cult film freak: MARIO BAVA'S 'BARON BLOOD' WITH ELKE SOMMER & JOSEPH COTTEN

Title: BARON BLOOD Year: 1972 Rating: ****

Italian director Mario Bava, always comfortable within gothic-soaked time-period pictures like BLACK SABBATH and BLACK SUNDAY, is so initially thrust into the bright/glossy 1970's for BARON OF BLOOD that... with monotone star Antonio Cantafora meeting spunky-cute ingenue Elke Sommer in his infamously murdered ancestor's immensely sinister castle... you'll think his Pan Am flight would lead absolutely nowhere beyond a groovy night at the funky discoteque: where the two leads hit it off because they're both perfect-looking...

So maybe Bava's lost his touch, about to submerge viewers into a campy drive-in exploitation flick... until the titular BARON is brought back and, with a nightmarishly melted-prosthetic face half-obscured within a menacing black cloak, things get really scary... particularly when Sommer's chased around the corridor-mazy castle with a barrage of creative quick-zoom shots where, thirty-five minutes in, we're finally experiencing a genuine Bava feature where he's (as usual) both director and cinematographer...

Elke Sommer and Rada Rassimov in BARON BLOOD

Replete with ultra-violent body-count murders and this elaborate castle location (where he could have shot ten movies in)... yet things slow down when the sinewy monster turns human as CITIZEN KANE icon Joseph Cotten, having played the straight man in the Vincent Price comeback ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES, gets the monstrous role and, with a wheelchair-riding millionaire front, he had bought the castle: and wants Elke to show him around...

Then, following another semi-lull of monologue-spouting expository dialogue, things get re-reignited with gorgeous Italian seance-leading Rada Rassimov, channeling the witch who'd killed the BARON for trying to burn her at the stake: overall making BARON BLOOD a Gothic horror with an equal amount of high-octane action, perfectly combining the gothic 1700's with the groovy 1970's.