The films of Italian director Mario Bava often suffered from scattershot distribution and grind house promotional campaigns on this side of the Atlantic, a condition that misrepresented the director's work and his artistry. So most viewers would hardly suspect that there's something of real value hiding behind titles like The Whip and the Body (1963), Bay of Blood (1971) and Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). One of Bava's most dubious titles is Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) which started life as Operazione Paura. It's actually an exceptional Gothic thriller highlighted by some truly frightening sequences but the visual shocks aren't nearly as disturbing as the suggested horrors that lie just beyond the camera lens.

Set in the remote European village of Karmingen at the turn of the century, Kill, Baby, Kill recounts the experiences of a doctor who is called there to perform an autopsy on a woman who died under mysterious circumstances. In the village, Dr. Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) joins forces with the local police inspector and a nurse who are conducting their own investigation of the events. The autopsy reveals that the female victim had a gold coin imbedded near her heart and soon other women in the village fall victim to the same fate. Why? Does it have something to do with the reclusive baroness and rumors of a curse?

During his formative years, Bava studied to be a painter but ended up as a cinematographer, revealing his artistic training through a unique sense of screen composition and detail. He started directing portions of other films (most notably I Vampiri (1956), which is officially credited to Riccardo Freda, a personal friend of Bava's) before getting his own name on the director's chair. His first full directorial effort was the landmark horror feature, Black Sunday (1960). After the international success of that film, he worked steadily, often directing a film a year and doubling as cinematographer, right up to his death in 1980.

Kill, Baby, Kill was directed during a highly productive time in Bava's eclectic career. He had just finished the influential science fiction film Planet of the Vampires (1965) which would inspire the set design for Alien (1979), a misguided spy spoof, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966), and a Viking adventure (Knives of the Avenger, 1965) directed under a pseudonym - John Old. For Kill, Baby, Kill, Bava brought together several veteran Italian stars such as Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Piero Lulli (Inspector Kruger) and Erika Blanc (Monica), all familiar faces from the sword and sandal genre called "peplum" and spaghetti Westerns. Their experience would come in handy since shooting took a mere eleven days. Using a script by the two writers of a lurid Mickey Hargitay vehicle (Bloody Pit of Horror, 1965), Bava explored the dynamics of power and revenge within the framework of a ghost story. The result is a mixture of pure poetry and pulp thriller, distinguished by the vivid, almost hallucinogenic color cinematography. Bava biographer and Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas wrote that Kill, Baby, Kill "occasionally jolts into the realms of free-form delirium and dementia. The spectre of little Melissa Graps, with her white lace dress and bouncing white ball, is perhaps the most influential icon of the Italian horror cinema, having been copied in countless other films, notably Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit (from Spirits of the Dead, 1968), and the film itself has been an admitted influence on such directors as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch."

* TCM is showing a letterboxed print of the English language version.

Producer: Luciano Catenacci, Nando Pisani
Director: Mario Bava
Screenplay: Mario Bava, Romano Migliorini, Roberto Natale
Set Decoration: Alessandro Dell'Orco
Cinematography: Mario Bava (uncredited), Antonio Rinaldi
Editing: Romana Fortini
Music: Carlo Rustichelli
Cast: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (Dr. Paul Eswai), Erika Blanc (Monica Schuftan), Fabienne Dali (Ruth), Piero Lulli (Inspector Kruger), Luciano Catenacci (burgomeister), Micaela Esdra (Nadienne).
BW-75m.

By Lang Thompson