- Director
- Mario Bava
- Year
- 1971
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 84 min
Also released as
- Reazione a catena
- Twitch of the Death Nerve
- Carnage
- Blood Bath
- Last House on the Left Part II
- Bloodbath Bay of Death
- Zátoka krve
- Banho de Sangue
- O Sexo na Sua Forma Mais Violenta
- Last House - Part 2
- Last House on the Left 2
A Bay of Blood
The hinge between giallo and slasher. Friday the 13th Part 2 lifts two murders almost shot for shot.
Thirteen people die in 84 minutes and the plot is an inheritance dispute. Bava is not interested in who inherits and neither are you.
What this film does is invent the body-count structure: a set of characters with no arc, dispatched in individually designed pieces of staging, with the camera treating each death as a self-contained sequence. Two of them, the spear through the couple in bed and the machete to the face, are reproduced in Friday the 13th Part 2 closely enough that the comparison is normally made shot by shot.
It also has one of the great final gags in horror, which is the only part of the plot worth protecting.
The alternate-title list is the longest of any film on this site, which is why the search here covers alternate titles at all.
Banned, seized, prosecuted
DPP 72 · successfully prosecuted
UK video title Blood Bath
Circulated in Britain as Blood Bath, which is one of at least six titles this film has carried. Anybody looking for it under Bay of Blood or Twitch of the Death Nerve would not have found it on a 1983 shelf.
UK now Passed 18 uncut
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The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Australia
Canada
UK
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
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