A Bay of Blood (1971)
Even though the influences of the genre come from even older movies, this one is probably the first true slasher film which fits the genre completely. Sure this film by Mario Bava is missing the masked murderer but the similarities for example to Friday the 13th (1980) are quite clear. Last time I saw this about 15 years ago I couldn't really understand much from it, the VHS had a horrible audio track and no subtitles, so all I could understand was that some people were getting killed and that of course didn't impress me much back then. Now luckily the DVD by Future Film has nice audio with subtitles and the image quality is good as well. But I must say I still didn't really understand everything. Now sure I understood the motives and the plot, but at points I was quite lost with who's killing who. The movie jumps timelines and there are multiple killers (not a spoiler, so don't worry) so I got lost quite a many times. Anyway that didn't matter much as there's a nice giallo-like atmosphere and plenty of quite graphic kills which kept me entertained. At points the soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani sounded great, but unfortunately most of the time it was rather dull. The ending is just something special, shocking and absolutely hilarious in a dark sense of humour and that alone is worth watching the whole movie. As a curiosity piece for seeing the baby steps of the slasher genre this is pure brilliance and as a fun late night shocker this works quite well even today, despite the few flaws.
73%
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