Mario Bava Collection Volume 1:

The earliest film in the set is Black Sunday/La Maschera Del Demonio, a lavish tale of vampire revenge from beyond the grave, based loosely on a short story by Russia's master of the macabre Nikolai Gogol. In 16th century Moldavia, Princess Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele) is put to death, along with her brother, for sorcery, vampirism or incest (possibly all three). Two centuries later, a pair of doctors on their way to a conference encounter the ruins of the Vajda chapel and its adjacent crypt. Through the doctors' own folly, they awaken the satanic duo, who then precede wreck their vengeance upon their descendants, most notably Katia Vajda (also played by Barbara Steele). Needless to say, they ratchet up a significant body count by the final reel.

With Black Sunday, his first credited outing as a director, Bava already displays many of the visual tropes he would come to rely on throughout his career, such as 360 degree pans to establish the stage, strategic use of the zoom lens, an obsession with eyes, and richly baroque (if often dilapidated) settings. Working with a shoestring budget, Bava set the bar for what a horror director could achieve with a few cobwebs, some empty suits of armor and a fog machine cranked to eleven. For a film that is nearly fifty years old, Black Sunday still posses the power to shock a viewer, particularly in the gore department, which is far more graphic than anything Bava's American or British counterparts would have dared to attempt.

The acting is no less stellar; with Barbara Steele, giving a performance as the evil Princess Aja that is less acting than it is a force of nature, practically dooming her to a career of climbing out of caskets. The male leads are suitably gullible and overly romantic, but ultimately they're window dressing. After all, in horror films, villains (or villainess in this case) and the damsels in distress are always far more interesting.

Next up chronologically is The Girl Who Knew Too Much/La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo, Bava's attempt to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock, creating what is arguably the first giallo in the process. Nora Davis (Letecia Roman) is an Italian-American on holiday in Rome, who arrives to have her host, an elderly friend of the family, die her first night in town. Her luck doesn't improve when she goes to find help, only to be mugged and seemingly witness a murder whilst in shock. Dashing doctor Marcello Bassi (John Saxon) becomes smitten with the attractive trouble magnet and helps her investigate a string of murders known as the Alphabet Killings.

Bava sets the dread in motion early on in this picture and rarely pulls back on the throttle, taking advantage of every twist and turn, stumbling only on the killer's unmasking. Letecia Roman plays her role with the right amount of Gidget-esque naiveté, and John Saxon makes quite a credible leading man. If you're only familiar with his more schlock-oriented roles from the 1970's, his performance here will be a revelation (in as much as a dubbed performance can be). Although The Girl Who Knew Too Much was supposed to be a bit of a Hitchcock parody, and indeed there are a number of lighthearted touches (the overhead shot of Roman being looked over in a hospital bed by a group of nuns, only to have them pull back in an oddly Busby Berkeley-esque reveal stands out), this film really does stand on its own merits and sets the stage for a plethora of Italian produced mystery films.

1963's Black Sabbath/I Tre Volti Della Paura presents a trio of ghastly tales hosted by Boris Karloff. The first and most effective of these is The Telephone, in which a young (and it's assumed kept) woman is being stalked on the telephone by an unknown menace. The second segment, The Wurdalak features Karloff himself as a vampire looking to feed on his family. This is followed by The Drop Of Water in which a nurse steals a ring from the hand of a woman who died in mid-séance, to dire consequence.

While The Drop Of Water plays like story rejected by Night Gallery (but with much better makeup and effects), the other two tales of have lots going for them. In The Telephone, for example, an excellent subversion of our expectations in the stalker film is deftly executed by Bava, while in The Wurdalak, Karloff shows that he still had the chops to inspire chills decades after Frankenstein. And, the fact that Bava was willing to toy around the issue of Kindertot in this segment is still rather daring after all this time.

Black Sabbath was also Bava's first film in color, which he utilizes to stunning effect; drenching the screen with phantasmagoric shades that accentuate the onscreen madness in a way that would become his trademark.

Knives Of The Avenger/I Coltelli Del Vendicatore is basically for-hire Bava working in the Viking-Hercules milieu. It's rumored that he took the job after the first director left, and the contrasting footage makes this painfully obvious. While Cameron Mitchell is manly in his loincloth, and the movie is basically a paint-by-numbers genre picture, there are some parts that boggle the mind. For example, any of the scenes that feature the ocean are guaranteed to have endless shots of waves lapping the shore, as if the cameraman pointed his lens at the surf and went off to lunch. The scenes that Bava shot have some of his trademark camera work and (very) slight touches of his Grand Guignol excess, but these only serve to minimally elevate this film above its matinée fodder origins.

Finishing out this box is Kill, Baby.Kill!/Operazion Paura, which is generally considered to be one of Bava's finest films (others would say that crown belongs to Blood & Black Lace). This movie really shows Bava at the height of his powers; using superstition, fake blood and creepy dead children to create an experience that is at once frightening and disorienting. A doctor is summoned to an isolated village to determine whether or not foul play was responsible for a woman being impaled on a wrought iron fence. The entire village lives in the grip of fear created by the Villa Graps, and its unhinged mistress Baroness Graps. Joining the doctor is a young woman returning to the village after being away for twenty years, a police inspector and the mayor of the village. The bodies pile fast in this film, and the viewer is left guessing as to causes, suspects and motives.

Kill Baby.Kill! is really much more than a film, it's an endurance test for the viewer, as Bava doles out very few clues to follow. There's no denying the rush and thrills one gets watching it. And there are some genuine jump-out-of-your-skin moments along the way. Even genre fans who think they've seen it all may be taken by surprise by much of what this film has to offer.

Unlike previous horror filmmakers, Bava gave the menace a more overt sexuality and imbued the proceedings with a more distinctive psychological passion. His repeated imagery that suggests disintegrating opulence contrasted with almost universally voluptuous female leads creates an underlying sexual pathology that is brought to the surface through the subjective gaze of Bava's camera.

Taken as a whole, these films show the origins and evolution of a singular filmmaker. Comfortable directing horror as well as camp, Bava left a lasting impression on genre filmmakers, and his influence can be seen in the works of Fulci, Argento, Romero, and traces of his influence can even be found as recently as the Tarantino-Rodriguez experiment Grindhouse.


Disc Presentation
The Mario Bava Collection Volume 1 collects these five films into a crack rock of astronomical proportions for horror al Italiano and giallo junkies alike. And, like most drugs worth taking, there is no thought given to restraint. For this collection, Anchor Bay has used the most pristine elements available. There are a few flaws here and there, mostly what appear to be shrinkage of the master print, and there are definite, but very tolerable, signs of age. With the exceptions of the penultimate scene in Kill, Baby.Kill! (which looks like it was transferred from either a work print or a washed out VHS copy), and a few rough spots in Knives Of The Avenger, the transfers here shine, rendering almost any previous editions obsolete. The films are presented, as far as I can tell, in their original theatrical ratio and enhanced for widescreen televisions.

The sound is all mono, but it's a clean mono. While Black Sunday is presented with only an English language track, and both The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Black Sabbath are presented exclusively in Italian, the remaining films feature both Italian and English language options. English subtitles are available on all of the films except for Black Sunday, which is particularly vexing, since when the audio commentary is going on, you can't follow along. Since you probably wouldn't watch it with the audio commentary without having seen it first, it's not really that big of an issue.

DVD Extras
Speaking of audio commentaries, the ones provided by Tim Lucas, publisher of Video Watchdog are gobsmackingly dense; loaded with more trivia, production history, and genuine joy for the pictures on display than any I've heard in recent memory. Lucas is on the verge of publishing his biography of Bava, which looks to be bigger than the Manhattan phone directory (don't believe me, check out the pictures at www.bavabook.blogspot.com). The only hassle is on Black Sunday, where the commentary completely drowns out the audio of the film, so that whenever there's a lull in the commentary, you can't hear a thing (and, again, no subtitles on this film). Sadly, Knives Of The Avenger and Kill, Baby...Kill! are bereft of commentaries. A commentary would have really kept the former from being such a dull note in an otherwise stellar collection and would have greatly enhanced one's appreciation for the latter. To be fair, another label was scheduled to release Kill , Baby...Kill! with Lucas' audio commentary, only to be postponed at the last minute, and screener copies of this edition are going for top dollar. If this version never sees the light of day, I hope Lucas would consider making a commentary of some kind available via a podcast. A geek can dream, can't he?

There are also some interesting featureettes: The Girl Who Knew Too Much includes Remembering The Girl With John Saxon, which features Saxon discussing what it was like working with Bava and how they didn't get along, and A Life In Film: An Interview With Mark Damon. In the latter featurette, the Black Sabbath lead makes the incredulous claims that he suggested Clint Eastwood to director Sergio Leone and that he, not Roger Corman, directed The Pit And The Pendulum. Damon comes across as amiable, if a bit smug.

Anchor Bay also earns brownie points for putting oodles of trailers in this set. Some films, like Knives Of The Avenger only have their AIP trailers, while other films get both the AIP trailers and their international versions as well. My gripe with the trailers is directed towards the folks who created them. Many of them give away crucial points of the films they're advertising, so I'd advise first time viewers to save the trailers for dessert. The TV spots on Kill, Baby...Kill! are particularly enjoyable, with the narrator admonishing "Be sure that you are insured before you see...".

Finishing out the extras are excellent onscreen biographies and radio spots. Listening to these spots made me nostalgic for hyperbolic movie advertisements that didn't rely on a blurb from a critic or mention of which direction a particular thumb was going.

Bottom Line
After getting over some initial disappointment at Anchor Bay's decision not to include the AIP versions of these films, I have to say that The Mario Bava Collection Vol. 1 is still an outstanding collection. Every one of these films (well, Knives Of The Avenger may require a few qualifiers) are worth owning and thanks to this set, you get a lot of bang for your buck. If this set is any indication of what's in store for the future, I'm already salivating at the thought of what will be on Vol. 2.