Rating: 
Summary: Classic Giallo
Review: I knew this was going to be a unique movie experience as soon as the opening credits started to roll. Also, the soundtrack is listed as Dolby mono but the music has sort of an enveloping presence. Nice clarity, good sound, and a soundtrack that I didn't have to push the volume up to maximum on my speakers. In this feature, the women are not dressed as stimulating as the other Bava movies I've seen (even though the movie is about models) but they are nice-looking actresses and the lead female is a powerful, dominant woman. She controls everybody and it's rather exciting. I cannot reveal her fate. What odd sets! What strange colors! Bava did another film featuring mannequins that I am going to research and purchase based on this film. The film doesn't seem dated at all. I just thoroughly enjoyed the music, lighting, and especially Eva Bartok's performance (the dominant owner of the model agency) who was in control until the very end. They don't make many movies like this any more, and I've rarely seen any that are as engaging. I prefer to comment on the quality of the DVD rather than disclose plots and key points. For a 1964 film, this widescreen DVD will be a real treat in your collection if you like the horror/terror/murder genres.
Rating:
Summary: Great movie, Great DVD
Review: If you are like me and are a fan of this movie and for years had to rely on an old, faded video for your repeated viewing------REJOICE. This movie has been released on DVD. It was like watching it for the first time. The reds (and if you are a BAVA fan you know about the reds) are so vidid they will make you weep. And that widescreen. WOW. Thank you to whoever was responsible. The picture is so clear and crisp, sound is great, and loaded with extras like trailers, interviews, and bios.
Rating: 
Summary: ONE OF THE BEST USES OF COLOR EVER
Review: If you are looking for a breathtakingly beautiful use of color and lighting, YOU MUST SEE "BLOOD AND BLACL LACE". This has to be one of the great overlooked movies of all time. Great Jazz score.
What happened to the mentality that could both make and go see this kind of movie? After watching this one, and looking over the current cinema listings in the local paper, I nearly cried at the lack of anything like this to see.
The rich jewel tones that flood every frame in this film are amazing. Eastmancolor must be one of the most underrated processes in film history. Notice how shocking the white undergarments of the models seem after the killer rips their bodices away.
A great movie in which nearly the whole cast lies dead at the end. Eva Bartok is amazingly beautiful, why didn't she become more of an international star?
Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: ONE OF THE BEST USES OF COLOR EVER
Review: If you are looking for a breathtakingly beautiful use of color and lighting, YOU MUST SEE "BLOOD AND BLACL LACE". This has to be one of the great overlooked movies of all time. Great Jazz score.
What happened to the mentality that could both make and go see this kind of movie? After watching this one, and looking over the current cinema listings in the local paper, I nearly cried at the lack of anything like this to see.
The rich jewel tones that flood every frame in this film are amazing. Eastmancolor must be one of the most underrated processes in film history. Notice how shocking the white undergarments of the models seem after the killer rips their bodices away.
A great movie in which nearly the whole cast lies dead at the end. Eva Bartok is amazingly beautiful, why didn't she become more of an international star?
Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The First Giallo!
Review: In my opinion, this film is the first giallo. This movie gave birth to what filmakers like Dario Argento & others have popularized in the late 60s & throughout the 70s & 80s as a specific genre of horror film. Bava used the now-familiar use of the gloved & hooded killer killing beautiful women in a variety of sadistic ways. In Argento's films like DEEP RED, TENEBRE, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMMAGE, & his latest one SLEEPLESS (aka NON HO SONNO), one can see the homage or formula that he used to make these films successful & effective. And it can all be traced back to this 1964 film, BLOOD & BLACK LACE (aka SEI DONNE PER L'ASSASSINO). Bava used lavish sets, deep colors, fluid camera work, & the familiar thin narrative in this movie that is copied later on by Argento, Fulci, & yes, even American directors like Brian De Palma & John Carpenter. The storytelling in this movie is rather weak as to what set off the murders of those lovely models. Instead, this film relies more on STYLE & loads of it. And the rervelation on who the killer is... well, I won't spoil it. BLOOD & BLACK LACE is an exercise in style & taste. It's like watching a beautifully choreographed ballet of death with brutal intensity & violence. I would also go so far as to name this film the FIRST TRUE "BODYCOUNT" horror film. To modern horror film fans, BLOOD & BLACK LACE may not be your cup of tea. But watch it & relish it for it is a feast for your eyes. The mesmerizing beauty of Bava's genius is a sight to behold.
Rating:
Summary: PRIME BAVA....
Review: Many have said this movie is misogynistic. I won't get into that. To be fair, I would have to say that it is disturbing to a degree, but also a stylish shocker done by a master film maker that is highly watchable if you're not squeamish. The world of haute couture is a perfect place to present a murder thriller in that it affords the limitless opportunities of playing with color, showcasing beautiful women and providing a host of possible villains...and victims. Bava does all of this in classic continental style. The victims are beautiful fashion models, the murders are violent and ,in some cases, gory. The settings of the salon and showrooms are garish with lots of red and black. The murder set pieces are scary, bizarre and done to the hilt. The storyline has some cohesence with enough sordid details to make it juicy. VCI has done the film marvelous justice on DVD and it looks beautiful. All in all, an engrossing horror film that continues to satisfy Bava and giallo fans and a collector's treat as well. Enjoy this one.
Rating:
Summary: A Landmark Horror Movie
Review: Mario Bava, the founding father of Italian horror (see my BLACK SUNDAY/THE MASK OF SATAN review), was a real trendsetter with his innovative camera tricks (he was a cameraman as well) and cinematic mastery. Every one of his movies changed the face of horror worldwide. But BLOOD AND BLACK LACE may just well be the most influential and ground-breaking movie in his distinguished career!
A fashion house in Italy becomes a slaughterhouse when the diary of one of the models is discovered. It seems that there is some unsavory material within the diary concerning the models. Everyone is after the diary, and in fact somebody even goes as far as to bump off a few people for the diary. Who will survive?
See folks, this is where the Italian giallo, the career of Dario Argento (my favorite Italian horror director), and the slasher film began. When I saw BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, I gained a new understanding of Italian horror and how cool it is. It's all right here: wild camera moves (achieved on a red wagon!), lighting in different colors (echoing EC Comics long before George Romero gave it a shot in CREEPSHOW and even before the first TALES FROM THE CRYPT movie in 1972), gorgeous but ill-fated women, psychosexually motivated mayhem, and of course truly awesome murder sequences! Yes indeed, we can all thank Mario Bava for the state of Italian horror in its heyday and for all those slasher movies that have come out recently because Mario Bava singlehandedly shaped the state of modern, non-Gothic/supernatural horror in just 90 minutes of murder and mayhem!
VCI's DVD is a testament to this movie's significance in horror history. The audio commentary by Bava expert Tim Lucas provides a treasure trove of trivia for Bava buffs and Italian horror fans alike! Best of all, the presentation is uncut and in widescreen, complete with the original opening title sequence (which was truly awesome and evocative) and restored murder sequences which are as cringe-worthy as anything Tom Savini could come up with! We have the American title sequence (courtesy of Filmation Studios, the animators of Fat Albert and He-Man) and French title sequence, and much, much more! A truly ground-breaking horror film, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE is a definite must-watch!
Rating:
Summary: Body Count Madness - Birth of the Giallo
Review: The first body count-movie, Bava's "B&BL" truly ushered in a whole genre of horror film. Many directors were admittedly influenced by Bava's work including Carpenter, Argento and even Almodovar. Bava created a whole style on his own that no one will ever be able to completely re-create, but it's worth trying. BLACK LACE introduced audiences to the giallo, an italian horror-mystery --- the masked and gloved killer, the various suspects, the damsels that will surely die, the violent killings, the murderer's identity revealed --- and it also introduced the "body count" gimmick (check out the euro-trailers for the film on the disc as they count down the victims one by one --- "Friday the 13th" would rip-off this advertising campaign 15 years later!) You can't watch BLACK LACE without laughing somewhat at some of the character's actions and lines, and dubbed voices, but the script is not the key here. It's the style, lighting, colors, camera movements...and of course, the deliriously fun murder scenes that make this a masterpiece of horror. The movie looks stunning, colors are vibrant --- and it's uncut featuring the one blood-moving-in-water shot from the bathtub scene which has always been edited. The DVD includes a fun Cameron Mitchell interview, an interview with actress Mary Arden who played the model Peggy in the film, some other Bava trailers ("Erik the Conqueror"), the original American re-shot title sequence (quite good), a Tim Lucas commentary track, photo gallery and more. It's a great disc - recommended highly.
Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece, in which all emotion is carried by the style.
Review: The pulpy plot of 'Blood and Black Lace' - a mysterious killer slaughters the beautiful models of a haunted-house-like fashion salon - is not the most important aspect of Mario Bava's masterpiece, although the title accurately indicates its interest in (female) death and (fetishistic) sexuality. Indeed, Bava seems to freeze the potentialities for terror and suspense in favour of hermetic set-pieces, where the elaborate mise-en-scene, its colours, lighting effects, set-design and the composition of figures within it, the European bande dessinee chic, are all far more important than any psychological crises the characters undergo. Indeed, the loving way Bava films the mannequins that strew the salon, the glowing red light that shines from some, or the curved wires of others, betrays more intense interest than in any of his human figures. With one exception: the murderer, a faceless, bandaged figure in black sunglasses, dark raincoat and trilby, a Fantomas for the more lurid 1960s, poised arbiter of aestheticised transgression, a figure who shares with the director the power to be everywhere, see everything and decide the fate of the characters. 'Blood' is not a generic thriller or horror film, but the blinding epitome of pop-art Surrealism, where the guiding spirits are the likes of Man Ray, Ernst, Cocteau and Franju, where the image is composed and fragmented into static, fetishistic components, where decor and atmosphere and look are manipulated with rarefied perversity. We may not care about individual characters, but the look of the film as a whole, its charged shards of images, its staged restructuring of generic form, its invasively creepy camera movements, with its point-of-view shots that don't belong to anyone, together unleash a full-blown expression of our most profound and inadmissable desires, impulses, dreams, fears; our most murderously (misogynistically?) violent wishes; our eroticising of death; our terror of the unknown, the random order of death and the decay of beauty, the failure of our attempts to preserve it. Crucially, the proliferation of murders are an attempt to keep the truth hidden, just as the unconscious spills out of any attempt to repress it. Bava is credited in films like this with inaugurating the slasher genre, but at its inception he fearsomely negates its ideological, helpless-female/predatory-male assumptions (which is why many horror fans can't deal with him), although to tell you how would spoil your enjoyment of this Jacobean nightmare.
Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous Looking, Ground Breaking Giallo!
Review: We all know that Director Mario Bava is really a Cinematographer at heart and it really shows in "Blood And Black Lace". Unusually graphic for 1964, though fairly tame today I guess, this film is still suspensful, full of red herrings and difficult to watch in certain scenes. This is the film often credited with popularizing and really starting the "giallo" genre and it truly is a masterpiece of it's kind. Of course we have the black-gloved killer, the plot twists, the sexual heat, etc... which makes any good giallo and as wonderful as Bava is at Directing this movie, just witness the tracking shots and the close-ups, he really excels as a Cinematographer in this one! The use of color is amazing! As strange as it is to say, it is a beautiful film to look at despite the fact that it is brutal in content. The beautiful colors grab you and hold you and create a surreal, almost dream-like quality in spite of the fact that there are people being brutally murdered. It is quite obvious that, even though it was different in content, this film with it's use of colors was a clear inspiration for Dario Argento's gorgeous, color-induced, frightening, nightmare film "Suspiria". If your looking for a film to show you what Mario Bava is all about as a Director and Cinematographer and you want to see the "grandfather" of the giallo film, there is no better place to start then with "Blood And Black Lace". A true cinematic masterpiece!
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