 2023
NOTE: Using this opportunity to revisit a review I wrote for this film fifteen years ago, slightly cleaned up and reflecting my recent re-watch of this classic.
Although now armed with with experience of many of the Master’s films, prior to my first viewing of Bay of Blood, aka the much better titled Twitch of the Death Nerve, most of what I know about Mario Bava came from reading: the grandfather of Italian Horror, a founding father of giallo as a film genre and a prime influence on generations of filmmakers, notably Dario Argento (and now Sergio Martino), who would go on to refine and bring the genre to legions of fans across the globe. But my practical film experience with Bava was limited to Black Sunday, a terrific film with tons of mood, but not indicative of what I would later come to see in his colors films, or in the proto-slasher mayhem he would unleash in this nasty piece of work.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: A twisted version of an Agatha Christie mystery, the movie opens with little clarity as to what we’re about to see: an insect dies, falling into the aforementioned bay. Next we come to a wheelchair-bound old woman and a mysterious man. The man throws a noose around the woman’s neck and kicks her wheelchair out from under her, leaving her to the die, her useless legs scrape against the floor. The man’s victory is short-lived; seconds later he’s stabbed multiple times and slowly dragged away from the scene by an unseen killer, setting the scene for muder galore as everyone we’re introduced to either kills or dies in short order as the mystery as to who the woman was and why she was killed comes to light.
If Bay of Blood feels familiar to someone seeing it for the first it makes sense: large chunks of the film have been re-cycled over and over in the slasher films we’ve come to know and love, most notably Friday the 13th, which similarly utilizes the killer POV, the basic setting (trading a set of houses on the bay for a camp on the lake), and even some of the series more audacious kills like the spearing of two kids making love.
But where Blood outshines Friday is in the glee it takes with its despicable cast of characters. No one is good – everyone is after something, and murder seems to be a small price to pay to get it. The only people seemingly innocent of the whole thing is the one place where Bay of Blood falters: Bava introduces a group of four kids joyriding in a car (that looks suspiciously like Speed Buggy). They wind up at the house where the old woman was murdered and decide to fool around and explore, and are of course promptly killed within minutes. Later on their deaths are used to make a connection between two of the principle players, but the whole sequence feels kind of wedged in, despite being a LOT of fun to watch.
Bava, who’s also credited as one of the screenwriters as well as the DP, shoots the film with his usual sense of lurid style, using bright colors juxtaposed with dark surroundings, and a clever (if not always successful) use of going in and out of focus, particularly when coming up to a weapon. The film may not look very expensive, but it doesn’t look cheap, either. There’s a healthy amount of Hitchcock injected into the film as well, including a swimming scene where one of the girls gets her leg caught on a line that’s holding down a dead body. When the corpse rises to the surface, it makes its presence known by slowly floating toward her until its decayed hand prods her on the buttocks. The deaths are all flashy and bright, bright red, but the kicker of Bay of Blood is the ending, giving a big middle finger and a raspberry to everything that went on before it, all to a bright, sunny soundtrack.
As a history lesson Bay of Blood shows exactly where so many of the tropes we’ve come to expect from our 80s slasher horror came from, and also shows that it can be executed with a sense of style often missing from its larger budgeted descendants. Factor in the sweet ending and you have a great introduction to Bava’s work as well as a film worthy for any midnight marathon.
I just wish they had left it as Twitch of the Death Nerve!
Cinema Dual 
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