BARON BLOOD

“Behind dank walls a nightmare world of horror and butchery awaits, as a rotting corpse crawls from the earth to terrify the living. Beware of Baron Blood!” So says the trailer of this gorgeous Mario Bava gothic production. Sometimes given short shrift by critics, take a look at the new print with the vibrant color and breezy euro-pop soundtrack and give it another chance. It’s not a masterpiece, but a solid exploitation flick from an accomplished craftsman.
Young American Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora) goes to visit his Uncle Karl (Massimo Giotti, from the They Call Me Trinity spaghetti western series) in the old country, to “scare up some family secrets.” His great grand-pappy was Baron Blood, a Vlad Tepes-type character who tortured and murdered over 100 of his countrymen before being similarly dispatched. Kleist and Eva (lovely sweater girl Elke Sommer) feel the need to read some incantations, which result in bringing back the dreaded Baron, who continues his wicked ways. Nice casting fills out the slim plot, with special notice going to the delicious Joseph Cotton, slumming here and just chewing up the scenery whenever possible as the reincarnated Baron.
It does seem like more of an early 60s film than an early 70s one, at least as far as it’s explicitness. Even the beginning of the movie is like a figurative time machine, with Peter on a modern airplane flying back to his ancestral home, where he gets pulled farther back into time until the Baron himself is resurrected. It’s as if Bava recognizes and slyly comments on the creaky conventions of the “old dark house” genre by sneaking in sight gags like the murder next to the Coke machine in the castle hallway. Another encroachment of the modern is the plans for the castle to be made into a tourist attraction, and the Baron’s use of a tape player in the torture chamber to play screams of agony. This whole movie has a lot of screaming from its’ cast; the luscious Miss Sommer gets to showcase her lungs in particular effect.
Bava’s painterly eye and seemingly effortless ability for shot composition raise this slight film above its’ predictable material. There’s nothing careless about his camera placement or understated camera movement. He tends to arrange a lot of his shots by having some object or objects frame the foreground, then have the action come up through the back of the shot towards the front, thus achieving a scene that is active and static simultaneously.
This is true of one of the best scenes, the Baron’s pursuit of Elke through the dark, foggy streets of the town. From not much more than some shadows and screams he constructs a wonderfully effective paranoid landscape from his choices of angles, editing, and how he fills the frame. What a craftsman, this scene is just a joy to watch.
Great score by Stelvio Cipriani, alternating from Mancini-esque euro-pop to dark, spooky music for the appropriate moments. Apparently this was re-scored for the US version by Les Baxter, but not on this print. Good for us.
So we get torture, a broken neck and hanging, blood seeping under a door, a cut throat, zombies, and my fave, death by spiked coffin lid! I leave you with the words of Uncle Karl, “There are too many unknown quantities to this mystery and there’s no logical procedure to its’ solution.” Duh!