September 4, 2002

By Dennis Harvey

EURO "art movies" always got away with otherwise objectionable content by being, well, arty about it, but by the 1960s the line between edification and exploitation was blurred into an impressionist smear. Directors were permitted any auteurist indulgence (on the set at least – such stuff often got rudely cut out by foreign distributors) so long as they delivered enough sex and violence to maintain the audience's delicious sense of slumming. Generally dismissed or despised by mainstream critics at the time, Eurotrash genre cinema of the '60s and '70s now makes the period look like a golden era of artistic adventure in the cause of crass cash-harvesting.

No one was more deeply embroiled in both values than Mario Bava, the late Italian horror master whose works are showcased this month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and next month at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive. Modest, seldom satisfied by his own work, and accustomed enough to career instability that he kept odd-jobbing (as lenser, FX supervisor, editor, et al – often without screen credit) well after scoring some directorial hits, Bava probably would have been amazed by such museum-level homage. His 18 years in the folding chair are remarkable for the stylistic consistency of their output, given the vagaries of budget, the bankrupted producers, and the brute recutting that most Bava features suffered through.

Initially trained as a fine-arts painter, Bava followed his father into cinematography when just 19 years old, in 1933. By the late '50s he was taking over projects from runaway directors (Jacques Tourneur's Giant of Marathon, Riccardo Freda's Caltiki the Immortal Monster and I Vampiri), then given a chance to helm the black-and-white witchery tale Black Sunday – a hypnotic dream of seductive evil that unleashed the succubus lurking behind British actor Barbara Steele's wide gamine eyes. Signed to U.S. exploitation behemoth American International Pictures' foreign division, he coined even more cash with Black Sabbath, a lustrously Technicolored trilogy of supernatural tales linked by guest star Boris Karloff. That gig ended badly with a travesty spy spoof, 1966's Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, however, so Bava reverted to erratic freelance assignments, which ended with his heart-attack death in 1980.

The YBC showcase and slightly smaller PFA retrospective both offer incomplete but compelling cases for taking Bava as a major stylist – his use of chiaroscuro lighting, saturated color, nerve-wracking tracking shots, and painterly compositions is at least as fetishistically drunk on beauty as the eye of von Sternberg or Minnelli. Acolytes like Dario Argento and Bava's own son Lamberto (Demons) would later amplify this style while drastically upping the gore quotient. But none ever quite matched his morbid romanticism or graceful mise-en-scène amid bloodthirsty, often silly scenarios. The visual intoxication should be well over legal limits during these series, since the 35mm prints to be screened were fully restored for simultaneous DVD release and represent the most complete versions of oft-cut, retitled, and otherwise messed-with titles.

The most drastic such case is 1972's Lisa and the Devil, a labyrinth of strangeness (satanic Telly Savalas hounds Elke Sommer though hallucinatory crumbling-mansion misadventures) that played only a festival date before it was butchered and stuffed with bad, new, pea soup-vomiting scenes as 1974's opportunistic House of Exorcism. (For comparison purposes, both play at YBC.) Slightly overrated, like any movie suppressed for a decade or more, the intact Lisa is still a fascinating extreme in Bava's willingness to let atmosphere overwhelm every other storytelling virtue.

Among other revivals, 1970's Five Dolls for an August Moon and the next year's Twitch of the Death Nerve are riots of convoluted giallo mayhem anticipating the next decade's less interesting slasher genre. Their sunlit vacation settings and eye-popping pop art interiors are granted all the slavish attention paid to cobwebbed-castle Ruritania in 1972's routine Baron Blood and 1966's Kill, Baby, Kill, probably the most frightening feature Bava ever made.

For completists, there are rare glimpses of nonhorror obscurities: The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) is a sometimes hysterical Hitchcockian blond-in-peril thriller redeemed by dazzling B&W lighting effects; the censor-hobbled Four Times That Night (1972) likewise throws diverting color splashes at foolish sex comedics modeled on Rashomon (!); regrettably clothed, 1965 muscle-man epic Knives of the Avenger is dull work-for-hire. Missing from either series are Bava's spaghetti westerns, his great comic-strip Bond spoof Danger: Diabolik, the excellent proto-Alien sci-fi horror Planet of Blood, and that most fantastical of all pillar-power lifting flicks, Hercules in the Haunted World. But there's a big compensating gift: Kidnapped, a most atypical exercise in brutal modern crime-caper suspense that was shot and abandoned as Rabid Dogs when production funds ran out in 1974. Lamberto B. contributed fill-in sequences for the newly "finished" film, which has drawn favorable comparison to Dog Day Afternoon and Reservoir Dogs. This dead man, it seems, still has some tales to tell.

'All the Colors of the Dark: The Films of Mario Bava' runs Sept. 6-27, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, 701 Mission, S.F. $3-$6. (415) 978-2787. www.yerbabuenaarts.org. Fri/6, 7 p.m., Black Sunday followed by Black Sabbath; Sept. 13, 7 p.m., Lisa and the Devil followed by Five Dolls for an August Moon; Sept. 14, 7 p.m., Twitch of the Death Nerve followed by Baron Blood; Sept. 19, 7 p.m., House of Exorcism; Sept. 20, 7 p.m., Kill, Baby, Kill followed by Knives of the Avenger; Sept. 21, 7 p.m., The Girl Who Knew Too Much followed by Four Times That Night; Sept. 27, 7 and 9 p.m., Kidnapped (a.k.a. Rabid Dogs).