Review for Blood and Black Lace

When Arrow decide to give a film the royal treatment they really go for it. Their Blu-Ray edition of the film that is oft credited with creating the giallo film phenomenon of the sixties and early seventies , ‘Blood and Black Lace’, is a veritable film-course in a box. The extra features here are worth the price of the disc alone and the quality of this restored version of the film on Blu-Ray is utterly breath-taking. It’s one of the best ‘packages’ for a single movie I have ever seen and Arrow seem to be consistently raising the bar with their releases.

Mario Bava’s ‘Blood and Black Lace’, for the uninitiated, is credited with creating the whole serial slasher sub-genre and, stylistically at least, of creating the look of the giallo phenomenon which followed in its wake. Despite being something of a box-office flop on its release, it had a heady influence on filmmakers like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. The film exudes the lush visual (baroque) bridge between the sleazy end of the fifties and the psychedelic start of the sixties, aping Hitchcock to a degree but in so doing, creating something fresh and darkly exciting.



 When a beautiful model's body is found mutilated inside Max Marian's (Cameron Mitchell) fashion house during an exhibition, it opens up a Pandora’s box of drug addiction, blackmail and bloody murder.

It’s certainly a spooky and atmospheric film. From the first ‘kill’ (when we see the faceless/masked killer flit through the trees in the dark in the victim’s peripheral vision) it’s spooky stuff and you can see the template emerging for many slasher movies that followed. The blood, when you see it, is stagey in the way that Hammer films did it – bright lurid reds that either look more horrible than reality or substantially less so depending on your view.



The most horribly memorable moments are all gratuitously violent and always imbued with a sadism that some might term as misogynistic. (Don’t worry – there are plenty of academics contributing to the debate in the extra features so you won’t have to make up your own mind about where you sit with this without some help). That includes a face being pushed onto a burning plate, another into a bath full of water. Flesh is also sliced, slit and stabbed and on one occasion a tors impaled on a medieval claw – preceding a similarly shocking scene in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre by more than a decade making me wonder if Tobe Hooper had done his homework by watching Bava/ Who knows? Maybe just a case of warped minds thinking alike.



Whatever your take there is something quietly mad and dangerous about the whole thing. It feels off-kilter and strange from the first frame evoking a strange atmosphere which is reflected in Argento’s films to a large degree – hard to place exactly but a defining tone nonetheless.

Of course, buried in the film’s narrative there is an element of whodunit as we try to figure out who the killer is. After all, just about everyone in the film could be a suspect. Needless to say, it’s not who you think it is. Or is it? It’s got a few twists but nothing mind-blowing in that regard.



The film looks absolutely magnificent with a 2K restoration from the original camera negative – a painstaking exercise which removed all the grit and grain from previous editions and shows it, perhaps for the first time, as director and cinematographer Bava would have intended.

You can watch the film in English or Italian (with English subs) but the film will be partially dubbed whichever way you go as the original dialogue is spoken in native tongue by both English American and Italian cast. So I selected the US dub which was fine. No point in being purist when nothing ‘pure’ is available. Audio is uncompressed mono PCM and perfectly adequate.

The disc is jam-packed with a veritable mother load of supplementary materials which make this an almost encyclopaedic edition of the film, surely a mandatory purchase now for any film students studying the giallo genre. Here’s what you get.


 
· Brand new audio commentary by Mario Bava’s biographer and film-maker in his own right, Tim Lucas; not his first for the film either; he did a similar version for a previous US DVD release. It’s excellent with great content but never seeming too dryly academic either.

· Psycho Analysis – a new almost hour long ‘documentary’ on Blood and Black Lace and the origins of the giallo genre. In truth, other than the odd movie clip it really is a series of talking head interviews with directors Dario Argento (Suspiria) and Lamberto Bava (Demons), screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi (All the Colors of the Dark) critics Roberto Curti and Steve Della Casa, and crime novelists Sandrone Dazieri and Carlo Lucarelli. Very illuminating on the giallo genre.

· An appreciation by Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, the creative duo behind the Rollin tribute movie ‘Amer’ and giallo influenced ‘The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears’. Although short, and adding little to the lengthier documentary, their clear passion for the genre is absolutely infectious.


 
· Yellow – the much-acclaimed crowd-funded neo-giallo short film by UK based Ryan Haysom & Jon Britt which runs for 30 minutes and is entertaining enough. Find out more about that particular film here.

· Gender and Giallo – a lengthy visual essay by Michael Mackenzie exploring the giallo’s relationship with the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s using voice and lots of visual ‘slides’ and movie clips. This is a greta way of seeing and appreciating the genre in its social and political context and a very nice addition to the package.

· Panel discussion on Mario Bava featuring Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava and Steve Della Casa, recorded at the 2014 Courmayeur Film Festival; using recorded audio and images only. It’s great to hear the reverence and affection that Argento and others had for Mario Bava, very much ‘the master’ in their view from whom they learned a huge amount.



· The Sinister Image: Cameron Mitchell – a creaky vintage episode of David Del Valle’s 1980’s television series, devoted to the star of Blood and Black Lace and presented in full over two 25 minute segments. It’s an interesting interview that shows Mitchell to be a most personable raconteur.

· The alternative US opening titles, sourced from Joe Dante’s private print and scanned in 2K especially for this release

· Original theatrical trailer

· Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Howard Hughes, author of Cinema Italiano and Mario Bava: Destination Terror, an interview with Joe Dante, David Del Valle on Cameron Mitchell and more, all illustrated with archive stills and posters (some of which are illustrating this review).



Arrow’s Blu-Ray release of ‘Blood and Black Lace’ is a corker. If you have any interest in Mario Bava’s work or in the roots of the giallo genre then this is a great place to start. Not only is it one of the best transfers of an old movie I’ve seen, the package comes with some fantastic supplementary materials that will please fans and academics alike. A must buy.