Above is the fourth episode of bavatuesdays, in this discussion Paul Bond and I take a look at Mario Bava’s 1964 giallo Blood and Black Lace. It’s quite a masterpiece of murderous technicolor, and it’s considered by many the beginning of the body count/slasher film genre. The premise is that a fashion house becomes the epicenter of a series of gruesome murders of six female models, and hence the Italian title Sei donne per l’assassino (Six Women for the Murder). The assorted murders are stylized to seem as if they had been taken from the pages of a death-themed fashion magazine. There is a lot to love about this film, and while Paul and I try to cover as much as we can, we couldn’t help but spend much of the time lauding Tim Lucas’s (of Video Watchdog fame) amazing commentary on the DVD. The man has nothing short of an encyclopedic knoweldge surrounding just about every detail of Mario Bava’s career. It is absolutely compellign to hear him talk, and it makes me want his book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark all the more.
As for the recording of our conversation, I’m still working on getting the delay between Paul in the Google Hangout and the Wirecast broadcast to mesh more cleanly. As of now we are still a couple of seconds out of sync which is annoying. And while this doesn’t break the deal for me because we are doing it for fun and to learn about Bava’s films, I have to say it makes it harder to watch and having it synched would make the world a little bit of a better place to be ;). Anyway, I’ll try and figure this out this week so the next six episodes are clean. Hope you enjoy the show despite all it’s imperfections!
You can see Paul Bond’s post on the film here and his flickr set of relevant images here.
