Mario Bava kick-started Italian horror films with gothic gore fests like Black Sunday (1961) and Blood and Black Lace (1964). Even more extreme is A Bay of Blood (1971), an obvious touchstone for the slasher genre. Indeed, it's influence is more noteworthy than its cartoon gruesomeness. Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) and her husband (Giovanni Nuvoletti) are murdered at their bayside estate, triggering a real estate squabble. Two greedy real estate developers (Chris Avram and Anna Maria Rosati) who wish to develop the property into a resort. The Donatis' daughter Renata (Claudine Auger) and her meek fiancé Albert (Luigi Pistill) arrive with their kids in tow. A drunken medium (Laura Belli), her entomologist husband (Leopold Trieste) and a groundskeeper (Claudio Camaso) also become involved, along with a quartet of horny teens.
A Bay of Blood (also titled Twitch of the Death Nerve) is absurdly convoluted, with a coterie of monstrous caricatures carving each other to bits. If the premise sounds clever, Bava's approach is too murky and self-serious to generate fun. Expository flashbacks and asides prevent the killings from gaining momentum. Good actors like Luigi Pistilli, Isa Miranda and Laura Betti stammer through banal dialog scenes while waiting to die. Only Claudine Auger, Thunderball's Domino, gives her character a kinky Lady Macbeth charge.
Bava constantly contrasts his Saubadia locations with the squalid killings. Bay hammers home a strange ecological message, showing humanity as greedy, depraved and deserving of death. The bay's pristine beauty clashes with mankind's destructiveness, whether Paolo's torturing insects or a squid crawls across a corpse's face. Even Albert and Renata's kids become drawn into the cycle of violence. It's a bizarre, overwrought message too heavy for the material, and too silly to stand on its own.
Bava's hyperviolent slayings inspired a generation of slasher movies: a death tableaux anticipating Halloween, two teens murdered during sex like Friday the 13th Part 2. Even by the genre's standards, Bay's killings are extreme: a graphic decapitation, a face spit by machete, several prolonged strangulations. Deaths contrast with trite irony: Bava lingers on the teens' smiling car grill and incongruously cheerful music plays over the final murder. This is as clever as Bava's direction gets.
Mario Bava fared best with broad, operatic material, mating F.W. Murnau's shadowy, formalized frights with sexually charged gore. His films aren't for all tastes, but their baroque craftsmanship's undeniable. A Bay of Blood only offers invention in overwrought bloodshed, limiting its appeal to undemanding exploitation fans.
