this week in film and television

INDIE 80s: BLUE VELVET

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) gets introduced to a dangerous, candy-coated world by Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) in David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET

BLUE VELVET (David Lynch, 1986)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, August 8, 4:30 & 9:30
Series continues through August 27
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

David Lynch reveals the dark underbelly of American society in his 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet. Channeling Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock as well as John Badham’s War Games, Lynch creates a unique look and feel in this modern erotic noir thriller, set in the small suburban town of Lumberton, North Carolina, where danger and darkness lurk just below the surface. Lynch, who had previously made the well-received Eraserhead and The Elephant Man as well as the disastrous Dune, establishes the American theme at the heart of the movie with Blue Velvet’s opening shot, red roses in front of a white picket fence with a bright blue sky in the background. As the soundtrack plays Bobby Vinton’s 1963 hit version of the title song, Lynch then shows a red fire truck moving in slow motion down a tree-lined street, a fireman in a blue shirt on the truck, waving, standing next to a Dalmatian; children being beckoned across a street by a crossing guard; a woman (Priscilla Pointer) on her couch watching a black-and-white crime movie in which a man with a gun enters a living room; and her husband (Jack Harvey) suffering a heart attack while watering the lawn, the hose shooting out from his groin area as he lies on the ground. Lynch then zooms in on a human ear in a windy green field, the organ being devoured by bugs, followed by a billboard announcing, “Welcome to Lumberton.” That’s quite a welcome, indeed. Lynch begins the main narrative as college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) visits his father in the hospital, then finds that now-ant-covered ear in the field. The camera swoops in closer and closer, finally taking viewers inside the detached organ, and the story takes off, as Jeffrey and high school student Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of local police detective John Williams (George Dickerson), get involved with a group of demented, crazed criminals led by the deranged Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who are abusing singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) while apparently holding her husband and son hostage. The more Jeffrey immerses himself in this maniacal, candy-coated world, the more peril he finds himself in as his relationships grow with both Sandy and Dorothy.

Dennis Hopper restarted his career with memorable performance as the maniacal Frank Booth in BLUE VELVET

Like the true surrealist he is, Lynch populates Blue Velvet with all kinds of insects, from the ants and other creepy crawly things on the dismembered ear to a bug a robin brings to the Beaumont kitchen; when Frank Booth puts on his oxygen mask to suck in an unidentified drug that most likely is nitrous oxide or amyl nitrate, he resembles a bug, and when Jeffrey needs to gain access to Dorothy’s apartment, he pretends to be an exterminator — and is spotted by the man in the yellow jacket (Fred Pickler). Lynch doesn’t overplay his hand; he deleted a scene involving Aunt Barbara’s (Frances Bay) obsession with termites; the story does take place in Lumberton, after all. The American dream turns into an American nightmare as Lynch also turns Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a theme fraught with menace, lip-synced by the very strange Ben (Dean Stockwell) and mimicked with evil glee by the maniacal Booth. The song, which includes the key line “Too bad it only seems / It only happens in my dreams,” has led some to consider that most of the film is a dream, taking place in Jeffrey’s head from the time the camera zooms into the ear and then eventually emerges near the end. (It would also help explain why high school student Sandy is wearing a ring on her wedding finger throughout the movie.) Even the casting and character names are filled with tantalizing references: Sandy’s mother is played by Hope Lange, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Selena Cross in Peyton Place, a film about a different underside to an American town; Stockwell was a child actor who starred in such films as The Boy with Green Hair and later as a cold-blooded killer in Compulsion; and even the Beaumont family name evokes Hugh Beaumont, who played the patriarch of the Cleaver (!) family in Leave It to Beaver. It’s also extra difficult to watch Vallens get so physically and emotionally abused, knowing that she is played by the daughter of one of cinema’s most beloved and beautiful stars, Ingrid Bergman; Rossellini gives a brave and courageous career-defining performance as a wife and mother who will do anything to get her family back. Nearly thirty years old, Blue Velvet holds up marvelously well, as dark and depraved, and as shimmering and vibrant, as ever, set in a luridly colored world stunningly photographed by Frederick Elmes and featuring a haunting throwback score by Angelo Badalamenti, a frightening yet appealing world that Lynch turns upside down and inside out. Blue Velvet is screening August 8 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Indie 80s,” which continues through August 27 with such other seminal ’80s films as the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, Gregory Nava’s El Norte, Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, and Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead.

RICHARD LESTER — THE RUNNING JUMPING POP CINEMA ICONOCLAST: A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

The Fab Four are on the run in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, screening at Lincoln Center as part of Richard Lester retrospective

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (Richard Lester, 1964)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, August 8, 1:00
Festival runs August 7-13
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
www.thebeatles.com

The Beatles are invading America again with the fiftieth anniversary restoration of their debut film, the deliriously funny anarchic comedy A Hard Day’s Night. Initially released on July 6, 1964, in the UK, AHDN turned out to be much more than just a promotional piece advertising the Fab Four and their music. Instead, it quickly became a huge critical and popular success, a highly influential work that presaged Monty Python and MTV while also honoring the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and the French New Wave. Directed by Richard Lester, who had previously made the eleven-minute The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film with Peter Sellers and would go on to make A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Petulia, and The Three Musketeers, the madcap romp opens with the first chord of the title track as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are running down a narrow street, being chased by rabid fans, but they’re coming toward the camera, welcoming viewers into their crazy world. (George’s fall was unscripted but left in the scene.) As the song blasts over the soundtrack, Lester introduces the major characters: the four moptops, who are clearly having a ball, led by John’s infectious smile, in addition to Paul’s “very clean” grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell, who played a dirty old man in the British series Steptoe and Son, the inspiration for Sanford and Son) and the band’s much-put-upon manager, Norm (Norman Rossington). Lester and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Repulsion, Star Wars) also establish the pace and look of the film, a frantic black-and-white frolic shot in a cinema-vérité style that is like a mockumentary taking off from where François Truffaut’s 400 Blows ends. The boys eventually make it onto a train, which is taking them back to their hometown of Liverpool, where they are scheduled to appear on a television show helmed by a hapless director (Victor Spinetti, who would star in Help as well) who essentially represents all those people who are dubious about the Beatles and the sea change going on in the music industry. Norm and road manager Shake (John Junkin) have the virtually impossible task of ensuring that John, Paul, George, and Ringo make it to the show on time, but there is no containing the energetic enthusiasm and contagious curiosity the quartet has for experiencing everything their success has to offer — while also sticking their tongues out at class structure, societal trends, and the culture of celebrity itself.

Lester and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Alun Owen develop each individual Beatle’s unique character through press interviews, solo sojourns (the underappreciated Ringo goes off on a kind of vision quest; George is mistaken by a fashion fop for a model), and an endless stream of spoken and visual one-liners. (John sniffs a Coke bottle; a reporter asks George, “What do you call your hairstyle?” to which the Quiet One replies, “Arthur.”) Oh, the music is rather good too, featuring such songs as “I Should Have Known Better,” “All My Loving,” “If I Fell,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” “This Boy,” and “She Loves You.” The working name for the film was Beatlemania, but it was eventually changed to A Hard Day’s Night, based on a Ringo malapropism, forcing John and Paul to quickly write the title track. No mere exploitation flick, A Hard Day’s Night is one of the funniest, most influential films ever made, capturing a critical moment in pop-culture history and unleashing four extraordinary gentlemen on an unsuspecting world. Don’t you dare miss this glorious eighty-five-minute explosion of sheer, unadulterated joy. The restoration, courtesy of Janus Films, is screening August 8 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute series “Richard Lester: The Running Jumping Pop Cinema Iconoclast” and will be preceded by The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. The festival runs August 7-13 and consists of most of the now-eighty-three-year-old Philadelphia native’s films, including Robin and Marian, The Bed Sitting Room, Juggernaut, Cuba, The Royal Flash, and the above-mentioned titles. “Growing up, I always thought of Richard Lester as one of the 1960s’ most typically English filmmakers — not just because of his irreverent and absurd sense of humor and his feel for English life but also for the affectionate way he sent up familiar icons from the Beatles to the Three Musketeers to even Superman,” Film Comment editor and FSLC senior programmer Gavin Smith said in reference to the series. “Imagine my surprise when I first learned he was actually an expat Yank. Regardless, he’s still a great English filmmaker!”

MOVIE MASKS: THE FACE OF ANOTHER

Tatsuya Nakadai will reveal his actual face when he appears at the Museum of the Moving Image to screen and discuss THE FACE OF ANOTHER

Hiroshi Teshigahara examines identity and more in THE FACE OF ANOTHER

CABARET CINEMA: THE FACE OF ANOTHER (TANIN NO KAO) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, August 7, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

Kôbô Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara collaborated on five films together, including the marvelously existential Woman of the Dunes in 1964 and The Face of Another two years later. In the latter, Tatsuya Nakadai (The Human Condition, Kill!) stars as Okuyama, a man whose face has virtually disintegrated in a laboratory accident. He spends the first part of the film with his head wrapped in bandages, a la the Invisible Man, as he talks about identity, self-worth, and monsters with his wife (Machiko Kyo), who seems to be growing more and more disinterested in him. Then Okuyama visits a psychiatrist (Mikijirô Hira) who is able to create a new face for him, one that would allow him to go out in public and just become part of the madding crowd again. But his doctor begins to wonder, as does Okuyama, whether the mask has actually taken control of his life, making him as helpless as he was before. Abe’s remarkable novel is one long letter from Okuyama to his wife, filled with utterly brilliant, spectacularly detailed examinations of what defines a person and his or her value in society. Abe wrote the film’s screenplay, which tinkers with the time line and creates more situations in which Okuyama interacts with people; although that makes sense cinematically, much of Okuyama’s interior narrative, the building turmoil inside him, gets lost. Teshigahara once again uses black and white, incorporating odd cuts, zooms, and freeze frames, amid some truly groovy sets, particularly the doctor’s trippy office, and Tōru Takemitsu’s score is ominously groovy as well. As a counterpart to Okuyama, the film also follows a young woman (Miki Irie) with one side of her face severely scarred; she covers it with her hair and is not afraid to be seen in public, while Okuyama must hide behind a mask. But as Abe points out in both the book and the film, everyone hides behind a mask of one kind or another. The Face of Another is screening August 7 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Movie Masks,” being held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Becoming Another: The Power of Masks,” and will be introduced by RISK! podcast host Kevin Allison. The film series continues through August 28 with such other mask-related works as Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, and Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY, SCULPTING IN TIME: THE MIRROR

Andrei Tarkovsky masterpiece reflects back on life and art

THE MIRROR (ZERKALO) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, August 7, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through August 28
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org

“Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So explains Andrei Tarkovsky in his 1975 semiautobiographical masterpiece, The Mirror, in which the Soviet auteur takes a literal and figurative looking glass to reflect on his life, particularly his childhood, in twentieth-century Russia. The nonlinear film, which features long, beautifully composed scenes with little or no dialogue, alternates between color and black-and-white as Tarkovsky maneuvers between three time periods, telling the fragmented and disjointed story of forty-year-old Alexei, who is never onscreen as an adult (he is only heard offscreen in voiceover by Innokenty Smoktunovsky) but is shown as a young boy (Filipp Yankovsky) and an adolescent (Ignat Daniltsev, who also plays Alexei’s son, Ignat). Margarita Terekhova portrays Alexei’s ex-wife, Natalia, as well as his mother, Maria; Tarkovsky’s own mother, Maria Vishnyakova, plays the elderly Maria (who is also called Masha and Marusya), and his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, a successful poet, reads several of his works over the gorgeous imagery that is composed, in many cases, like paintings. Incorporating archival footage of WWII, the Spanish Civil War, and the Sino-Soviet split, Tarkovsky explores family relationships as seen through the eyes of the young Alexei and Ignat, adding mystery and magic, including levitation and slow motion, to the personal, poignant tale. As with Andrei Rublev, the film begins with an odd prologue in which Ignat turns on a sepia-toned television show in which a woman uses a type of hypnosis, concentrating on the hands, to help a student speak without a stutter, as if Tarkovsky is warning the viewer about what is to follow, a deeply hypnotic film that speaks in unusual ways.

Stunning imagery can be found throughout Andrei Tarkovsky’s hypnotic tone poem, THE MIRROR

In his 1986 book, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky wrote, “Generally people’s memories are precious to them. It is no accident that they are coloured by poetry. . . . It occurred to me then that from these properties of memory a new working principle could be developed, on which an extraordinarily interesting film could be built. Outwardly the pattern of events, of the hero’s actions and behavior, would be disturbed. It would be the story of his thoughts, his memories and dreams. And then, without his appearing at all — at least in the accepted sense of the traditionally written film — it would be possible to achieve something highly significant: the expression, the portrayal, of the hero’s individual personality, and the revelation of his interior world.” Cowritten with Aleksandr Misharin and photographed by Georgi Rerberg — Tarkovsky’s regular cinematographer, Vadim Yusov, pulled out of the project because of artistic differences — The Mirror is a visual wonder, a true revelation, filled with stunning scenes that will emblazon themselves in your memory, from a burning barn to parts of a ceiling falling from above, from a woman washing her hair to a man sitting down next to a woman on a fence and breaking it. Don’t worry if you can’t always figure out who is who and what exactly is going on at any one moment and just put your trust in the hands of a genuine master. The Mirror is screening August 7 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of Arts & Design series “Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time,” which runs Friday nights through August 28 and includes all seven of Tarkovsky’s full-length films (Solaris, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice) before concluding with the behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR: 70th ANNIVERSARY OF BOMBING

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) examine their Hiroshima affair in Alain Resnais classic

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (Alain Resnais, 1959)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, August 6, 12:40, 3:00, 5:10, 7:10, 9:10
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In July 1959, Cahiers du cinéma published a roundtable discussion with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and others about Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which Rohmer said, “Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything. . . . Perhaps Hiroshima really is a totally new film. . . . I think that, in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema. . . . In any case it is an extremely important film, but it could be that it will even gain stature with years.” Some four and a half decades later, Rohmer’s prediction has come true, as a stunning new 4K digital restoration reveals Hiroshima Mon Amour to indeed be one of the most important films in the history of cinema, redefining just what the medium is capable of, as fresh and innovative today as it was to Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, et al. upon its initial release. As the black-and-white film opens, two naked, twisted bodies merge together in bed, first covered in glittering ashes, then a kind of acid rain. The woman (Emmanuelle Riva) is a French actress who is in Hiroshima to make a movie about peace. He (Eiji Okada) is a Japanese architect, a builder working in a city that has been laid to waste. Both married with children, they engage in a brief but torrid affair; as her film prepares to wrap, she gets ready to leave, but he begs her to stay. Theirs is a romance that could happen only in Hiroshima.

Director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, Same Old Song), who passed away on March 1 at the age of ninety-one, was meticulous with every detail of the film, from the casting to Marguerite Duras’s stirringly poetic, Oscar-nominated script and dialogue, from Georges Delerue’s and Giovanni Fusco’s powerful, wide-ranging score to crafting each shot as a work of art in itself, using two cinematographers, Michio Takahashi in Japan and Sacha Vierny in France, to emphasize a critical visual difference between the contemporary scenes in Hiroshima and the woman’s past with a German soldier (Bernard Fresson) in Nevers. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a haunting experience, examining love and loss among the ruins of war as two people, at least temporarily, try to create something new. Riva (Three Colors: Blue, Thomas the Impostor) is mesmerizing as the confused, unpredictable woman, her eyes so often turned away from the man, unwilling to face the future, while Okada (Woman in the Dunes, The Yakuza) can’t keep his eyes off her, desperate for their romance to continue. Riva bookended her long career by starring in two of the most unusual yet beautiful love stories ever made, as more than fifty years after Hiroshima she would be nominated for an Oscar for her hypnotizing performance as an elderly woman debilitated by a stroke in Michael Haneke’s Amour. The glorious 4K restoration of Hiroshima Mon Amour,, supervised by Renato Berta, who was Resnais’s chief cameraman on four projects, makes it, to use the words of Eric Rohmer, feel like a totally new film, like we’re experiencing it for the very first time all over again. Hiroshima Mon Amour is having five special screenings on August 6 in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the actual bombing that led to the end of WWII.

NITEHAWK OUTDOORS: MALLRATS

Kevin Smith (r.) will talk about MALLRATS, and hopefully its upcoming sequel, at free twentieth anniversary screening Tuesday night in Williamsburg

Who: Kevin Smith, DJ Steve Reynolds
What: Nitehawk Cinema and BuzzFeed Throwback Theater present free outdoor screening of Mallrats (Kevin Smith, 1995)
Where: 50 Kent Ave. between North 11th & North 12th Sts.
When: Tuesday, August 4, free with advance RSVP, doors open at 5:00, music at 7:00, film at sunset
Why: Writer, director, and costar Kevin Smith will be in Williamsburg on Tuesday night for a Q&A prior to a free twentieth anniversary screening of his 1995 cult fave, Mallrats, in which he plays Silent Bob to Jason Mewes’s Jay. Also in the cast are Ben Affleck, Shannen Doherty, Jeremy London, Priscilla Barnes, Michael Rooker, Joey Lauren Adams, Ethan Suplee, Claire Forlani, and, as himself, comic book legend Stan Lee. Mallrats deals with difficult breakups, game shows, Magic Eye pictures, pre-Paul Blart mall security guards, the Easter Bunny, sex, and general loitering. Advance RSVP is required but doesn’t guarantee entry to the event, which also includes a set by DJ Steve “Party Like It’s 1999” Reynolds and such food trucks as OddFellows Ice Cream, Luzzo’s Pizza, Best Buds Burritos, and Landhaus. Smith recently confirmed that he is in the process of making a Mallrats sequel, so this is a great opportunity to hear him discuss the underrated original as well as what’s coming next for these crazy characters.

AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES: BLACK SABBATH

A dead medium is not quite ready to say farewell to the world in Mario Bava’s BLACK SABBATH

BLACK SABBATH (Mario Bava, 1963-64)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, August 1, 6:45, Tuesday, August 4, 7:00, and Saturday, August 8, 9:00
Series runs through July 31 – September 3
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

The film that gave Ozzy Osbourne’s band its name, Black Sabbath is just about everything you could want such a movie to be: cheap, exploitive, and featuring Boris Karloff, with nods to great French and Russian storytellers. (Um, sure . . . of course.) Founded in 1954 by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, American International Pictures was responsible for hundreds of low-budget independent films through 1980, specializing in horror, Westerns, blaxploitation, sci-fi, biker flicks, teen delinquency, women in prison, and even beach movies. Anthology Film Archives is paying tribute to the famed studio with a three-part series that begins July 31 by focusing on auteurs who either cut their teeth with AIP or were already well established. It’s quite a list; through September 3, Anthology will be screening works by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Vincente Minnelli, Brian De Palma, and Roger Corman, who will make several appearances at the downtown movie house. Also on the roster is Italian scaremaster Mario Bava, whose Black Sabbath will be shown August 1, 4, and 8. Black Sabbath is, appropriately enough, an anthology of three short films hosted by Boris Karloff, a kind of melding of Karloff’s Thriller television series with Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. The Italian-French coproduction was significantly changed by AIP, altering the order of the films and drastically modifying one of the plots. Black Sabbath opens with “A Drop of Water,” supposedly based on a short story by Anton Chekhov. Late one night, nurse Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux) is summoned by an elderly caretaker (Milly Monti) to a stately home where a medium — sporting perhaps the most frightening face ever on a dead person, with dark, deep-set eyes and a viciously wicked smile that makes her look like an evil doll — has died during a séance. After stealing the medium’s ring off her finger, Helen is suddenly taunted by a buzzing fly and drops of water, evoking what was experienced by the killer in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who was haunted by the unending sound of a beating heart. (Perhaps not coincidentally, AIP was famous for its Poe adaptations.) The conclusion is truly chilling, with a cool little coda.

Boris Karloff serves as host of Mario Bava’s eerie anthology film BLACK SABBATH and plays one of its creepier characters

In “The Telephone,” the glamorous Rosy (Michele Mercier) returns to her apartment one night after an undisclosed outing and is harassed by a man who keeps calling her on her awesome black and red phone, the severity of his threats growing each time she picks up. When the man claims to be the recently deceased Frank, she turns to a former friend, Mary (Lydia Alfonsi), for help, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to save her from this supernatural peril. The Italian original had a tasty soupçon of lesbianism and prostitution, which was washed clean by AIP, but “The Telephone,” possibly inspired by works by F. G. Snyder and Guy de Maupassant, is still a creepy little story that holds up well in this surveillance-crazed age. The trilogy of terror concludes with the heavily atmospheric vampire yarn “The Wurdalak,” adapted from a novella by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. In nineteenth-century Russia, a family awaits the return of its patriarch, Gorca (Karloff, looking like a cross between the Grinch, the Gremlin from the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and the Abominable Snowman), who has gone off to kill a wurdulak, a living cadaver that feasts on the blood of loved ones. Gorca’s son Giorgio (Glauco Onorato), Giorgio’s wife (Rika Dialina), their young son, Ivan, and Giorgio’s younger siblings, Pietro (Massimo Righi) and Sdenka (Susy Andersen), are joined unexpectedly by Vladimir Durfe (Mark Damon), a traveling nobleman who discovers a man with a knife in him outside the family’s cottage. But when Gorca finally shows up, there is something different about him, and the members of the clan must decide whether he’s still their father or if he’s been turned, coming home to feast on his family.

Black Sabbath might be minor Bava, but it’s a great place to start if you know little or nothing about the Italian director, who made such other films as Black Sunday, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, and Kill, Baby, Kill before passing away in 1980 at the age of sixty-five. Black Sabbath has that classic Bava look and feel, with colorful, lush sets, eerie cinematography by Bava and Ubaldo Terzano, captivating suspense, and essentially competent acting with questionable dubbing. Karloff has a ball both as the host of the whole thing and the star of the third film, chewing up the scenery with his playful eyes and mocking brow. He would go on to make a bunch of films for AIP, including Corman’s The Terror and The Raven, Daniel Haller’s Die, Monster, Die! and Jacques Tourneur’s The Comedy of Terrors, alongside such fab costars as Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price, and Peter Lorre. American International served as a training ground for up-and-comers as well as a last bastion for aging actors and directors, and the strange and scary Black Sabbath fits right into their majestic raison d’être.