‘The clouds are swirling. There will be tears shed over the bay...’
My thirst for new and exciting horror films has led me to some odd places over the last 12 months. After embarking on a quest to fill in the gaps from previous generations, I found myself visiting A Bay of Blood – the film credited as the genesis of the slasher genre. Included on the infamous list of 72 films banned in the UK by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mario Bava’s Giallo slasher film has been re-appraised over the years and regularly features in list of the top 50/100 horror films, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that it is utterly bizarre.
When a wily old landowner is killed by her husband Fillipo (who himself is murdered moments later), a chain of events lurches into action that sees a group of teenagers mercifully butchered, a young couple return to the bay to try and solve the mystery, and there is also a live octopus feeding on the face of a corpse. Horror director Joe Dante described this sequence of events as ‘one of the most preposterous and confusing plots ever put on film’. He’s not wrong. A Bay of Blood is essentially a series of death sequences with a plot inconveniently draped around it like an unwanted cardigan.
Can a film be considered a success just because it went on to become influential? I’m not so sure. And the fact of the matter is, other than the absurd plot, A Bay of Blood also boasts some truly terrible acting, shoddy camera work and sound editing that is barely worthy of the name. Everything is either too quiet or way too loud. Having said that, there are some genuinely visually striking moments, but even at barely 90 minutes, it felt like it was going on forever. The whole thing feels far too close to an episode of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place for comfort.
I finish my reviews with a variation on this next sentence quite a lot, but believe me when I say, this one is truly for horror completists only.