BLACK SABBATH

***This title is available from Amazon on DVD. It's very nice.***

It is a measure of Bava's talent that this, despite suffering awful degradations at the hands of it's American distributors, manages to not only survive as a good film, but - in places - as an excellent one. The aforementioned abuse included the enforced addition of 'mood lightening' scenes, stunningly poor dubbing and the replacement of Roberto Nicolosi's soundtrack by the most horrendous and unsubtle piece of crap that Lex Barker (who has enough of it in his repertoire) could come up with. The closing title theme is an up-beat comical arrangement of 'The Funeral March' that should be placed into a bag marked 'Aural Abortions' along with The Worzels entire back catalogue and Elton John's rictus-fictus inducing Candle In The Wind.

This is a portmanteau movie, much like those being produced by Hammer rivals Amicus at the time. These were occasionally effective (I've always had a fond spot for Asylum (71), where Richard Todd gets menaced by the bodily parts of a dismembered corpse and Patrick Magee is murdered by a silly robot doll), but often gave the impression that they were designed to cram as many stars as possible into a low budget. By having four stories in one film, you could hire lots of 'name' actors for what amounted in essence to cameos, but were leading roles within the context of the short segments they appeared in. Black Sabbath differs from this in that it actually gives the feeling that the individual tales were designed before the idea of cramming them into one film arose. The cast is also, with the exception of it's two imported American leads, distinctly lacking in marquee value.

After an entertainingly hokey introduction by bonkers Boris we start the first story. Adapted from a Chekhov doodle, THE DROP OF WATER tells of a nurse who is called to dress the corpse of a newly deceased medium. Seeing an expensive looking ring on it's hand, she can't help but be tempted and greedily proceeds to steal it, accidentally knocking over a glass of water on the bedside table as she does so. When she arrives home after carrying out the rest of her duties, she begins to hear noises associated with her avaricious act, which gradually get louder and more intrusive until they become unbearable.

A very effective little preamble, there isn't really that much to this section, but as an exercise in pure horror it succeeds with flying colours. With a decrepit atmosphere (much helped by the bizarre castle set, it's floor littered with cats and broken dolls (!?!)), this - like WHAT - makes much use of heightened sound. The tension is generated by drips and buzzes until, finally, a purely visible representation of the terror appears. Also graced by the ugliest corpse this side of Cap'n (bloated) Bob Maxwell and the almost equally scary Harriet White, this constitutes a convincing start.

Unfortunately it isn't maintained. THE TELEPHONE is a definite weak spot, despite carrying on in a similar vein. Again, it is the aural that is of import, and again it is basically a single woman within a confined space who is on the receiving end of the unleashed horror. This time it is Rosy, a wholesome looking lassie with a nice line in puffy nightdresses, and she is the victim of a persistent nuisance caller from beyond the grave. Despite it's sleazy overtones - the fear of voyeurism is nicely played upon - the plotting seems slapdash and there's a dreary sense of predictability. The supernatural elements were admittedly insisted upon by the moneymen, and it would be nice to see how this would have worked as a pure thriller (the undead caller is a betrayed ex-boyfriend out for revenge). In it's original form this could have born some resemblance to the recently rediscovered WILD DOGS, a crime thriller set in a car and in which the action occurs in in real time.

Fortunately, we end with an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's THE WURDALAK, a story which also inspired Giorgio Ferroni's pretty good Night of the Devils (La Notte dei diavoli, 1972) and Roy Ward Baker's pretty appalling The Monster Club (1980). Young aristocrat Vladimir D'Urfe is travelling across Eastern Europe when he comes across a headless corpse. Stopping at the next household he comes across, he is told that it is the body of a notorious bandit who also happened to be a Wurdalak - a dead person who feeds off the blood of the living in order to survive. He is also told that the creature's killer was the patriarch of the house, Gorka, who instructed them to kill him if he returned after five days have passed for their own safety. Of course, he returns just after the relevant bells have tolled, but they reluctantly allow him into the house in the hope that he may still be his old self. Silly fellows.

This is a bravura episode, and probably Bava's best entry in the gothic horror stakes with the exception of Black Sunday (La Maschera del demonio, 60), which it resembles thematically. Again, there is a family which is destroyed from the inside, by something which is not what it purports to be. In this case it is in the image of the father than the daughter that the corrosive element infiltrates the household, but it's effect - death and undeath - is the same. Again the outsider hero faces elimination through the strength of his love for someone who has two sides, one alive and one that feeds off the living.

Similar sets are also used - the forest of stunted trees and becobwebbed crypts - giving rise to a similar atmosphere that is - if anything - even more intense than that of it's predecessor. The snowbound terrain also recalls Corbucci's morbid The Great Silence (Il Grande silenzio, 1968), further accenting the hopelessness of the individual in the face of the overwhelming cruelty of nature and the environment. The imagery is bluntly chilling - a severed head hung from the gatepost, the small vampirised child kneeling prostate at the door in an attempt to lure his desperate mother from her safety (in a scene obviously inspirational to Salem's Lot (77)). One of the weirdest shots, the camera pulling back as Gorka rides off with his prepubescent victim, was actually accomplished by filming Karloff against a cyclorama backdrop on a rocking horse! Pure unadulterated genius.

Matt Blake