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Mario Bava's disprezzo, as Moravia would have it, is at once signaled, Edwige Fenech's wiggling begins with a double crash-zoom and ends with ersatz blood hosed off her ample bosom with a spritzer bottle. Glossy dummies on the island resort, an experimental resin formula coveted by the industrialist host (Teodoro Corrà) and his cronies. The scientist (William Berger) fights off opulent offers, his wife (Ira Furstenberg) is an "ice maiden" with a hidden judo throw, the axis of a crisscrossing welter of venal affairs. A matter of dirty whores versus clean whores, declares Fenech's coquette to her glorified pimp of a husband (Maurice Poli), just back from a tryst with the houseboy. "We have to do something for the working class, don't we, darling?" A slew of killings whittles down the sleek ensemble, corpses are wrapped in plastic and kept in a meat locker among slabs of beef, electric organ notes mock each new addition. "Filthy swine from the same mold," a fittingly hollow slaughter for a bourgeoisie more synthetic than the mannequins in Blood and Black Lace. (The point of departure is less And Then There None than Le Amiche.) A focus shift blurs the contemplative figure by the shore at dusk as a rifle barrel invades the frame, the beauty rises from bed to pose amid palm trees and is next seen with a bullet in her manicured head. A scuffle is glimpsed through a lattice panel, the brawlers knock down a modernist sculpture and the camera follows rolling spheres down a staircase and into the gory foam of a suicide's bathtub. "Shall we take bets on who dies first? The dead one wins." Bava promptly revises (and perfects) this human terrarium with A Bay of Blood. With Howard Ross, Helena Ronée, Ely Galleani, Edith Meloni, and Mauro Bosco.
--- Fernando F. Croce |