Mario Bava on Blu- ray: Kidnapped and Black Sabbath . But the film, originally titled Rabid Dogs, remains his leanest and meanest trip through hell's outer rim. A group of ruthless robbers has just jacked 5. From this point on, Bava sticks us right in the backseat of a sky- blue Opel Rekord with these lunatics and barely shows the decency to crack the window. An unreleased suspense thriller from Italy's master of horror and fantasy, Mario Bava, Rabid Dogs makes its belated debut in this special DVD release. When a bank robbery goes awry for a pair of violent criminals, they take an. Amazon.com: Kidnapped: Lea Lander, George Eastman, Riccardo Cucciolla, Don Backy, Maurice Poli, Maria Fabbri, Erika Dario, Luigi Antonio Guerra, Francesco Ferrini, Emilio Bonucci, Pino Manzari, Ettore Manni, Lamberto Bava. Nor for that matter does he allow us much time outside the caravan once we're there, but from these confined environs, the filmmaker provides a master study in crime- world nihilism, slathered in sweat, blood, and stink. Like Tobe Hooper's classic, also produced in 1. Bava strips the film of stylistic excesses, making the instinctual savagery of the murderous trio—Blade (Don Backy), Doc (Maurice Poli), and 3. George Eastman)—all the more direct and frightening. Of course, Doc, the mastermind for all intents and purposes, serves as more of a moderator between the yawping hyenas that are Blade and 3. Though compliant, Riccardo (Riccardo Cucciolla), the father, constantly and subtly prods at the control exerted over him, whereas the young woman, Maria (Lea Lander), is gripped by hysterical fear that only grows with intensity as the film progresses. Maria, who Blade is intermittently entertained by, but Riccardo has his own agenda (a reveal too wildly cynical and bruising to ruin here), which makes it clear that he's been stoking the coals of Maria's panic along with the robbers from the beginning. It's class and that thing called “taste” which Bava is ultimately skewering, as he insinuates the immediate physical threats of desperate, violent, but low- level criminals are no more or less insidious than those of the seemingly docile upper- middle class. In fact, the former often serves as an allowance for the latter, making its perpetrators looking more dignified and inconspicuous by comparison. And though he never directly addresses it, the film's thematic interests have a tenuous but unmistakable alignment with Bava's personal beliefs and body of work, which was often discarded or debased for its graphic, sometimes unappealing, and “tasteless” depictions. Indeed, the work that Bava expressed most pride in, Black Sabbath, shares a similar distrust in the pillars of the status quo, but adorns them with elements of the macabre and grotesque both sly and grandiose, not the least of which being Boris Karloff. Beginning with a series of unnerving phone calls, opener “The Telephone” finds him in a stylistic mode close to Hitchcock, detailing the stalking and intended murder of a young woman, Rosy (Michele Mercier). The terror and suspense of the film is complicated by satirical melodrama, as the vengeful return of Rosy's ex- squeeze, the gangster Frank Rainer (Milo Quesada), is initially just the pretense for a cruel expression of social jealousy from a slighted friend. Visually, it's uncluttered and told with a brisk mastery, as each shot moves the story ahead with stunning exactitude without limiting the scope of the story or confining the impressive hash of furious emotions in the film. Like Bava's classic Black Sunday, it centers on a cursed Russian family, the patriarch of which (Karloff again) returns home from an extended trip, acting strange and baring certain vampiric tendencies. The director matches the fear and terror of the supernatural with an unexpected, near- hysterical vision of misguided familial passions, as a mother's love for her child, and a young woman's love for her father, are responsible for just as many lives as the elusive, titular beings. It's a (literally) dreadful melodrama, and Bava amplifies the simple horror story with his reliably potent sense of desolate, haunted atmosphere. The sequence in which a tot, presumed dead, calls out for his mother while heading into the surrounding, wind- whipped forest is almost unbearable in its depiction of helpless parental instinct. There are echoes of “The Tell- Tale Heart” here, as guilt and grief of this seemingly minor crime summons a host of visual and auditory shocks and prods, the eponymous one being the most perpetual. It's stripped down, but in a much different way than Kidnapped. Bava uses minimal dialogue to set the sequences, and then leans on filmic language almost entirely, from the flamboyantly expressive lighting to the actors and their makeup to the all- important sounds of water and a buzzing fly. Greed is punished, but the robbery is also a matter of vanity, culled from the nurse's need to not only look like a natural caregiver, but like she's worth as much fiscally as she does morally. At the center of Bava's alluring and grotesque artistry, whether in early masterworks like Blood and Black Lace and Black Sunday or Kidnapped, is a ferocious humility, an unfettered focus on what's important in filmmaking, and an unrelenting hostility toward and suspicion of those who seek false virtue in art. When young David Balfour arrives at his uncle's to claim his inheritance, his relative tries to murder him, then has him. Mario Bava's movie Kidnapped reviewed is it good is it bad find out in the video. Mario Bava had spilled plenty of blood by the time he reached his 1974 swan song, Kidnapped. But the film, originally titled Rabid Dogs, remains his leanest and meanest trip through hell's outer rim. Mario Bava's. Kidnapped and Black Sabbath are now available on Blu- ray from Kino. Kidnapped—like Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, a film it's often (mistakenly) credited as inspiring—is a heist picture whose suspense is not in the act of the heist, but in its aftermath. Director Mario Bava's long.
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