Cheap Shock (DVD) (Mario Bava) Price

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Customer Reviews of Shock

Real good Shock for your video.
Forget Sixth Sense and others horrors with ghosts and take Shock.In this classic giallo from legendary Mario Bava will touch you fear pretty step by step,just to the macabre finale.The story is well written by four peoples,including Bava's son Lamberto and Dardanno Sachetti,important screenwriter for Italian horror film.The camera work is excellent,acting of Daria Nicolodi too.And the wonderfull collector's edition of Anchor bay entertaiment?Beautiful cover,widescreen and remastered picture,italian trailer and U.S.Tv spot and interview with assistant director Lamberto Bava!!!With perfect work of Amazon.com what else we can want?

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An impressive swan song for Bava.
First of all, both Lamberto and his father Mario worked on this film. Second, there is no proof how much of the film was directed by one or the other. I'm inclined to think it was more Mario's doing and less his son's, because nothing Lamberto Bava did afterwards is as good as this, and that includes Macabre and A Blade in the Dark, not to mention the junk he lowered himself to once he started directing the Demons films.

This is definitely smoother, more atmospheric and more slickly disturbing than the disjointed and undeveloped Twitch of the Death Nerve. Not that the latter was a bad film, it had its moments, but Bava ultimately did not pull that one off. Good performances all around combined with a disturbing incestual theme and a stylistic tour-de-force result in an impressive swan song for Mario Bava. Sure, it's not a masterpiece, it's no Lisa and the Devil, but a worthy addition to any Italian horror fan's DVD library. And check out that score by Goblin spin-off Libra!

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Mario? Lamberto!
Shock (Mario Bava, 1977)

While Mario Bava put his name to Shock (known to American audiences as behind the Door II)-- the last film Bava was involved with before his death in 1980-- that probably wasn't a good move. Bava, whose career reached such heights as I, Vampiri (1956) and Bay of Blood (1971), never sank so low as this. Not even Danger: Diabolik! (1968) is this bad.

Much of the blame rests on Mario Bava's son Lamberto, who in an interview included with the DVD says (admits to?) having directed over half the film himself. Anyone who's seen any of Lamberto's solo outings (Demons 2, Demons 3, Black Sabbath,
Midnight Killer, etc. ad nauseam*) already knew that about five minutes into this dog. It's all the more disturbing given a high-powered, albeit small, cast and a script that might have actually worked in the hands of a director who understands how to build suspense. Mario, for example.

The story (which isn't a sequel to the original Beyond the Door, incidentally; the only thing the two have in common is David Colin, who plays a different role in each movie) centers around a family who move into a new house. Well, not really a new house. The mother, Dora (Daria Nicolodi, a Dario Argento staple), lived here before with her first husband, who committed suicide years before. Her new husband (John Steiner, who also worked with Argento in the 1982 film Tenebre)is an angel compared to the first guy, or so everyone seems to think. Dora's child from marriage #1, Marco (David Colin, who never acted in another film after this), is also along for the ride. By the family's first night in the house, Marco is starting to fall under the influence of something rather nasty.

Yes, you've seen a bunch of possessed-kid flicks before, but there's enough here to have made this one compelling (Bava has a take on the Oedipus complex that's just plain nasty-- some of the few scenes that actually make this worth watching) had it been done correctly. However, any subtlety reflected in the original script is woefully absent here; foreshadowing is writ large enough for even the densest viewer to be able to spot any good jumps from a mile off, and the ending can be seen coming long before you actually get there. Not a good thing in a supposed mystery.

Painfully, both Steiner and Nicolodi turn in good performances, and the soundtrack, originally credited to Libra (who have since been unmasked as Italian pop stalwarts Goblin), is as much a joy as is all of Goblin's other early work. However, Shock provides hard and painful evidence at how much less than the sum of its parts a whole can be. * 1/2

(* Yes, Lamberto is credited with the original Demons. One wonders whether Dario Argento was just the writer on that one.)