The Horrible Horror Vault: The one where everybody's the killer

 

 

Title: Twitch of the Death Nerve aka Bay of Blood

What Year?: 1971

Classification: Parody/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

When I started this feature, one thing I was planning all along was to cover the giallo genre, something I’ve ranted about regularly without actually reviewing, and it’s crossed my mind that some might doubt if I really know about it at all. In fact, I surveyed the field some time ago with a semi-random selection that included several of the most praised or notorious examples, but came out with nothing I could use except Phenomena (which I keep getting the title of wrong), a late and definitely odd example. Once I set out for a rematch, I knew the choice was one I don’t believe I got to until well after my initial dive, perhaps the most egregious and influential. It’s incredibly bloody, absolutely pointless and kind of fun. I speak, of course, of Twitch of the Death Nerve, aka A Bay of Blood, and you should be able to tell right off the bat that character development was not a selling point.

Our story begins with the murder of a crippled old woman, staged as a suicide by a guy who is himself promptly done in. It’s revealed that Casualty Zero was the heiress who held title to a beachfront property sought after by developers. With her death, interested parties are coming out of the woodwork, including her possible illegitimate son, a businessman and his mistress, a clueless amateur fortune teller and her equally distractable entomologist husband, and a husband-and-wife pair who brought their kids along for some reason. They all want the property, most of them will kill to get it, and very soon they are rubbing out each other as well as a handful of intruding teenagers. It’s kill or be killed, with an assortment of deadly hardware, and the parents just might be the ones with the drive to win. But the only thing more questionable than not bringing your gun to a knife fight is leaving it where your kids can find it!

Twitch of the Death Nerve was a 1971 giallo/ horror film directed and co-written by Mario Bava, a filmmaker known for horror and crime films such as Black Sabbath and Danger: Diabolik. The film was based on a story by Dardano Sacchetti, with the eventual plot reportedly being developed around various violent death sequences already conceived by Sacchetti and Bava. The film was shot in early 1971 at the vacation home of the film’s producer, Giuseppi Zaccariarello. The cast included Bond girl Claudine Auger as the protagonist Renata and Luigi Pistilli as her husband, with Laura Betti, an actress who had previously worked with Bava, as the fortune teller Anna. Gore effects were provided by Carlo Rambaldi (see Conan The Destroyer, ET). The film was first released in Italy under the title Ecologia del Delitto (Ecology of Crime) and later under the title Bahia De Sangre (Bay of Blood) in Spain. It was released in the US under its given title as well as Carnage, with a reported R rating. The film benefited from multiple re-releases through the 1970s, and became an influence on American slasher films such as the Friday the 13^th franchise. Bava died in 1980 at age 65. Auger died in late 2019. It is currently available under the Bay of Blood title for digital streaming on platforms such as Shudder, but is not offered for purchase or rental.

For my experiences, I freely admit to hearing of this one from Brandon’s Cult Movie Reviews. What interested me from the start was that, from reviews and synopses alone, it clearly qualifies as a parody, not necessarily in the sense of intentional comedy (then again, we’re dealing with the Italians, so I’m not going to say no…) but certainly in the sense of satirizing and deconstructing the genres it is a part of. The entirely disconcerting part is just how damn early it is. Gialli had been around for a while by the time this came along, yet they certainly were not dying out as a “straight” form the way the old-school “whodunit” had been in the US (compare to Picture Mommy Dead). Even so, this film came along to skewer their conceits and cliches, under the direction of one of the filmmakers who did the most to establish the genre in the first place. It should have been the unkindest cut of all to fans and peers alike, except, it became one of the more popular and well-regarded entries in the genre.

Moving forward, if there is one thing where I might dissent with other reviewers, it is that I do find plenty to differentiate the characters. The most interesting character and on paper the closest we get to a sympathetic one is the heiress’s son, who is in turn the only party to be personally wronged by the others. However, per the official score card, he also accounts for most of the collateral casualties among actually uninvolved bystanders, albeit trespassers in his own house. By comparison, the one you would definitely root against is the businessman, whom I honestly thought committed many more of the killings. By the time we get to the nominal protagonists (whom I had no idea are actually part of the family), they really are the nearest thing to “good” guys. Sure, they knock off the most harmless of the lot for no particularly good reason, but they are the ones who have to deal with the contenders who already provided most of the body count. The core irony among many is that if they kept their heads down or just left, they would probably have come out on top anyway. The real head scratcher is that they seem to be the only ones to bring a firearm to the proceedings, which of course only comes into play when an ironic twist demands it.

All of this is really worked around the central reality that this is all literally and willfully meaningless. Up to a point, this is of course the point, and it is impressively successful in skewering targets well before their most currently familiar examples. Among other things, it offers a striking counterpoint to the “tragic villain” archetype now familiar as part of the superhero genre. The characters all have their motives and backstories that they think justify their actions in some way, but the glaring reality is that they are almost all after the same thing for the same reasons. By my assessment, it all runs into two glaring problems. First, for all the pretensions of sophistication, there are realities that the satire must ignore rather than merely work around. The real reasons the rich don’t slaughter each other like Hunger Games contestants have everything to do with systems developed and evolved by and for them. Second, despite its deconstructions, there is still at least one unnecessary diversion to establish several characters’ motives as a plot point. This can in itself be granted as part of the satire, yet the fact remains that it is far too long to be amusing or effective in any other way.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with one that I’m still not satisfied with the usual explanations for. A ways in, Renata is looking around the house (or one of them), before she has really done anything herself. She discovers a room with three bodies, all from a group of teens who wandered in. She is genuinely shocked and justifiably terrified. That’s when she sees the businessman, who promptly tries to kill her. Now this is where I find some doubt in certain summaries that say someone else murdered the bystanders. The businessman is certainly all in for killing her, as she would certainly be a threat to his schemes already. She runs, and manages to get a door between her and her attacker, which happens to be an awful lot like a certain horror movie a few years ahead. She manages to grab a clearly inadequate weapon before pushing against the door, which is made in large part of glass. Just when you would be thinking how long it will take for one of them to figure this out, she takes a swing and puts her nominal weapon right through the glass. It’s one of the more creative and effective moments of a well-executed film. It leaves the further question open if this is the moment she flat-out snaps.

In closing, what I come back to are my own suspicions about the real course and nature of the slasher genre. Back when I reviewed Sleepaway Camp, I pointed out that the whole genre was devolving into self-parody even in the early 1980s, a reality further demonstrated by John Carpenter’s valiant efforts to do something, anything else with Halloween 3. In that context, the present film feels like an eerie memento mori, made and released at virtually the same time Silent Night, Bloody Night was fumbling its way through a rudimentary outline of the slasher movie as an American phenomenon. My conclusion is that the slasher movie and the giallo before it were always on the verge of either intentional or unintentional or unintentional comedy. What this movie demonstrates is that a clever satire/ parody can not only overcome the limitations of its source material but actually improve on its better points. That’s just enough to put this one far enough on my good side to get to the middle of the ratings scale. Make no mistake, it’s absolute trash, but it’s the kind of trash that knows not to pretend to be anything else. For someone who knowingly wrote the Exotroopers series, that’s enough for a little mutual respect.