The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (aka. L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo), dir. Dario Argento (1970)

NIKKI says:
Well, this officially becomes my second favourite Argento flick after the brilliantly awesome Profondo Rosso. The reason I loved this one so much? Because I understood everything that was going on. That's unusual with Argento. Often there's so much subtext going on, and concentration on frightening visuals that the plot gets left a bit behind. (I think Argento himself has said that plot and acting talent are the least focused on ingredients in his pictures.) Here, though, the film is plot-heavy with great actors and decidedly light on thrills and effects. It's clearly early Argento (his debut as a director, I believe), and its just great.

Tony Musante (the great and tragic Schibetta from Oz) plays a guy who witnesses a fairly harrowing murder inside an art gallery. He spends the rest of the film searching for the murdered in the black suit, hat, and gloves. The killer taunts him, kills others around him, and he must hunt deep in his memory to piece together just what he really saw at the museum.

The whole thing about memory and the mind playing tricks is fascinating. So, not only have you got Argento telling a story, he's doing it with a message. Just what do we see when we view events from afar? How can we ever be sure that what we're seeing is the truth? What is truth when it comes to reliance on memory and sharp-moving visuals? This is a really great exploration of those themes, and it's tense and scary when it needs to be, bloodthirsty at just the right moments, and packed with interesting characters.

It's truly one of his best movies. The development of the artist is so obvious in this one, down to the black gloves, the close-ups on the eyes, and the spurting blood. Old Dario is always the best, and this just proves that.

4/5

STEVE says:
On the back of the DVD packet, Argento is said to have "single-handedly created the Giallo genre". Just think about being the one who created a genre. That's pretty fucking cool. Romero and Zombies, Stoker and Vampires, Bava and Giallo. Sweet.

This claim, however, is almost immediately disputed on the commentary track by Alan Jones and Kim Newman. It's Mario Bava, they say, who created the genre, but Argento - and specifically this film - was the first to make use of it after all the rules were laid out.

Either way, I don't like to think of Giallo as a genre. I think of it as a style, like Film Noir, something that happened organically and only classified in retrospect.

Even if he didn't create it, Argento clearly knew how to use the style, and this movie has it in spades - unlike some of his later work in and out of the Giallo mold. At some stage Argento became less interested in story and more in shocking visuals, and I think Giallo - whether a genre or a style - was the poorer for it.

3.5/5

Il Mistero di Lovecraft: Road to L., dir. Federico Greco / Roberto Leggio (2005)

NIKKI says:
I said to Steve last night -- April has become "Handheld Month". We've had Diary of the Dead, Cloverfield, Welcome to the Jungle, and now this. Although not entirely handheld, the scary bits were mainly seen through a camera lens. I've decided movie directors are right: Things are scarier when presented in that style.

In this movie, the group is down in some abandoned tunnels. They stumble across some gutted fish. The one guy is all, hmm, let's go back. And then he looks forward and sees... briefly, quickly... SOMEONE! They scream and head back. Because this is Lovecraft territory, and we know it's not a person but a giant FISHMAN!

Not that we see the giant fishman. But still... we know.

The situation is this... A group of American filmmakers come to Italy because of a manuscript that has been found that features journal entries by H.P. Lovecraft that suggest he visited certain parts of Italy prior to writing his most famous works, Call of Cthulhu and Shadow over Innsmouth. The entries specifically mention the creepy things Lovecraft supposedly saw in those abandoned places.

The filmmakers want to solidify this apparent connection by finding something specific that proved Lovecraft was inspired by Italy, and not just his imagination.

So, they take their cameras and they start their seeking. Meanwhile, the main director guy just becomes more and more of an arrogant prick, and alienates everybody, so they get very little done. It's not the area that's doing this guy in, he was an asshole from the start, so we get this weird juxtaposition of an angry group in an angry area that just wants to be left alone. It's an interesting tension. And separates this film from Cloverfield with its camaraderie in a bad situation, and Welcome to the Jungle, in which the stresses of the situation turn those guys against each other.

Here, it's tense from the outset. Very cool twist on this sort of group-tries-to-solve-mystery sub-genre. This group eventually finds what they're looking for, and the final moments of the film are really creepy. I was afraid of fishmen in the house for a little while after it ended. The best scene, though, was the group asking some old fishermen for directions... man, that was harsh. Oh, and the scene where they hear music playing FROM NOWHERE!

Good movie, interesting story, love the concept, and there was some phenomenal acting by the one guy -- Fausto -- who just couldn't take the director's smarminess for one more second.

3/5

La Terza Madre (aka. Mother of Tears), dir. Dario Argento (2007)

NIKKI says:
Did somebody say this movie was Dario "back to form"? I'm sure I heard that prior to watching it. It's very true, at any rate. For the first time since discovering Tenebrae or whichever Argento I watched first way back when, I felt genuinely creeped out, by the story, the effects, the horror, and I genuinely cared for the woman in peril.

My god, how gruesome. New wave horror has nothing on Dario. The blood spatter here proves that old school horror/violence is still the most effective, even if you can tell the spike through the eyes is so totally fake. It just looks good. And I don't think much of it was CG, which is even better. The woman at the start stumbling around in her own intestines -- gross! But awesome.

The story wasn't bad, either. This is apparently the final film in the Three Mothers trilogy that includes Suspiria and Inferno. Here, Asia Argento plays the daughter of a woman killed by the Mother of Sighs from Suspiria. In this movie, she and a friend at a museum open an ancient urn, inadvertently bringing into this realm, the Mother of Tears. Asia must steel herself against the witch and her powers, which see the entire city turning on itself in horror and fury.

Asia goes to an old house to face off against the witch, ad stumbles across an awful party scene where the women are all chanting and singing for the one main witch in the little red dress. It's all so creepy and weird. Asia ends up swimming through a body-infested sewer, and -- ugghh -- it's just awesomely revolting.

But it never feels exploitative. I did find myself cursing Dario when not one, but TWO, babies found themselves at the receiving end of his horror vision, but that's Dario, I guess. Taking me places I don't want to go so sharply and so quickly that I barely have time to register it. These days, with the drawing out of the gore, they've just got it so wrong. It's so much harder to process Dario's type of violence that aims not to gross out, but to shock. It's fast, and it's mean. Just dare to watch the woman get her mouth ground open (AHHHH!), or the spike up the dress, or the spike through the gullet, or the poked out retinas. Snap, snap, snap.

This was a fitting conclusion to the director's weird vision.

3.5/5

A Bay of Blood, dir. Mario Bava (1971)

STEVE says:
Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (or Twitch of the Death Nerve, or Carnage, or any one of the eighteen titles it goes by – including the strangely misleading Last House on the Left, Part II) was not our first pick to begin this project. It was Gremlins. And I was really looking forward to watching Gremlins again, I’ll tell you, because I wanted to see if it was as annoyingly saccharin as I remember it. “Bright lights, bright lights,” and all that. Damn your eyes, Chris Columbus!

But the disc we rented was all scratched up and wouldn’t play past 39 minutes, so we had to come up with an alternative.

Scanning our shelves here at home, still in the mood for something that leaned in the general direction of horror (Gremlins fits that description, even though it’s more of a black comedy – either way, what it’s doing in the kids’ section at VideoEzy, I’ll never know), Nikki pointed out A Bay of Blood.

Mmmm. Bava. Good. We went with it.

I remember watching this something like fifteen years ago with my friend Doug. It was pretty much the first slasher film, he’d said, and that Friday the 13^th, Halloween and their endless spate of sequels and rip-offs (see The Burning) all owe their existence to this movie. And I could see it – remote location, killer’s POV shots, post-coital teenage slaughter (there’s even a scene that’s replicated almost frame for frame in Friday the 13^th Part 2) – but at the same time, I felt that those movies had totally missed the point. A Bay of Blood has a plot that can, at best, be called intricate, but when compared to that of the Friday the 13^th or Halloween films (“demented madmen running around in ski masks, hacking up young virgins”) it becomes downright Chandleresque.

Because I can’t do it justice, here’s the blurb from the back of the DVD packet: “Countess Federica, the elderly owner of a coveted piece of bay side [property], is brutally slain by her husband Flippo (sic) Donati - who is himself then killed by a mysterious third person at the murder scene! Who is the killer? Could it be real estate [developer] Frank Ventura? Or Paolo Fosatti, an entomologist neighbour who wants to preserve the natural insect life thriving around the bay? The Countess's illegitimate son, in a bid to claim [a name] for himself? Or could it be Albert, the weak-willed husband of Donati’s ambitious daughter, Renata? Brace yourself, because no one's a suspect for very long in Mario Bava's black comedy of human greed - which boasts 13 characters and 13 of the most shocking murders ever filmed!”

Like a synopsis for a Young and the Restless story arc, innit?

And the beauty of it is, there’s not just one killer. As soon as we meet someone, get to know them a little bit, they’re killed off. Then we get to know the killer, get familiar with their story; they’re killed off, and so it goes. It could have been played as straight comedy, but I don’t think it would have been quite as funny.

There were some lame elements. Bits of the soundtrack do not hold up, if they ever worked to begin with, and Bava had apparently just pioneered Zoom-O-Vision because he uses the hell out of it. But this, I argue, does not detract from the story, which, if I may say so, is way-cool.

A Bay of Blood is the Short Cuts of horror cinema, a Giallo Magnolia, if you will. Sure, there’s an overall story, but it’s just an excuse to get these people in the same general location. The movie is practically a series of vignettes strung together by the fact that some of the characters have dealings with some of the other characters. And then kill them.

I’m giving it 3 out of 5.

NIKKI says:
I, too, was really up for Gremlins. Much as I've been saving the new DVDs that come my way (The Kingdom, Lucky You) for this project, I loved the thought of beginning the new year with a flashback, with a classic. Gremlins with its holiday perversity seemed a key choice. Alas, it wasn't to be. Though we should take note -- we own Critters, we own Ghoulies, why do we not own a non-scratched, well-looked-after copy of Gremlins? Shame on us.

So, we went with A Bay of Blood. I'm not sure it set the tone for the project, as Steve desired. But it turned out rather an interesting choice, mainly because it was so out there. I liked the fact it wasn't a safe choice. Perhaps that's our tone, our point? To always be challenging ourselves? This one did that. Not that we don't love our slashers, but a new year, new project, Summer-evening film, this wasn't.

Also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve, A Bay of Blood is a plot-twisty thriller, which uses its 13 ultra-gruesome murders as a selling point. They win, too, because the murders are graphic, icky, and realistic. I had to swallow a revisit of my dinner right in the very first few minutes when the Countess gets it. Bava does this thing where he presents a problem-free environment with lazy, lingering shots and then just ruins it all with immediate grossness. The Countess, for instance, wheels around her home for about five full minutes before she falls victim to a Wile E. Coyote-type rope set up and winds up hanging in the air and choking to death. Same thing happens with the naked, bathing Brunhilda, the couple making love in bed (their names, who knows?), Bobby brooding by the fire place (was it Bobby?) ... serenity, peace and then DEATH. But you know it's coming, you just never really know when, and that's Bava's genius. I thought Brunhilda was going to get it Jaws-style in the water, but instead she winds up neck-sliced on land, running away from her attacker, who wasn't even anywhere much near the water. The suspense works.

I spent much of the following scenes thinking about the Italian directors and their love affairs with carnage. Why do I dislike the modern horror "director" who revels in torture, and cheer when Bava or Fulci or Dario plugs an unsuspecting, personality-less character with similar brutality? Why do they get away with little character development and structure, people introduced seemingly to top up the body count (the massacred teens served little purpose here, as far as the plot goes). I loathe it in modern films, love it here. I have to work that one out. It could be because Bava is Bava and can do what he likes. It could be the time period. These guys were experimenting, defining a genre, rebelling and reflecting as all good filmmakers do, while guys today are ... I don't know what. Making a quick buck? Riding the wave? No one who has seen a Bava picture like this one can argue today's violent, gross-out horror is pushing boundaries, as is so often suggested. The boundaries had well and truly been pushed by the Italians 30 years ago. And no one, but no one, does random torture like the Italians.

But then, I guess, the murders aren't the real key to this one's enjoyability. The famed "13 characters, 13 murders" thing kept me glued. Who's going when? Who is left alive? Well, no one if all 13 people die. Wait, let's recount, there's that guy, that girl, the real estate man, the entomologist ... those children? Where do they fit in? It was so much fun putting the pieces together, watching just how the whole thing works. And there was motive for each and every slaying, even the teens, which made things a bit less random. The end, though, while clever, was a bit anti-climactic for me. Steve mentioned it's lack of earlier set up, and I agree. It came about quite suddenly, in an Amazing Stories kind of a way (you thought it was this, but it was THIS!), and we chuckled and we loved Bava for his cheekiness, but it let the movie down a tad. Every murder had motive, let's just say, bar the final two. Still, heaps of fun, and some really horrendous yuckness, like the dead guy covered in squids! Oh man, why?!

I'm giving this one 2.5 out of 5. Here's to a great movie-watching year!