Harry Thomason and his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason created TV’s Designing Women and were a 1990’s power couple, playing a major role in getting President Bill Clinton elected. But way before that, he wrote and directed this Rod Serling narrated film.

This movie presents its tales as true, set up by not one narrator, but two. Yes, Rod Serling was not enough. Let that sink in.

“The Heptagon” starts at the funeral of a college student. It turns out that three guys all played a prank that led to his death. A curse from his mother — the seventh daughter of a seventh son — leads to every one of them dying.

“The Darkness” is about a boy’s dog disappearing into a hole to hell and his father going insane after he tries to visit the hole. This feels like a retelling of the Shaver mysteries (see our review of Beyond Lemuria to learn more), although one possibly insane IMDB reviewer claims that they’ve been to the actual hole. There’s also an IMDB review of the film from the voice of the hole itself! Does this have something to do with the voices from Hell that have been proven to be audio from Baron Blood?

Finally, “The Girl on the Bridge” retells the urban legend “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” which has variations all over the country (check out this North Carolina one). Rosie Holotik from Horror High and Don’t Look in the Basement plays the title character, which takes this movie up several letter grades.

The end of the film feels like it keeps wrapping everything up, only to take us back to the beginning and tell it all again. It’s a really strange narrative device that probably was the only way that this movie got to a long enough running time to play in drive-ins.

This film is an odd duck. It’s so awesome in parts and so bad in others. Serling’s voice is perfect, but you can tell he had nothing to do with the writing. And yet, it all feels like something you’d love to watch all fucked up at a drive-in around 3 AM. So, you know, this would be a definite recommendation.

Thomason would follow this up with The Great Lester Boggs, a motorcycle film featuring ex-football player Alex Karras as a cop, The Day It Came to Earth and Revenge of Bigfoot, which starred Motel Hell‘s Rory Calhoun. Then, after writing and producing for The Fall Guy, he started moving in much more powerful circles.

If you want to see this for yourself, Diabolik DVD has the Code Red blu-ray that combines this film with Sasquatch. Or you can watch it for free on Amazon Prime.

I’m constantly on the hunt for certain movies. Ever since I saw the trailer for this — the only film to ever be shot in Duo-Vision — I’ve been on the hunt. Finally, in an Exchange store on a Sunday afternoon, my patience was rewarded.

The Grandview is one of those gorgeous California hotels that you dream of living the rest of your life in, Telly Savalas style. But there’s one big problem — any blonde female who checks in never leaves. I’d make a Hotel California joke here, but that just seems too easy.

Trivia note: This is really the Hotel del Coronado, where Some Like It Hot was shot.

David Bailey, from TV’s Another World, plays hotel detective Rick Stewart, who is busy with old women who don’t pay their rent and overly amorous beachfront lotharios. Soon, he’s on the trail of the killer, which gets more personal when his ex-wife Lisa James (Tiffany Bolling, The Candy Snatchers) shows up to sing at the Grandview and promptly dyes her brunette hair blonde. Whoops.

This song is the best part of the film. Becca and I have been singing it to one another ever since we watched this.

Writer/director Richard L. Bare — who holds the record for directing the most successive number of television shows (168 episodes of Green Acres) — planned to follow up this film with another Duo-Vision movie called October Incident, which was about trying to kill Castro. The gimmick wasn’t well received so the movie was canceled.

I’d best compare Duo-Vision to the way that Ang Lee shot his version of The Hulk. The other screen often shows what’s in someone’s mind or reveals the truth of what they’re talking about. The story probably wouldn’t be anything I’d seek out if it wasn’t for Duo-Vision, but I’m glad we have this in our collection. It’s one of the rare movies we’ve seen that reveals the killer almost instantly yet remains interesting.

More trivia: Aside from the songs that Bolling sings, the film’s soundtrack is mostly made up of the piano score from 1925’s silent Phantom of the Opera. And thanks to DVD Drive-In’s George Reis, I now know that Charles B. Pierce of The Town That Dreaded Sundown fame was the set decorator!

Thanks to the Warner Archive for restoring this oddball film. I wish I had seen it on the big screen and hope to get the chance one day!

Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? Maybe. Maybe not. But if you ask me, this combination of the occult and biker culture ranks really close.

Tom Latham (Nicky Henson, Witchfinder General) leads The Living Dead, a motorcycle gang that causes trouble and occasionally dabbles in black magic. The worm filled apple didn’t fall far from the tree — Tom’s mother, deceased father and butler Shadwell (George Sanders, All About Eve and Rebecca) follow the Left Hand Path. With their help, he learns how to die and come back from the dead — roaring from his freshly buried earth on his motorcycle (later Lemmy would do this in Motörhead’s “Killed by Death” video).

Soon, one after another of the gang commit suicide and return from the dead. Soon, the gang is killing cops and menacing babies. And their names! Gash, Hatchet, Chopped Meat, Hinkey and Bertram! This movie is about pure mayhem! I wonder, was all of England in the grip of Satan in the early 1980’s?

Director Don Sharp keeps things stylish and moving. This isn’t his first go-round with frogs in cemeteries, pacts with the devil, mysterious suicides and zombies. Check out his other film, Witchcraft. He was also behind Dark Places, Hammer’s Rasputin: The Mad Monk and the final movie in The Fly series, Curse of the Fly. This is his best work, though.

You should pretty much quit whatever it is you’re doing right now and go watch this. Luckily, it’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime.

What do you write about a movie that pretty much created modern horror? Sure, you can point to Night of the Living Dead and even Carnival of Souls as starting points, but from a mainstream blockbuster perspective, this is where the rules of modern supernatural horror begin.

Inspired by William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, which itself was inspired by the 1949 exorcism of Roland Doe (“The Pope’s Exorcist” Malachi Martin claimed that he was the inspiration, a point that Blatty denied) the legends around this film — it was a cursed set, it’s filled with subliminal messages — supersede a very simple fact: this movie is frightening as hell, even 40 plus years later.

Do I even need to tell you the story of how Pazuzu finds its way into an Ouija board and into the soul of the daughter of an actress? Probably not. What’s striking is that how long the movie takes to get there. Scenes of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) acting take precedence over the sad life of Father Karras, who has to deal with the death of his mother and his increasing lack of faith.

When do we realize something is wrong? When it is too late. When Regan (Linda Blair) intrudes on one of her mother’s boring parties, pisses on the floor and tells an astronaut “You’re gonna die up there.” PS — Want to know more about that guy? Then you should watch The Ninth Configuration.

Science can’t solve these issues. Detectives cannot. Only the Church can help.

What follows is a haunted house of scares that have been imitated ad nauseum (pun intended) so many times that we know the beats: head spinning, pea soup vomit, masturbation with a cross, blood, strange voices, levitation. A priest must show weakness before showing great sacrifice. And in the end, two old men find friendship in the aftermath.

It’s what is not seen that is most interesting, such as the old Hollywood directorial tricks William Friedkin used to get a reaction. He fired guns into the air to get a frightened reaction. He slapped some actors right across the face before important scenes. The painful screams of Blair and Burstyn are real — they were being yanked all over the set by stunt harnesses which caused both injuries and pain. And Regan’s bedroom was actually the inside of a freezer.

I’ve read for years about the subliminal that are supposedly hidden in the film, originally learning about them in William Poundstone’s book Big Secrets. Wilson Bryan Key — the guy who claimed that if you stack Ritz crackers up they always spell S-E-X — claimed that the film was full of images and sound effects that created a subliminal air of menace.

Friedkin has alternately claimed that subliminal messages are both “a very effective storytelling device. The subliminal editing in The Exorcist was done for dramatic effect — to create, achieve, and sustain a kind of dreamlike state” and that “there are no subliminal images. If you can see it, it’s not subliminal.”

One of the techniques used are the flashes of Captain Howdy, a demon who appears three times in the film. In an Entertainment Weekly article, Friedkin said, “You couldn’t catch it before VHS. And now you can stop the DVD and stare at it.” You’ll find the face during Regan’s examination, Dr. Karras’ dream, in the kitchen and several other places throughout the film.

Key also claimed that the word “pig” appears several times in the film, a keyword in the post-Manson era.

The site Subliminal Manipulation also writes that “the terrified squealing of pigs being slaughtered was mixed subtly into the soundtrack. The buzzing sound of angry, agitated bees wove in and out of scenes throughout the film.” They go even further to describe people fainting during the film and getting nightmares — attributed more to the subliminal than the horror content.  In addition, they say that “several theater employees were actually placed under the care of physicians and a few quit their jobs. Employees frequently had to clean up floors and rugs when nauseous spectators (mostly male, for some reason) did not quite make it to the restrooms.”

Want further conspiracy? That site also calls out author Blatty as a former CIA operative and policy-branch chief of the Psychological Warfare Division of the U.S. Air Force.

The music is another crucial element of the film. While Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (actually part one of the overall record) is considered the theme for the movie, it was a complete accident that it was picked. Originally, Lalo Schifrin created six minutes of music for the trailer that were considered too frightening when combined with the images of the film. Some claim that this music was reused for The Amityville Horror, but the truth is that Friedkin hated the music that while it was being recorded, he made the orchestra stop playing and threw the tapes away in the studio parking lot — in front Schifrin and his wife. Additionally, the director claims that he wishes that had he heard them sooner, he would have used Tangerine Dream for the film (they would score his film Sorcerer).

While the film wasn’t available on video or TV in England until the 1990’s, an American TV cut has plenty of interesting changes, including director Friedkin speaking new, censored lines for Regan. In addition, this cut has a different shot of the Virgin Mary statue that cries blood and a longer shot of Regan’s face changing into a demon. This network TV cut is rarely seen today.

Friedkin used Mercedes McCambridge, a voiceover actress, to help create the signature sound of the demon’s voice. A former alcoholic, she used raw eggs, chain-smoking and whiskey to achieve the voice she used (and add to her state of mind). Plus, Friedkin demanded that she be bound to a chair while voicing the demon, to better give the sounds of restraint. She later said that the experience was one of horror and rage, while the director himself admitted that the extreme to which she went through terrified him. Plus, while she originally didn’t want any credit, once Linda Blair received a Best Supporting Actress nomination, she decided to sue so that people would know the voice as hers.

There’s also a Director’s Cut and an Extended Director’s Cut (The Version You’ve Never Seen) that has some cuts here and there, longer FX (CGI aided) for the spider walk scene and some added scenes between Father Karras and Father Merrin. These tweaks would only be noticeable to someone who has watched the film over and over again.

We’ll get to them eventually, but there were several sequels and prequels, such as Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Exorcist III, Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist.

Was The Exorcist upsetting? Well, TV preacher evangelist Billy Graham claimed an actual demon was living inside the movie.

As for viewers today, they may be surprised at the sinister power that this movie still holds.

When horror movies have socially maladjusted kids getting abused by popular football players while showing how attractive girls can still fall for them, they’re playing directly to their demographic. How many fright fans felt the same way or endured the same stings and arrows as the hero of this film?

Everybody beats the shit of Vernon. His fellow students hate him. His teachers despise him. Even the janitor. His only friend is Robin (Rosie Holotik, Nurse Charlotte from Don’t Look in the Basement), who is dating the main football player who abuses him. And his other friend, the mouse known as Mr. Mumps? Well, he’s taking a mind-altering potion that Vernon’s developed that makes the little fella super violent. In fact, it makes him so brutal that it kills the janitor’s cat, who flips out and smashes the little fellow and forces Vernon to drink his own potion.

Pat Cardi, the actor who played Vernon, was a busy child star, playing in over 100 TV shows and appearing as a young chimp in Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He grew up to create and found MovieFone, which in the pre-internet days was how people discovered what films were playing in theaters.

Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, Abby) plays the detective who comes into the school once Vernon starts killing. The murder scenes form a proto-slasher vibe while the music is crazy, with primal power chords accentuating big moments (think the guitar sound from the Torso trailer). It also features Pittsburgh Steelers star “Mean” Joe Greene in a small role. If you live here in the Steel City, you need no introduction to Mean Joe. If you live elsewhere, he’s the player who threw a jersey to the kid in the Coca-Cola commercial. He’s also in The Black Six, one of the first all-black biker films, along with other NFL names like Gene Washington, Mercury Morris, Lem Barney, Willie Lanier and Carl Eller. Of course, we’ll be getting to this movie very soon. But until then, savor Joe in that Coke commercial:

At heart, this is a Jekyll & Hyde story (it’s Carrie before Carrie, too) but told as if it were a 1950’s teen monster movie refilmed through a 1970’s doom-laden lens. Its script comes from Jack Fowler, who is really J.D. Feigelson, writer of Wes Craven’s Chiller and Dark Night of the Scarecrow.

The film — also known as The Twisted Brain — was shot in Texas and released by Crown International in March of 1974 to the drive-in circuit. It really picked up its cult cache thanks to frequent TV airings. Code Red put out an uncut version on blu-ray in 2009, following a Rhino release of the TV version of the film. They’re both rather hard to get now, but worth seeking out. I found myself really liking this film, despite its budget and relative silliness at times.

Want to learn more? The new issue of Drive-In Asylum has an interview with director Larry Stouffer and some artwork from me that you can see here!

Once you watch this film, you’ll wonder — just how did this play on TV? It was part of the 13 titles included in Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated in 1975 (the others were Marta, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch) and several of these films aired intact on regular television! I can’t imagine — nor will you once you read this — what people thought! I even found a mention that the scene where Klaus Kinski inserts a pin into a girl’s eye aired uncut on Pittsburgh’s beloved Chiller Theater (indeed, it played on  July 7, 1979 and December 26, 1981, thanks to the amazing listing on the Chiller Theater fan site).

1906. Austria. Greta von Holstein (Ewa Aulin, Candy from Candy as well as Death Laid an Egg) has been used and abused by all of the men in her life, including Dr. von Ravensbrück, a rich cad who knocks her up and leaves her to die in childbirth.

Three years later. Her hunchback brother Franz, besotten with incestual love, brings her back to life with a magic medallion inscribed with the secret of life over death. He tries to get back into her pants, so she throws a black cat at his face. It eats his eyeballs, because, well, this is a Joe D’Amato movie. She then escapes into the world where she seeks revenge on the von Ravensbrück’s family.

Walter, the son of the doctor who done her wrong, and Eve, his wife, take her in after an accident outside their home. They both fall in love with her, which gives D’Amato license to shoot long lovemaking scenes. You may know him on one hand for his horror films, like Beyond the Darkness, Frankenstein 2000, Absurd and Antropophagus. But you may also know him for his adult films like Porno Holocaust and the Rocco Siffredi vehicle Tarzan X – Shame of Jane. Here, he combines his love of the female form with his eye for murder and insanity.

Eva is becoming jealous of Greta. But what he doesn’t know is that her new lover is wiping out people left and right, just for fun. The butler in the gallery with a razor. The maid in the woods with a shotgun. A lab assistant in the lab with a metal club. Even the family doctor (Klaus Kinski, do I need to say more or tell you he was in Schizoid, Crawlspace, Marquis de Sade: Justine and more? Or that he was also a maniac who was drafted to the German army, spent time as a POW and drank his own urine to get sick and get home earlier? This is not the craziest Kinski story, by the way…) is strangled right after he learns how to use her amulet to bring back the dead that he had been experimenting on (as you do).

Eva’s jealousy wins out, so she walls her up alive in the rooms beneath the castle, killing her. But Greta isn’t done yet. She shows up as a ghost at a party and lures Eva toward falling off the roof. That night, Greta’s ghost gives Walter a fatal heart attack in bed. And all of this was just to lure her old lover, Dr. von Ravensbrück, to the funeral, where she leads him to a vault and suffocates him.

A police inspector wonders if he’ll ever add up the case, as he finds the corpse of Greta’s brother near her empty grave. She’s gone and he wonders whatever happened to her. The person he has been telling the story to? Greta.

I was really struck by Berto Pisano’s music in this. He also contributed the strange soundtrack to Burial Ground. Here, his music is jazzy and then atonal, with sharp stings to call out the action.

I feel like I need to take a long shower after watching this movie. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. It’s an effective mix of giallo and gothic romance, with plenty of sleaze and gore for those seeking those thrills.

Lindsay Finch (Mary Charlotte Wilcox, The Beast of the Yellow Night and Psychic Killer) loves to go to funerals, where she mourns and then kisses the dead men passionately after everyone else leaves. Throw in a theme song that sounds like it comes out of James Bond while we see flashbacks of her relationship with her dead father and visiting his grave and pigtails and I’m all in.

She has swinging hippie parties at her pad and her friend Wade (Christopher Stone, the late husband of Dee Wallace who appeared with her in Cujo and The Howling)  tries to get with her. Just when it seems she’s giving in to his makeout moves, she screams at him to stop and he calls her a bitch, because this is 1973. She dreams of her father in yellow hued flashbacks and hugs a stuffed animal.

Later, she goes through the funeral notices to find the services for young men. We then meet Fred McSweeney, a mortician, as he picks up a male prostitute. That job is just a cover for his true love — a Satanic coven that meets at night, inside the mortuary, where they have orgies with dead bodies. McSweeney takes the young man to his workplace where he pumps the manwhore full of embalming fluid while he’s still alive, all while Lindsay goes to another funeral where she tries to make out with Bobby. She’s surprised by Alex (Lyle Waggoner, TV’s The Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman, as well as the honor of being the first nude centerfold in Playgirl and the appointed mayor of Encino, California), the man’s brother.

Speaking of that embalming scene, it goes on and on and on, with the young man screaming, “I’m blind!” over and over. It’s nearly campy instead of frightening. To say this film has an issue with tone is an understatement.

Lindsay sneaks out to Bobby’s funeral, where she starts to associate Alex with her father. He’s a rich gallery owner and they begin a romance — one she refuses to consummate, even after they are eventually married. Every time she sees him, we get yellow hued flashbacks with a music box soundtrack of her playing with her father. But more about that in a little, OK?

McSweeney speaks to Lindsay after he catches her at a funeral, telling her that he has a group that she should join. Yet she tries to remain normal, even going on a date with  Wade that fails. That’s when she decides to see what McSweeney’s group is all about.

She walks into an orgy with the dead, which freaks her out enough to go back home. Then she and Alex fall in love with no dialogue, just a montage. It’s a strange part of an incredibly strange film, with this happy go lucky relationship coming out of nowhere in a film otherwise about sex with dead people.

Lindsay keeps talking to the cult and ends up getting a dead body of her very own. But Wade follows her and is killed by McSweeney. She screams in horror. This scene wasn’t n the original script, nor was the Satanic group in the one that follows, but were used to pad out the film and add more horror elements so that it would potentially play drive-ins better.

Again — tone being all over the place — we’re treated to a nude cult disrobing Wade’s corpse and having their way with it before Lindsay awakes screaming. But the marriage isn’t working out well, with Alex following her all over town and their maid — complete with the most stereotypical Irish accent ever — telling him that his wife spends her days at her father’s grave, wearing pigtails and dressed like a little girl. You should see the look on Alex’s face when he catches her as she yells, “This is not your place, go away!”

Alex tries to get Lindsay to go on a holiday to visit his mother, but he discovers a registered letter from McSweeney to his wife for a meeting at 10 PM. He follows her to the mortuary where he discovers his wife surrounded by nude devil worshippers as she makes love to a dead body. She looks frightened and then McSweeney murders Alex, which calms her.

McSweeney drugs her as she lies in her bed, then brings in her husband, now embalmed so he can last forever, finally a man who she can be attracted to: the combination of her father — who we see in flashback being shot accidentally by her — and the man she fell in love with. The editing here — combined with dissonate instruments and a remix of the title theme — is crazy, like this film has suddenly become Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

We see intercut shots of Lindsay getting under the covers with her dead husband and her getting in the coffin with her father as everything goes sepia tone and the theme song returns.

Love Me Deadly isn’t for everyone. It’s one of those films that I hesitate to recommend to normal folks. But it is the kind of movie I text people about in the middle of the night.

Code Red has released this film on DVD, but it’s still rather hard to find. It’s up on YouTube, where I found it. It’s…well, it’s something. If you enjoyed The Baby, well, then you’re on the right wavelength of this one.

Feed Shark

Lisa and the Devil was shelved after a negative reception at the Cannes Market. A Bay of Blood was a box office disappointment. So Mario Bava decided to do something unlike any of his other films — developing a “poliziotteschi” film.

According to Roberto Curti’s Italian Crime Filmography, 1968-1980, poliziotteschi films “generally featured graphic and brutal violence, organized crime, car chases, vigilantism, heists, gunfights, and corruption up to the highest levels. The protagonists were generally tough working class loners, willing to act outside a corrupt or overly bureaucratic system.”

Bava filmed the entire film in chronological order, but the shoot was filled with issues. Original star Al Lettieri (The Getaway) was replaced after three days, mostly for showing up drunk. The replacement, Riccardo Cucciolla, spoke no English and had to read his lines from a script hidden inside the car (so Wikipedia says, but my copy is in Italian, so I have no idea why this was an issue).

Additionally, Bava’s son Lamberto, who was the assistant director on the film, has claimed that producer Roberto Loyola bounced all of the checks to the crew, who still finished the film within three weeks. All that remained were some cutaways and a pre-credit sequence, but Loyola went bankrupt and the film was lost in the courts.

There are numerous versions of this movie that were released in the mid 1990’s. For the interests of this article, we’ll focus on the Anchor Bay release of Kidnapped that was assembled by Alfredo Leone and Lamberto Bava.

After four crooks rob an armored truck, their getaway car is damaged and one of them is killed. The three that remain — Doc, Blade and Thirty-Two (George Eastman! Do I really need to tell you how much I love every movie this guy is in? Our site is literally his entire IMDB catalog, with movies like Stage Fright, Blastfighter, Hands of Steel, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Warriors of the Wasteland and more) — run into an underground garage, kill a woman and kidnap another named Maria (Lea Lander, Blood and Black Lace). They then steal another car driven by Riccardo (Cucciolla), who is trying to get a sickly child to a hospital before it’s too late.

The criminals force the man to drive them to their hideout. The film grows incredibly tense as Maria is on the verge of mania as she’s kept under gunpoint the entire way. Somehow, Ricardo remains calm. The heat is on, meaning that both the cops are on their tail and that the city is in the middle of summer. Doc forces the windows up on the car, keeping the nerves inside high.

Maria tries to escape after asking to be allowed to relieve herself outside, which leads to Blade and Thirty-Two capturing her and forcing her to do the act in front of them. It’s due to dogs, wandering the streets and barking, that she is caught (someday I have to do an IMDB list of movies that have dogs randomly wandering the streets).

These are base, horrible men who only know evil acts. After stopping for food and drink, Thirty-Two becomes drunk and attempts to rape Maria, an action that causes other motorists to notice the car. Doc replies by shooting his partner in the neck. The criminal lives, but now cannot move and is even more trapped than everyone else in the car.

The car stops to refill at a small town gas station, where the owner won’t even wait on them until his lunch is up. Doc tries to threaten him, but the old man has a gun at the ready. Blade finally resolves the situation by showing the sick boy inside the car and the old man decides to get back to work. However, a hitchhiker shows up and asks for a ride. As she gets in the car, the old man sees Thirty-Two’s bloody body, but he simply shrugs. It’s not any of his business.

The hitchhiker will not shut up, annoying everyone. When she removes the blanket and reveals Thirty-Two, Blade killing her feels like a relief. Doc asks Riccardo to pull over and they dump the body. And Blade carries out his friend Thirty-Two’s body and finally puts him out of his misery by shooting him.

Finally, they reach the group’s hideout, where Doc has another car and the papers that will allow he and Blade to leave the country. Then he reveals that he planned to kill Riccardo, the child and Maria. Riccardo begs for the boy to live, but Doc refuses and asks him to get him from the car. As Riccardo holds the boy, he pulls the gun he had inside the blanket all along, killing Doc and Blade, whose machine gun burst kills Maria. He takes Doc’s car and money, then leaves, only to reveal that he had been a kidnapper all along, holding the child for ransom. And the boy? Now he’s inside the trunk.

While this film has none of Bava’s trademark magic camerawork, it’s still taunt and well made. For example, in the scene where Doc shoots Thirty-Two, Bava uses tight close-ups of Doc and Riccardo’s faces, as well as the gun that Doc holds, then cuts to black as the car enters a tunnel. In that moment of no light or color at all on the screen — such a contrast to the dynamic hues we expect from the master — we simply hear the report of the gun being fired, stopping Thirty-Two’s rape of Maria. As we return to reality, Blade deals with his rage against Doc by screaming at his friend, only to discover that he is still alive. The flashbacks are relayed to us via voiceover instead of some dramatic camera move. Again — out of character, but this proves that Bava was not all special effects and tricks. He is filming the story as it should be filmed. The action inside the car is claustrophobic. And it had to have been even more so as it was filmed, as there’s real background zooming past behind the actors, so the camera was inside the car.

Also, this is a movie where you notice the acting so much more than in other Bava work. He takes a backseat to the true sense of dread and terror that his actors tell with their performances. I know that I’m a big Eastman fan, but he’s great in this film, a gigantic man child devoted to the id, barely restrained by the adult in the car, Doc.

Following this film, Bava would only work on one more film, 1977’s Shock. He would also do special effects work and uncredited direction on Dario Argento’s Inferno before his death in 1980.

In his later years, Bava left behind many unfilmed ideas. He was about to start filming a science fiction movie called Star Riders with Luigi Cozzi. That movie may have been the much-talked about sequel to Starcrash, which would have starred Caroline Munro and Klaus Kinski as the evil Baron Waak. Munro said of the film at Cannes, “With (her husband) Judd as my comical robot sidekick, El, we have a new mission. To help Baslim, a faithful officer in a dead king’s army, to unravel a mysterious plot of assassination and deceit-and save the life of a beautiful young princess.”

According to this amazing article, Bava had several science fiction films in mind, including the Dardano Sacchetti (The Beyond, A Bay of Blood, The House by the Cemetery, as well as just about every amazing Italian horror movie that is near and dear to your heart) scripted Anomalia, a Lovecraftian script about astronauts who find a wall at the end of the universe that separates good from evil. Holy shit, this is a film screaming to be made. There was also a plan to make The Space Wanderer, based on the Philip José Farmer book Venus on the Half-Shell, that sounds even more insane than that!