A Bay of Blood – 1971, Italy, 84m. Director: Mario Bava.
Mortuary – 1982, US, 93m. Director: Howard Avedis.
Women’s Prison Massacre – 1983, France/Italy, 89m. Director: Bruno Mattei.
A BAY OF BLOOD (1971) (AKA: Bloodbath; Twitch of the Death Nerve) A man kills his Countess wife only to subsequently get dispatched himself by a prowler. The deaths spark a fight over a lucrative piece of land involving a slimy real estate mogul (Chris Aram) and the Countess’s money-hungry daughter (Claudine Auger), as well as more murders. A quartet of teens partying at a nearby lake are slaughtered in gory fashion, including a couple who are, in the film’s most famous scene, impaled together while having sex. The characters are designed to be red herrings and aren’t terribly interesting. Luckily, the kills are highly inventive and gruesome—the discovery of a waterlogged body being eaten by an octopus is particularly gnarly. A Bay of Blood doesn’t have much to offer in the way of story, but as an early example of what would become the modern slasher movie, it delivers the goods. The black humored ending is delightful. B
MORTUARY (1982) The mysterious death of a prominent doctor leads to a series of murders committed by the unhinged son of the local mortician. The doctor’s teen daughter (Mary McDonough) thinks her father was murdered, but nobody believes her, including her mom (Lynda Day George) who earlier was seen at a Black Mass with the mortician (Christopher George). A mortuary employee stumbles upon one of the ceremonies and is subsequently impaled with an embalming trocar. Another victim is repeatedly stabbed to death with the same tool while sleeping in bed. Mortuary is highlighted by good acting and a creepy atmosphere, but the plot is often convoluted and rarely makes sense. The screenplay tries for a whodunit angle but the identity of the killer is obvious to anyone who’s seen even just one slasher movie. Look for a pre-Weird Science Bill Paxton in one of his earliest roles. C+
WOMEN’S PRISON MASSACRE (1983) A haggard Eastern European jailhouse is home to several female prisoners who are subjected to daily torture at the hands of the place’s sadistic correctional officers. Things are made worse when four escaped male convicts turn the prison into a war zone when their demands aren’t met by outside authorities. The scumbags waste no time in raping the ladies (prisoners and officers) repeatedly before the worst of the escapees (Gabriele Tinti) forces two of the women to play a game of Russian Roulette that ends with brains being sprayed all over and into the mouth of Tinti. A lesbian inserts a razor blade inside her vagina and tricks one of the men into raping her after she discovers he murdered her lover. Virtually everyone else is killed when a tactical team storms the building and shreds most of the cast with machine guns, including the evil warden (Lorraine De Selle) and the dirty district attorney (Jacques Stany) responsible for putting innocent protagonist Laura Gemser into the “big house.” This swan song to Italy’s Black Emmanuelle series might rank high in the sex and violence category, but in terms of acting, directing, and writing, Women’s Prison Massacre is strictly the pits. D