Italian Cinema - vo.rs

Blood and Black Lace: Bava Invents the Body Count

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Every slasher film owes a debt to a fashion house in Rome in 1964. Blood and Black Lace, released in Italy as Sei donne per l’assassino, “Six Women for the Murderer”, is the film where Mario Bava assembled the parts that half a century of horror would keep re-using: a faceless killer in gloves, a set of glamorous victims, deaths staged as the film’s central spectacle rather than its interruptions, and a plot that exists mainly to hang murders on. It borrowed and recombined elements already floating through crime fiction and gothic cinema, fused them into a single template, and the template held.

Danger: Diabolik: Bava's Pop-Art Crime Fantasia

Wed, 28 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

For years the widest audience Danger: Diabolik ever reached met it as a punchline, the film being pulled apart in the final episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1999. That is a strange fate for one of the most purely beautiful things Mario Bava ever made, and it says more about how the world lost track of Bava than about the film. Watch it clean, without the silhouettes and the wisecracks, and Danger: Diabolik reveals itself as a pop-art dream: a comic-book heist fantasia conjured, in 1968, out of coloured gels, forced perspective, a masterful cutting rhythm and almost no money at all.

The Dubbing of Eurohorror and What English Tracks Did to It

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Put on a Lucio Fulci film and you will hear something faintly wrong before you can name it. The voices sit a fraction ahead of or behind the lips. The room tone is too clean. An American cop and an Italian villager somehow share the same acoustic space, as though recorded in the same padded booth, which they were. This is not a fault in the print. It is the native condition of a whole national cinema, and once you understand why, the question of which version of a Eurohorror film is the “real” one becomes genuinely knotted. There often is no single original. There are only versions, and the English track is one of the strangest and most consequential.