Bay of Blood

I've heard a lot about this movie over the years, but I've never gotten around to seeing it until today (thank you Netflix).  For instance, someone once told me that the original "Friday the 13th" was a "loose remake" of this (I took that to mean "a ripoff" of this) and watching it today, I can see where that comes from.  A lot of the death scenes are very similar, suspiciously so, and one death scene in particular was lifted right from this movie and transplanted into the sequel, "Friday the 13th part 2."  It was the only really good scene in that movie, too.  Poo on them.  While the plot is different, the filmmakers clearly drew inspiration from the awesome death scenes in this movie.  Mario Bava is great at filming spectacular death scenes.  I used to count myself a huge fan of his until I saw "Blood and Black Lace" and just lost my taste for his movies, but this one reminded me why I used to enjoy them so much.  Perhaps I need to give him another chance.

So this movie is about a cantankerous old woman who happens to be rich (and also confined to a wheelchair, which renders her kind of helpless) and she's murdered at the beginning of the movie.  The murder is made to look like a suicide, so her heirs stand to inherit her huge estate, so they all get money hungry and start trying to ensure that none of her other heirs get their grubby paws on the money or the huge piece of property by the bay.  Murderous hijinks abound.

It's hard to feel sorry for any of these characters, because they're all a bunch of greedy jerks who are willing to stop at nothing (including multiple homicide) to get what they want.  One in particular really gets to me, because this person is seriously willing to off everyone in the movie, not even stopping to consider that if everyone else is dead, the police MIGHT just possibly consider that person the only suspect?  Also by the end of the movie there are so many damn bodies in the bay that the water probably contains about 50% blood, so the title is very fitting.  The acting is mostly good here.  Some of the characters are annoying, but the two most annoying ones to me were also the only two people in the movie who weren't murderous and evil, so I softened to them by the end of the movie.  There's also a killer ending (hahaha, I said killer) that is very fitting for the film, especially considering what went before.  The lines are kind of stiff and stilted but that's to be expected with Italian horror movies like this.  The English language track is always a little wonky. Other than that, there's really not much to complain about here.  I had a blast with this one.