Bay of Blood has been known by several names over the years, most notably Blood Bath and Twitch of the Death Nerve. That last name is a particular favourite of mine, as how can you not love a film with a name like that?
The plot of Bay of Blood is, on the face of it, a whodunnit. An elderly lady is murdered in the film's opening scene, and ostenbly the rest of the film should be about who her killer is. I say "should be", because the killer is revealed moments later, only to be killed himself by another shadowy figure. The "whodunnit" aspect of the film could therefore be corrected to be "who didn't do it", as during the course of the film just about every character we're introduced to gets involved in at least one murder. You see, the woman we saw murdered at the very start of the film was the owner of a bay that everyone wants their hands on for various reasons, and so they're all doing their best to make sure that they're the only ones left to inherit it. That's about it by way of plot; the rest of the film is taken up with meeting the various suspects, trying to guess who killed who and waiting to see who's eventually left standing (and the ending has a twist that's considerably more original than most).
Of course, a lot of Bay of Blood's importance - as a proto-slasher, a giallo or just as a great piece of filmmaking - comes down to its director, Mario Bava. One of the great filmmakers of the Italian horror genre, if not the world, Bava was known already for his earlier works, which included Blood and Black Lace, Black Sunday and Planet of the Vampires. At the time of its release, however, many critics panned Bay of Blood, and even today it is considered one of his most controversial films.
Its influence is still certainly felt, however, in later slasher film offerings - the most notable being Friday the 13th Part Two, which at best was "inspired by" and at worst outright lifted one murder scene from the movie to use itself (the impalement of a couple with a spear while they make love on a bed). Certainly there are similarities between Bava's film and some of the early stalk-and-slash movies of the late 70s and early 80s as well. So from that point of view at least Bay of Blood is an important film for the horror genre, regardless of people's thoughts on it.
Bay of Blood's notoriety also comes from the fact that it was caught up in the "video nasties" controversy in the UK in the early 80s. It was one of the 39 films that were successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act and was banned for over a decade in the country. Eventually it was released with cuts in 1994, and again uncut in 2000. Today of course it probably seems quite tame compared to the Hostel series, or The Human Centipede, but at the time it was apparently considered enough to "deprave and corrupt" the minds of those who watched it. Not bad for a film that used a child's toy wagon for its tracking shots.
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