27 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: A Blade In The Dark (1983)

The tough thing about Giallo's, as with Spaghetti Western's, is they were so mass produced that many of the stories ended up being regurgitated again and again by other directors.  It got to the point where filmmakers shamelessly stole from one another, almost always claiming they were the originals.  The budget's got smaller, the acting got worse, and the gore went up, up, and up.  While Dario Argento may hold the claim as the "Italian Hitchcock" he was not alone in his mastery of the genre.  The first Giallo (according to most film historians) was Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much.  His son, Lamberto Bava would become a well known name following collaborations with Argento on Demons and Demons 2, but his breakthrough film as a Director was Macabre in 1980.  A very good psycho thriller in it's own right, his second feature is unfortunately a bit of a let down, and that film (if you hadn't already guessed) is A Blade In The Dark.

A composer, Bruno (Andrea Occhipinti), is hired to produce a score to an upcoming horror film and has been put up in a small villa where he can work in privacy.  Or so he thinks.  It seems that people have a bit of a knack for sneaking into the villa and two girls both appear and disappear under mysterious circumstances.  Bruno is certain (and the audience knows) that they have been murdered, but he can't find the proof and as the story plays out, the body count grows.  Can he solve the mystery before he becomes another victim?

The premise is not uninteresting, the film is lit and shot evenly, and the score is enjoyable; all things that are expected of a Giallo.  The problem is that the acting completely lacks expression.  Compared to his freshman work, Macabre, which has explosive performances, the actors in A Blade In The Dark can do little more than look surprised or scared which makes them pretty boring to watch.  I'm not sure where the slip up was coming from, and while most Gialli are about as equally strange to watch in Italian as they are in English, the English dubbing track for this one is really a bad one.  Not "Ha ha" funny bad, but "Oh god, I don't care anymore, I'll read subtitles" (I personally have no problem with subtitles) bad.

The standout moments of the film are the kill sequences which all owe a great deal to the Argento school of the off camera knife wielding hand, but they're still great fun to watch.  Unless that sort of thing really disturbs you, in which case you shouldn't be watching Giallo's in the first place.  The climactic ending kill and reveal sequences are also probably the best part of the film, which unfortunately is very telling about the playing of the mystery.  It felt like you could have called it, McGuffin: The Movie after a while because there are so many different points at which Bava tries to misdirect the audience to the identity of the killer.  However, by the second to last kill it is incredibly obvious who the killer is which makes the reveal and wrap up anticlimactic.  Definitely a misstep, but Bava lands back on his feet two years later so it's interesting to see his roots.