the audience applauded

People are voting emotionally.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

My first experience with giallo movie is Tenebre by Dario Argento but last night I just found out the godfather of giallo genre is Mario Bava so I decide to check out one of his movie and I pick A bay of Blood.like most of giallo afterwards A bay of Blood featuring very beautiful cinematography by Mario himself with many POV shot from the killer and of course the gory kills that soon inspire the slasher genre.To proof how non cliché this movie is a group of teenagers get kill off right away in the most brutal way that even one of the kill later has been later used on Friday the 13th franchise.About the plot I actually really into the mystery but haft way through it turned into a complete mess that I hardly care about.The movie is enjoyable but not that impressive

Bay of Blood is listed as a Mystery, Horror, Thriller film. Well, two out of three ain't bad... this is NOT a horror film, it doesn't really fall into the Stalker genre either because at it's core is a solid Thriller and Mystery... just with lots of gore...The opening sequence is a masterful exercise in creating atmosphere and tension as the director, Mario Bava, shows us the death of a wheelchair- bound woman. Bava gives the audience an uneasy feeling by hinting that something isn't quite right. The elderly woman wheels herself slowly to the window and looks out, though when she doesn't notice anything amiss she starts back into the house. Something catches her attention and she turns round towards the window once again. It's at this point she spots the noose... hands push her towards the awaiting death... as the rope tightens around her neck, somebody kicks her wheelchair away... This is shot in minimal light, though Bava makes sure it's not too dark giving the scene an eerie feeling. This is one of the better opening sequences I've seen in a movie as it immediately grabs the viewer and pulls them headlong into the story... Who is this woman? Why has she been murdered? Who murdered her? These questions get answered but are replaced with more mysteries in the course of the movie.The writers, Franco Barberi and Dardano Sacchetti, and screenwriters, Filippo Ottoni, Giuseppe Zaccariello, and Mario Bava, have scripted a tight murder mystery. As grisly death after grisly death occurs the audience is wondering what is happening as four sightseers are slaughtered. Slowly, the killer's motives are exposed and revealed to the viewers, with a couple of twists in the tale. It's a very good story and I didn't really work out whodunnit until it was disclosed. This was fantastic for me as I usually work out the murderer and their motives well before the reveal.The special effects are extraordinary, even today... there's one scene where one of the sightseers gets a machete to the face, though the kill shot is off camera the scene where the killer pulls it out of his victims head isn't. I must admit it's more than a little disturbing due to the reality of the effects.I'm still not too sure about the ending though. I have a dark and morbid sense of humour so the finale made me smile, though I don't think it quite fits with the film. It also has a feeling of being added to try and give the story a moralistic finish.Should you like murder mysteries then I would advise you to give this a viewing, though you have been warned about the goriness of some of the death scenes.

Whereas Black Sunday may be one of the most influential films for the discerning Gothic horror artiste, Bava's 1971 'tour de snuff', Twitch of the Death Nerve, is unarguably the most influential toward the genre's eventual turn to bloodlust. Whether you like it or not, the definition of a horror film hasn't been the same since Twitch, and chances of its influence ever completely receding are next to nil. The first film to exploit its body-count as the main reason for viewing, Twitch of the Death Nerve even hits the ground running (or wheeling rather), with the first two of its thirteen ghastly murders occurring in the first scene alone. Besides the high mortality rate of the characters, and Bava's diabolical tunnel vision of the carnage, another not so easily noticeable (yet perhaps most lasting) influence of Twitch is the complete reliance on set pieces to reach its sadistic goal. Every murder is methodically, systematically designed for optimum shock, and the film's cameraman (Bava himself), art director, actors, writers, editors, FX men, etc., all play their crucial and individual parts to perfection each time, thereby making each piece stand alone like masochistic movements in a sadistic symphony.Said actors run the gamut from fallen icons of World Cinema (like Isa Miranda), and ex-Bond Girls (Thunderball's Claudine Auger), to Laura Betti, and a Brechtian spaghetti western star (Luigi Pistilli). The writers include none other than Dardano Sacchetti, who had just recently penned Argento's Cat O' Nine Tails, and would go on to give Lucio Fulci one of the finest scripts of his career – The Beyond. Carlo Rambaldi, who would go on to win two Oscars for Alien and E.T., created the then-state-of-the-art special effects. I suppose I should mention the story line, which is often attacked for being inconsequential, illogical, irrational, impossible to sort out, or simply the odious ex machina to simply get from one murder to another. I find it all pretty simple to explain myself – I don't see what's so difficult to understand. Bava's penchant for cynicism and his fascination with humanity's dark side has never been more apparent than in Twitch of the Death Nerve, whose plot concerns greed, real estate, the raping of the environment, and revenge.All the action transpires around a beautiful, undeveloped bay and its surrounding picturesque landscape/acreage, whose owner (Isa Miranda) has been murdered. Those who wish to convert the entire area into a fashionable resort now threaten the forests and natural life. But just who is the real heir to this potential fortune now? And who won't stop at nothing to own it all, or to preserve the land's natural state. Throw in some sex-crazed teenagers who stumble and wander where they shouldn't belong, and you've got the makings for wholesale slaughter. Beheadings, faces cleaved in two, necks gouged apart, bodies run through with spears & tridents, flying pots of boiling water, hangings, strangulations, bodies being blown to shotgun bits – Twitch of the Death Nerve's got it all! Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas said it best, "…the horror genre had seen nothing quite like it before – and it's seen very little unlike it ever since." Touché. As with his work on I Vampiri and Black Sunday, Bava likely had no idea that what he was making would change the course of horror film history. Twitch of the Death Nerve was a film for which Bava was especially proud – the body count, the blatantly offensive amorality, the over-indulgent carnality, and the ludicrous lump of unlikable characters.All these things were purposeful commentary on Bava's part – to take a stab at the industry, the genre; to see what he could do with a little bit of money; to push the envelope; to push the buttons and watch people's reactions. Such are valid and fun reasons for doing what he did. Little did Bava know that Twitch's genius would be singularly responsible for a whole bevy of '80s crap, including Friday the 13th, Part II's blatant theft of two of Twitch's death scenes. Argento's Bird and Bava's Twitch were the nails in the coffin for the first half of Italian Horror's heyday. The dark, alluring fantasies were now gone. No longer would the plots be semi-innocent, or quasi-Victorian. No more wandering through fogged graveyards and abandoned castles. Though Bava continued to make some work of merit in the '70s (Baron Blood, Lisa and the Devil), never again would he find himself at the forefront of the genre he almost single-handedly created. The future belonged to perversion, degeneracy, gore, hysteria, cannibalism, Teutonic witches, zombies and Goblins…lots and lots of Goblins.

I watched it on the Horror Channel and am seeing for the first time (I'm mid 40's) a number of horrors of this vintage on this channel. It is not my usual fare, so I'm not expert. The version was dark and well saturated. It was dubbed, too. Normally I never watch my World Cinema dubbed but this is 80's horror and like badly dubbed porno of a certain age, a degree of naffness adds to the overall charm. And you don't want your screen littered up with tiny writing when you want to see all the gory details, do you?No, there's not much plot - that also would get in the way, too much to think about. Something about the Bay in question being turned into a holiday resort and the consequent nasty removal of those persons inheriting that land. What you DO get are some very inventive murders - 13 of them, apparently, naked bathing beauties and some pretty scenery. Much better than today's total, full-on barrage of splatter. It looks quite European.What is great about this director is the very fast moving camera - it zooms in and out very fast at times for maximum shock effect, which may only appear for a few seconds. Unfortunately the dark screen hid quite a lot of detail, there were fight scenes where you could only make out wrestling bodies and nothing else. The final scene will have you in amused disbelief.I enjoyed it, at least and seems to be a bit of cult classic, so is recommended.