Review of Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) by Derrick P — 25 Jul 2008

God, these movies just get worse and worse.

I went from thinking that Bava was one of the most talented directors ever to being a hack from Italy. Here's my major problem with his later films: He made such great movies early on in his career. I thought that the man was a genius. But by this period, we just start seeing these overly convoluted movies that really don't represent the genre he's good at creating.

This is a giallo mod movie. I don't know if that can even exist, but it does. Now, there's always an issue with mod movies in the sense that they totally depend on the atmosphere of the mod scene to carry the movie, regardless of the content. This movie is not totally devoid of content, but there are definitely gaps in the logic that this movie tries to present itself as. Like I mentioned, Bava uses very convoluted plots and this movie is no exception to the rule. I feel like he understands everything in the story, so he avoids telling the audience anything that would give them too much insight into the mystery. Perhaps he is so desperate for making sure that the end stays secret that he just leaves huge plot points out of the movie. I mean, there are characters that you have no idea who they are and barely reference. I mean, they're on an island! There's a killer! You'd think that anyone who'd be on that island would be suspect and discussed to no end. But apparently, that means that the story is simply going to go the way Bava wanted and that's the way it is going to be. Fie! Fie on this film!

The only real pull that this movie has is that it is pretty fun to see how people are going to get murdered. Really, that's not that much of a draw because everyone gets murdered on a variation of knife stab. Sure, there's one sniper shot and the body is dragged away. (Why? Who knows? Maybe to distract you from the fact of who the real killer is. Too bad you can't solve it because, as I mentioned time-and-time again, there's just not enough info to make heads or tails of this movie.) I do like Bava significantly better when there is a body count. What this movie really reminds me is Bay of Blood (or for you people with the older print of the movie: Twitch of the Death Nerve.) But Bay of Blood has the cryptic storytelling with an eventual payoff and huge amount of gore. This movie (in comparison) is extremely tame with the gore. Really, the goriest scene is not even a real death. More often than not, you'll find bodies, but not actually see where things went haywire.

This really is a mess of a movie. Somewhere in here, there's a halfway decent film just begging to be recut and partially reshot. I'm not saying that this movie is anywhere near the mess that Roy Colt and Winchester Jack is, but there needs to be some massive restructuring for this movie to be considered good.