Rated 5 out of 5!
The sickle of death is about to strike
And it does so many times in this movie. A double-murder within the first ten minutes of a movie gets the pace going in what has been called the utmost in Mario Bava’’s ouvre of horror movies. Minutes after Countess Federica is murdered by her husband Filippo Donati, he himself is killed by an unknown person and his body dragged away.Many people then come down to the bay. There’’s Albert and his wife Renata, the latter being Donati’’s daughter. Frank Ventura is the scheming architect who wants to turn the bay and the area into some unspecified development project. There are also some teenagers who arrive in a yellow dune buggy and carouse in the abandoned night club by the bay. They are murdered most foully. It is the scene involving these people that served as the guiding inspiration for the Friday The 13th series, you know, brainless teens getting chopped up. But they are quick and brutal, or surprising in one case. Brunhilda, a German girl who looks like Penny Irving (House of Whipcord, Are You Being Served?) has a nice nude swim and a shocking surprise before her demise. She’’s actually one of the more decent of the four.
Of the residents, entomologist Paolo Fosatti, who is too involved in his Coleoptera (that’’s the taxonomic order of beetles, BTW) than in his complaining, wine-bipping, fortune-telling wife Anna, and when she was alive, Countess Federica, are opposed to turning the bay "into a sea of cement," the former for the insect life, the latter for its natural beauty and serenity. Simon, the Countess’’s illegitimate son, hunts squid and lives by the bay.
This movie is also known as Bay Of Blood, Carnage, The Last House On The Left Part II, Ecology Of A Crime, Reazione a Catena, and Antefatto, so take your pick, but Twitch Of The Death Nerve is the official English title. Whatever the title, this film sports a very high body count and brutal blood flow. Despite the cover boasting it being the uncut version, running 84 minutes, I read in one of my film books that the running time was 90 minutes, so a discrepancy there.
The only face I recognized here was Claudine Auger (Renata), who played vivacious Domino in the Bond movie Thunderball. Here though, there is not a shred of decency or compassion in this Lady Macbeth of a woman. Mario Bava’’s stylish technique on lingering on victims and blood plays a large part here, as does Stelvio Cipriani’’s piano score, which resembles that of the Rachmaninoff-like love theme in his first movie, Black Sunday.
It’’s difficult to filter out the message of human greed and also that of preserving the environment. Simon says it best: "Man should live and let live and without any interference." When Fosatti points out that the squid he was eating was alive, Simon retorts, "At least I eat my squid. I don’’t kill as a hobby like you do. If you kill for killing’’s sake, you become a monster."
