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

Filed under

A Bay of Blood

Name: A Bay of Blood
Director: Mario Bava
Genre: Horror, Giallo, Slasher
Released: 1971
Duration: 84 min

A Bay of Blood is a 1971 Italian giallo directed by Mario Bava. It is one of the 72 films on the Director of Public Prosecutions' video nasties list, and it was successfully prosecuted for obscenity.

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

The whole list