Furthering my education on Italian 70's cheesefest horrors, and having an ambivalent but generally favourable relationship with Dario Argento, I went on to check out Italian directors often put in the same brackets with him. Whereas I found Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond" downright dull, boring and nonsensical, Mario Bava's "Scho(c)k" shows a lot more style and ability to manipulate (albeit clichéd) genre characteristics. It also owes a lot more to Argento than it's readily willing to admit. References to "Deep Red" are numerous (a crazy mother/crazy son interaction, children's drawings, nursery melodies being heard, a house where funny things are occurring and so on). Elements on which the bulk of "Suspiria" is based are prominent here too - tormented women in nightgowns run around off their faces screaming aloud, amongst them Daria Nicolodi being a unifying factor too between the two filmmakers. There's more, though - Mario Bava is well acquainted with Polanski's "Repulsion" - you just expect Nicolodi's boobies to be grabbed by hands reaching from the walls or furniture any second now. There's jumpy mirror reflections in here too. And, lastly, "Shock" fits right in with "The Omen" and other films with malignant children messing about. It's not all copy & paste, though - whereas Argento disposes of his women relatively quickly and there's always quite a few of them, Bava decides to torture the single one he has till she's really driven quite insane. He also gets Daria Nicolodi to show more width to her acting ability than Argento ever did, and the payoff is considerable - she does rather well.
There are giveaway aspects of production that ring cheap and inept: the main body of the music score consists of one singular and derivative musical motif which is banged out on a slightly detuned piano and nauseatingly repeated over and over again - same with the nursery tune, resulting in the effect being annoying rather than haunting and creepy, as was supposedly the intention. Scenes that work the best are the trippy ones involving Nicolodi's nightmares and torments, including the giggly "flying blade" sequence. On the other side, Bava pays much more attention to and handles better the narrative and the dialogue - and that's, amongst other things, what distinguishes him from Argento, let alone Fulci. There's also something about his camera work and editing that is vaguely reminiscent of De Palma, although Bava's visual sense is a lot more detached, less elegant and earthier. A reasonably good representative of it's genre, I'm sure this one often gets scrutinised by enthusiast film buffs and scholars alike.
There are giveaway aspects of production that ring cheap and inept: the main body of the music score consists of one singular and derivative musical motif which is banged out on a slightly detuned piano and nauseatingly repeated over and over again - same with the nursery tune, resulting in the effect being annoying rather than haunting and creepy, as was supposedly the intention. Scenes that work the best are the trippy ones involving Nicolodi's nightmares and torments, including the giggly "flying blade" sequence. On the other side, Bava pays much more attention to and handles better the narrative and the dialogue - and that's, amongst other things, what distinguishes him from Argento, let alone Fulci. There's also something about his camera work and editing that is vaguely reminiscent of De Palma, although Bava's visual sense is a lot more detached, less elegant and earthier. A reasonably good representative of it's genre, I'm sure this one often gets scrutinised by enthusiast film buffs and scholars alike.