Year: 1963
Duration: 01:32:18
Directed by: Mario Bava
Actors: Michèle Mercier, Lidia Alfonsi, Boris Karloff
Language: Italian (English subs)
Country: Italy | UK | France
Also known as: I tre volti della paura, Les trois visages de la peur, A félelem három arca, As Três Máscaras do Terror, Der Ring der Verdammten, Die drei Gesichter der Furcht, I skräckens klor, Las tres caras del miedo, Ta 3 prosopa tou Satana, The Three Faces of Fear, The Three Faces of Terror, Tre rædselsnætter, Tri lica straha, Trzy oblicza strachu
Description: Black Sabbath is 3 horror tales made by director Mario Bava:
The Telephone. In The Telephone we learn that hot women may be lesbians. Lesbians will steal your jewels and your vital essences, betray you, get you thrown in jail and then steal some more of your vital essences. But this is probably ok because in Italy lesbians are very hot. So if you’re in Italy and you wind up with a lesbian on the side, you may want to roll the dice and just keep your eyes open. Here in the U.S. lesbians mostly look like Melissa Etheridge and Ellen Degeneres. So here you probably just want to avoid romantic entanglements with lesbians and make certain to never tell them where you hid the jewels. Also, if you live in the U.S. you may have thought, from the AIP cut, that this story is actually about some ghost or potential future ghost out for revenge. Sorry, it’s about lesbians.
The Wurdalak. In The Wurdalak Bava asks, “What if a man finds himself a hot non-lesbian woman? Will she too be a bitch?” They answer, unfortunately, is yes. But the bitchery of a heterosexual husband seeking/acquiring woman differs from the bitchery of a lesbian. Rather than intentionally or unintentionally destroying everything around her through lust or greed, it’s the maternal and familial instincts of the heterosexual woman (and her desire to trap eternally a husband) that will cause you to get killed or turned into a vampire if you become involved with her. So in The Wurdalak we learn that mothers won’t stake their children when they become vampires and will threaten to kill their husbands who rightly understand a knife to the heart and maybe a beheading are really the only rational alternatives for Eddie Munster. Husbands, weakened by the allure of hot Italian women, acquiesce to the irrational demands of their wives and then get killed. Women destined for marriage suffer from the same irrational ties which, even when they escape from their family of vampires, will cause them to be pulled back in and they will take you with them. And although she is hot, her body will now be cold and she will have very bad breath. So you probably don’t want that. In sum, you’re not safe with straight women who want to have families either.
The Drop of Water. So avoid lesbians. Also avoid marriage and women with marriage on their minds. But what about hot, kind of trashy single chicks? Are they safe? To you, probably. Because they don’t have other lesbians with whom they can express their perverted lusts, or men they can trap into an eternal marriage, their general lack of virtue must find another expression. Mainly in stealing pretty shiny stuff from corpses. So they’ll probably get their own before you even run into them. I give you The Drop of Water.
Review: “Three Faces of fear or Black Sabbath,” one of the best representatives of the classic horror film. He took off his very talented director (and concurrently also operator) – Mario Bava. In the distant 1963, he was one of the pioneers of operational Italian cinema. He was admired by Visconti and Fellini, some of his films have had a significant influence on the genre of horror film. “Three persons” in their numbers. Tape consists of a prologue, three frightening novels and comic epilogue, in which Boris Karloff riding a fake horse and makes jokes.
In Mario Bava was only half an hour to bring the viewer a sense of emotional balance and natural horror show with a phenomenal camera work, based on a fairly smooth transitions between plans, and the next moment simply adjusts to the frightening sounds, make-up, which is against their views getting nervous from awareness of other-worldliness of characters, and acting – something of classical and modern times. Bava has created three completely unrelated story short stories, each of which displays a certain “face of terror”.
They are all lined up in an interesting sequence – from less to more terrible – a kind of progressive development of horror, and imbued with a masterful suspense. By the end of the film the audience is ready to believe anything – and spying for his victims maniacs and European ghouls and ghosts – all thanks to a masterful directorial techniques and findings, by which fear takes on material substance. No naturalism and distortions in the film, only the work of several prominent people under the leadership of Baba, yes educated effects – that’s the key of this success.
Review #2: Bava’s horror anthology generally quite atypical for the 60’s. Not only that it is completely removed by one director, with a collection of short stories that do not intersect with each other thematically, it looks quite cheerful and one piece, even after nearly forty years. Why not tell about these fellows “Three persons,” as explicit trinket “Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors” or estetskih, but very uneven “Three steps in delirium.” Bava’s Almanac formally based on the literature – the works of Anton Chekhov, Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (Russian adored Italian classics) and Guy de Maupassant. But in fact, only the second short story “Vampire” somehow related to the primary source, and the other authors are mentioned only for the “weighting” of the work solid hyperlinks.
“Black Sabbath” – the first American experience Bava, was marked by collaboration with the living legend of horror (Boris Karloff) and a lack of understanding of the phenomenon of foreign counterparts of European genre cinema. There are two versions of the film, the producers rewired rolling up so that disappeared many branded directing features.
Still, even if not explicitly pedaliruemy seksploateyshn Italian, which is reflected in the short story “Telephone”, still dwarfs the so-called “Hitchcock” component in the form of discharge of suspense and notorious MacGuffin, who would later borrow the first slasher film directors. Two lesbian heroine, whose union gives a man so out of place, look at the screen perfectly and damn appealing, leaving a large reserve for the future of black moms and wild cats Russ Meyer, who has only just begun to win the hearts of newly minted feminists. Ghouls of the second novel – a tribute to the silent horror cinema 30s, where the stars were bright character actors (the same Karloff), and the fear was born deep in the human subconscious, to try to deny the existence of paranormal phenomena, with the very negative media opposed to reason. Witch from “Drops” is well remembered and mass rastirazhiruyut creators j-horror. After the horror of the inevitability of all, when you wait an unknown and is ready at any moment to die just from our own fear.
This subtle matter, which many would consider, or near, or even feel, in Bava’s very weightless, as is born out of the same as the music Kraftwerk – sudden screech phone vicious whistling wind or intimidating dripping in the bathroom. And it’s aerobatics. We are forever tied with fear, as if saying Bava, but with it’s arm is laughter. Like a simple formula, but only to repeat it, no one can now for nearly forty years.
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