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Reviews - Kill Baby! Kill and Baron Blood
Kill Baby Kill! and Baron Blood
Two more Mario Bava movies consumed. Kill Baby Kill is the last disc in the first dvd box set, about a town literally haunted by the death of a little girl. Apparently she is forcing people to kill themselves. There ends up being a little more to it. It's another low-budget Gothic gem from Bava, with great atmosphere and some unnerving sequences. It's creepy whenever you see the girl huddled silently in a corner of the room, or wherever.
Baron Blood is in the second box set, and it's a little curious how Anchor Bay packaged these because it's very hard to tell the chronology of these films. I picked this one because another one in the set said it was made after the widespread success of Baron Blood, so I figured I'd start with a good one. In late '60s or early '70s Vienna, a young man comes to his ancestral castle, curious to unlock the mysteries surrounding his ancestor, known locally as Baron Blood for his Vlad-like terror upon the citizenry in his time. The castle is undergoing renovation to become a tourist attraction or hotel, and there he meets international sexpot Elke Sommer, a student helping with historical details about the castle. They read an incantation to bring the Baron back to life, and it starts to work, so they read the one to cancel it. But later, they do it again, and the old parchment gets burned, so they can't undo what they've done, and the shambling Baron goes a-killin'. The movie gets a bit disjointed with the arrival of Joseph Cotten as the new owner of the castle, bought at silent auction. I guess it was just being cleaned up for the sale, because then Cotten goes through with the real renovations. He's creepy, and has his eye on Sommer, and whether he has any connection with the Baron should not be a surprise to anyone. Bava as usual gets great value out of his surroundings: the castle, the foggy Viennese streets, the wooded countryside. There's a great scene with a medium they ask to help them undo the curse. Some nice tracking shots inside an airport, apparently a first for Vienna. This one has commentary from the author of a book on Bava and though I put that on ostensibly to put me to sleep the other night, what I heard was pretty interesting as far as how the film came together and where the cameos were. It's a good one. It should be noted these films are not up to very high standards technically--they're pretty grainy, and it's a crap shoot whether a film has subtitles or is dubbed into English, but they're quite enjoyable.
Two more Mario Bava movies consumed. Kill Baby Kill is the last disc in the first dvd box set, about a town literally haunted by the death of a little girl. Apparently she is forcing people to kill themselves. There ends up being a little more to it. It's another low-budget Gothic gem from Bava, with great atmosphere and some unnerving sequences. It's creepy whenever you see the girl huddled silently in a corner of the room, or wherever.
Baron Blood is in the second box set, and it's a little curious how Anchor Bay packaged these because it's very hard to tell the chronology of these films. I picked this one because another one in the set said it was made after the widespread success of Baron Blood, so I figured I'd start with a good one. In late '60s or early '70s Vienna, a young man comes to his ancestral castle, curious to unlock the mysteries surrounding his ancestor, known locally as Baron Blood for his Vlad-like terror upon the citizenry in his time. The castle is undergoing renovation to become a tourist attraction or hotel, and there he meets international sexpot Elke Sommer, a student helping with historical details about the castle. They read an incantation to bring the Baron back to life, and it starts to work, so they read the one to cancel it. But later, they do it again, and the old parchment gets burned, so they can't undo what they've done, and the shambling Baron goes a-killin'. The movie gets a bit disjointed with the arrival of Joseph Cotten as the new owner of the castle, bought at silent auction. I guess it was just being cleaned up for the sale, because then Cotten goes through with the real renovations. He's creepy, and has his eye on Sommer, and whether he has any connection with the Baron should not be a surprise to anyone. Bava as usual gets great value out of his surroundings: the castle, the foggy Viennese streets, the wooded countryside. There's a great scene with a medium they ask to help them undo the curse. Some nice tracking shots inside an airport, apparently a first for Vienna. This one has commentary from the author of a book on Bava and though I put that on ostensibly to put me to sleep the other night, what I heard was pretty interesting as far as how the film came together and where the cameos were. It's a good one. It should be noted these films are not up to very high standards technically--they're pretty grainy, and it's a crap shoot whether a film has subtitles or is dubbed into English, but they're quite enjoyable.
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