Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: Bava (Mario or Lamberto)
Lamberto Bava is not his father.
And that’s fine.
I used to expect him to live up to being the son of Mario Bava, but look—that’s the tallest of tall orders.
I doubt I’ll ever live up to my dad, a teacher of nearly forty years who changed lives. All I do is write about boner movies and foreign sleaze.
But if we take the father and son dynamic out. Lamberto gave us plenty. Demons, A Blade in the Dark, Macabre and probably lots of Shock and The House of Exorcism. Oh yeah, Demons 2, Blastfighter, You’ll Die at Midnight, Delirium…that’s way better than most and worlds better than directors who are much better respected.
Yeah, he made Monster Shark and plenty of goofy TV movies, but I can admit it. I like all of them. Long ago, I decided to get over it and admit my love for his movies.
In 2007, Lamberto emerged from a long feature hiatus to direct Ghost Son. Other than the 2012 TV miniseries 6 passi nel giallo, this has been it for the younger Bava, so what do we get? How about a movie about a possessed infant, filmed on location in South Africa—yes, John Old Jr. and Mickey Lion will both play Sun City—with actual Hollywood actors who look deeply, profoundly confused about how they ended up here.
I mean, Pete fucking Postlethwaite is in this movie.
Stacey (Laura Harring, fresh off Mulholland Drive and trying her absolute damnedest; to be fair, she was also in Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! and The Forbidden Dance, so she knows what she’s in for here) and Mark (John Hannah) are madly, sickeningly in love. They live on a sprawling, picturesque horse ranch in South Africa, spending their days riding through sun-dappled brush and having aggressive afternoon passion. Their honeymoon bliss hits a brick wall when Mark perishes in a violent car crash.
Italian directors love to kill men in love off in car crashes. It’s kind of a thing.
Anyway, Stacey is crushed, tumbling into a catastrophic depression inside her empty manor, tended to only by her local housekeeper, Thandi (Mosa Kaiser), and the dependable family doctor, Doc (Postlethwaite, who seems both exhausted and singing karaoke in his head, endlessly repeating, “Well, how did I get here?”). Desperate and suicidal, Stacey attempts to end it all in the bathtub, only for the ghostly apparition of Mark to appear behind her, taking her hands and sliding into the water. Instead of taking her to the afterlife, however, ghost-Mark decides to take her to supernatural pound town.
Stacey soon learns that she is pregnant with her late husband’s child.
At first, the baby seems like a miracle—a piece of her lost love returned to Earth. But once little infant Martin arrives, the miracle becomes an Italian horror movie. The baby doesn’t just cry; he stares with a cold, malevolent gaze. Stacey begins to experience terrifying visions and physical assaults from her newborn.
Then, the two-month-old infant sprouts a sharp phantom tooth and bites down on her breast until he draws blood. You see the whole thing. Want it to get better? Well, the baby starts making out with her in the shower, turns into the ghost of her husband, makes out with his mom and potentially has a ghost baby boner.
This is why Italian horror exists.
As the spectral baby escalates to projectile-vomiting like a miniature Linda Blair — come on, let’s be frank, more Juliet Mills — and staging supernatural domestic accidents, Stacey is left isolated on the lonely plains, desperately trying to figure out if her husband’s restless spirit is trying to drag her into the grave through their son or if she’s simply drowning in a lethal case of postpartum psychosis.
Bava films the entire thing with the somber, heavy-handed weight of a prestige BBC period drama or a Lifetime Channel movie of the week. Ghost Son plays like a deeply strange remake of Shock —the legendary haunted-house picture that Mario Bava directed at the end of his life, which Lamberto famously co-wrote and ghost-directed parts of. Bava even goes so far as to copy Shock‘s most famous Texas switch jump-scare but with morphing, which was already out by 2009, but God bless you, Lamberto.
Yet, there’s a perverse charm to how dead-earnest the whole mess is. Laura Harring carries the picture on her back, giving a performance far better than the material deserves, treating every bizarre infant assault like she’s going to win an award for this and not just at Sitges or those Saturn Science Fiction Awards that I think were fake. John Hannah leans into the ridiculousness of voicing a demonic baby with surprisingly menacing charm. And then there’s Sergio Stivaletti’s practical effects work, which is right in the bloody pocket.
Is Ghost Son a good movie?
Depends on who you are.
If you’re normal, you weren’t reading this anyway.
If I said, “Dead husband makes a ghost baby who he possesses so he can keep his wife from beyond the grave and also, incestuous demon baby sex scene,” and you get all flushed and think you might pass out from the movie drugs I’m holding, then yes, it’s great.
You are the kind of person who sees that it has made for TV lighting, a slow pace and says, “Dammi di più, bel bastardo.”
PS: Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni is in it. “We came to celebrate you, not your dress.”
