I am in the middle of a long season of Bava reviews. Although he is credited with creating the Giallo with ‘Blood and Black Lace’, he never made another straight genre entry. Instead, the closest he came was with this trilogy of films from the early 1970s.
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) is certainly the most conventional of the three but still has a very strange atmosphere, sees most of the killings take place off screen and seems to reveal the killer part way through… or not.
A Bay of Blood (1971) has a very mixed up plot for a Giallo (although it does at least all resolve) but is most interesting for its twenty minute slasher movie sequence – made almost a decade before the slasher movie boom.
Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970) is certainly the best of the trilogy and one of Bava’s very best. A psycho killer take on the genre, the main character is hunting the killer of his mother, a killer whose identity is blurred in his mind and revealed piece by piece when he kills…
Catch up with all the reviews on my
Mario Bava page.