Black Sabbath (1963)

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is an anthology film directed by Mario Bava, and contains three stories framed by direct-to-camera pronouncements from Boris Karloff.The first segment, 'The Telephone' is a very entertaining, if rather contrived, giallo-styled thriller featuring Rosy (Michèle Mercier), a French prostitute, her friend Mary (Lydia Alfonsi) and pimp Frank (Milo Quesada). An excellent mish-mash of broken friendships healed, relentless abusive phone calls and murder. In number two, 'The Wurdalak', a family is plagued by a curse that appears to have afflicted the father Russian nobleman Gorca (Boris Karloff), which he brings home with him. Finally, 'The Drop of Water', set in 1910, features Nurse Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux) who pays the price for stealing a ring from the finger of a corpse in her care.I am not a huge fan of the colourful, darkly gaudy cinematography championed either by Bava, or later Dario Argento for projects like 'Suspiria (1977)'. Such an approach reduces the reality of the horror, which itself is difficult enough to convey with any measure of authenticity anyway. You are never allowed to forget you are watching a professional production, with actors rather than people, so heightened is the ultimate effect. This is just my opinion of course, and who cares about that?Having said that though, I thoroughly enjoyed 'Black Sabbath' a lot more than I expected to. Possibly Bava's approach works for me here so well because the stories, by their nature, are concise and bite-sized: each story is being relayed as opposed to being 'real'. And the wonderful use of primal colours here gives each tale a ghostly fairy-tale look which is very evocative.Much tinkering with the format befell this production for various around-the-world sales. The American version, for example, changes the order of the stories and removes all mention of prostitution from 'The Telephone' (Frank is merely a ghost rather than a pimp). Bava wanted the final scene to have been Nurse Chester's corpse, but this was also changed before production wrapped. So an utterly ingenious idea was had to feature Karloff signing off (just as he had opened the film), but in character as Gorca, before the camera pans away to reveal the horse he is riding to be nothing more than a prop, and the production crew running round waving branches to simulate the animal's motion. Such a jarring 'to camera' reveal has spoiled many horrors in the past (Bela Lugosi's 'Mark of the Vampire' and 'Return of the Vampire', for example), but works really well here because it merely accelerates the heightened reality rather than pull it out of thin air. An excellent, highly recommended anthology.

There were dozens of multi part horror films made from the 1950's through the 1970's, and this Italian entry in that genre is a cult classic, but a mixed bag. It's narrated by Boris Karloff who is the star of one of the three parts, his being the longest segment in the Italian language version I saw while writing up this review. I saw the dubbed English version years ago on commercial VHS, and mainly remembered the Karloff sequence that focused on a family cursed with vampires who attack those they loved in life, making me wonder how a vampire continues to survive once they run out of loved ones. Karloff, narrating the film as himself, looks haggard and ancient as the family patriarch, off in war in the middle ages setting, coming back to allegedly get his entire family to join him as one of the undead. The horror involves his young grandson, kidnapped by him for a furious ride along the paths of the seemingly dead countryside, as well as the adding up of never ending victims. It's slow moving, but very spooky.A modern sequence involves a young woman being harassed by telephone presumably by a former lover she betrayed to the police, and the twists involving an estranged friend she asks for help. This is a suspenseful but ridiculously plotted segment, because why didn't she just get out, go to the police, check into a hotel and stay out of the danger zone? There are some interesting aspects of it, but it's trite and extremely obvious. The other segment is comical, an ugly looking mannequin made out to be a corpse, from which a nurse steals a supposedly valuable ring, much to her own detriment. The corpse comes to life somehow, floating around in a search for revenge. I didn't laugh so much as roll my eyes, especially since the corpse looked like how Bette Davis made herself up as the title character in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" To end it all, at least in the Italian version, is a silly return of Karloff in his vampire disguise, bidding the audience adieu.

This is the best movie I've seen by Bava. I didn't like Black Lace. Bay of Blood had some decent scenes, but a mess of a story. Five Dolls, was a mess, except for Fenech.I saw the American version, and have not seen the original Italian, which I've read has different plots and scenes. The best story here is the first, The Drop of Water. The acting and suspense is all there. The dead witch/old lady was great.The Telephone, 2nd piece was decent, but was also slow. Maybe the Italian version was much better.The 3rd, "The Wurdalak" with Karloff as a vampire was creepy and had some decent scenes, but it was mostly slow and it died like the undead.I'll rate this as a B-, or 5 or 6 stars. It's worth checking out for a few scenes. I hated the intro of each segment with Boris Karloff, all this takes you out of the movie and into documentary nonsense. I'm not a fan of trilogies. Better to make one long movie. The Drop of Water should have been the movie. Maybe adding some of the telephone nonsense and the vampire tones. Jacqueline Pierreux was the best actress here. Karloff was decent as the vampire, but take out the stupid intro segments. The other actors were decent.I don't know why Bava is praised so much. What is missing from this film is a director. His job here looks like he delivered a product, very mechanical. But where was the direction of the actors, and their interactions? Not much. The reason The Drop of Water works so well here is because it's mostly one actress. A truly great director would have gotten more performance from the actors, not just put up set pieces, add color, set cameras, and yell action.

The stories in this anthology, narrated by Boris Karloff, are wonderful. They are full of atmosphere and terror. It is a masterful use of classic stories, presented in a nice way. The acting is excellent and the selection of stories fits the theme of darkness. One of them involves the effects of something that causes a person to kill only those who are the most meaningful to them--their loved ones. Another involves the stealing of a jewel from a psychic which leads to serious circumstances. Often these multi-story films have a single good one and the others are wanting. Here, with the help of Boris Karloff, things move naturally from one to the other, with an implied theme.