cult film freak: DIRECTOR MARIO BAVA'S HORROR ANTHOLOGY 'BLACK SABBATH'

Mario Bava's BLACK SABBATH Year: 1963 Rating: ***

The legacy of the feature film BLACK SABBATH on a Birmingham, England marquee across the street from where a band called Earth was rehearsing has heightened upon the death of lead singer Ozzy Osbourne...

Originally a 1963 horror-anthology more suitably titled THE THREE FACES OF FEAR (translated from I TRE VOLTI DELLA PAURA), narrated and co-starring veteran actor Boris Karloff directed by Italian horror-auteur Mario Bava, who brings the Victorian era into a darker, gloomier fashion than even the competing Hammer...

The Drop of Water corpse from BLACK SABBATH

Consisting of two versions: the Italian and the American International... the latter placing the most effectively horrifying episode upfront instead of serving as a bombastic climax: THE DROP OF WATER involving a greedy maid who swipes a ring from the corpse of a female medium, who's not an actress playing dead but one of the downright scariest, creepiest, eeriest prosthetic figures ever created...

Meanwhile TELEPHONE has basically the same premise of a vulnerable lonely woman, only incredibly gorgeous this time, stalked in a dark, cloistered setting... by phone calls from a slightly-older female seductress that, like WATER, lasts an economic fifteen-minutes, serving the woman-in-peril purpose with a fleshed-out beginning, middle and end...

Boris Karloff in BLACK SABBATH

Saving the most aesthetically well-known in the prolonged mid-section, THE WURDALAK, feeling more like an edited-down feature-length vampire flick with lavish gothic visuals within creepy rural locations (reminiscent of Terence Fisher's HORROR OF DRACULA), as Karloff steps from the narrator role into a veteran vampire hunter alongside gorgeous ingenue Susy Andersen and intrepid Mark Damon... which is overall the weakest of the trio, dragging down an anthology that could have more effectively harbored four or five twenty-minute vignettes...

And while the otherwise underused and underrated FRANKENSTEIN icon Boris Karloff gives an effectively chilling performance, THE TELEPHONE doomed starlets Michèle Mercier and Lidia Alfonsi and DROP OF WATER victim Jacqueline Pierreux are more aptly suited to Mario Bava's giallo-thriller substance over the atmospheric horror style.