I've never really understood why Mario Bava is held in such high regard... it takes more than a few carefully positioned coloured lights and creative shot compositions to impress me. Cool visuals are meaningless if the storytelling isn't up to scratch, and that's where I find Bava lacking. Kill, Baby, Kill is another case of a good looking movie with a lacklustre plot - an unengaging ghost story that is heavy on the gothic atmosphere, but light on originality, logic, suspense or scares.
The film concerns the ghost of a little girl, Melissa Graps, who is summoned from her grave by her mother to take revenge on the villagers responsible for the girl's death, while coroner Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) and a local woman (Erika Blanc) try to unravel the mystery. Bava's handling of the trite narrative is muddled with a dreary pace, making the film a chore to sit through that no amount of creepy visuals can compensate for. The spiders in the film have been working overtime, covering everything in cobwebs (lit in a variety of colours for added spookiness), there's random imagery of dolls and spiral staircases, and the ghostly kid giggles a lot, all of which take the gothic-ometer off the scale, but the lack of a decent story makes this one another Bava disappointment in my books.
4.5/10, generously rounded up to 5 for the bit where Paul runs through a series of doors eventually catching up with himself: it makes not a lick of sense, but it was certainly different.
The film concerns the ghost of a little girl, Melissa Graps, who is summoned from her grave by her mother to take revenge on the villagers responsible for the girl's death, while coroner Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) and a local woman (Erika Blanc) try to unravel the mystery. Bava's handling of the trite narrative is muddled with a dreary pace, making the film a chore to sit through that no amount of creepy visuals can compensate for. The spiders in the film have been working overtime, covering everything in cobwebs (lit in a variety of colours for added spookiness), there's random imagery of dolls and spiral staircases, and the ghostly kid giggles a lot, all of which take the gothic-ometer off the scale, but the lack of a decent story makes this one another Bava disappointment in my books.
4.5/10, generously rounded up to 5 for the bit where Paul runs through a series of doors eventually catching up with himself: it makes not a lick of sense, but it was certainly different.