Sei donne per l’assassino [Blood and Black Lace] **** (1964, Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Mary Arden) – Classic Movie Review 7817

For his 1964 film Sei Donne per Assassino [Blood and Black Lace], the Italian horror maestro director Mario Bava turns in a visually stylish but pretty dodgy and scarily grisly horror mystery thriller about a stocking-masked killer stalking and brutally murdering various sexy, scantily-clad fashion model girls in a bid to obtain a scandal-revealing diary.

With Bava’s bravura efforts of eye-catching directorial flourishes, it is impressive and exciting as a classic Sixties giallo, even if it is a none too satisfactory chiller, since the acting and the writing of the plot and dialogue are equally shaky. However, Bava’s ingenuity and flair, Claude Renoir’s Eastmancolor cinematography and the score by Carlo Rustichelli redeem it entirely.

For better or for worse, it is full on as a titillating combination of near-naked women and gory murder. It is notable as one of the earliest and most influential of gialli movies and was a template for Eighties slasher films, as well as inspiring the works of mainstream directors like Argento, Scorsese and Tarantino. Misunderstood and undervalued in its day, it is now hailed as one of the major movies of the golden age of Italian horror.

Co-written by Bava, Giuseppe Barilla and Marcello Fondato, Sei Donne per Assassino stars Cameron Mitchell as Massimo Morlacchi [or Max Morlan], Eva Bartok as Contessa Cristiana Cuomo [or Countess Christina Como], Mary Arden as Peggy Peyton and Thomas Reiner as Ispettore Silvestri [or Inspector Sylvester].

Also in the cast are Arianna Gorini as Nicole, Lea Lander (as Lea Krugher) as Greta, Claude Dantes as Tilde (or Tao-Li), Dante DiPaolo as Frank Scalo (or Franco Scalo), Massimo Righi as Marco, Franco Ressel as Marquis Richard Morell (or Marchese Riccardo Morelli), Luciano Pigozzi as Caesar Lazar (or Cesare Lazzarini), Giuliano Raffaelli as Zanchin, Francesca Ungaro as Isabella, Harriet Medin (as Harriette White Medin) as Clarice (or Clarissa), Enzo Cerusico as Gas Station Attendant, Nadia Anty as Model and Goffredo Unger as The Masked Killer.

Sei donne per l’assassino [also known as Blood and Black Lace, Fashion House of Death or Six Women for the Murderer} is directed by Mario Bava, runs 88 minutes, is made by Emmepi Cinematografica, Les Productions Georges de Beauregard and Monachia Film, is released by Allied Artists, is written by Marcel Fondato, Giuseppe Barilla, Roger Vadim and Mario Bava, is shot in Eastmancolor by Claude Renoir, is produced by Lou Moss and scored by Carlo Rustichelli.

Because of his low budget, Bava mounted his camera on a child’s toy truck for his tracking shots.

Typically, it was afflicted by censorship issues in the UK. The BBFC heavily cut cinema and video versions to edit the violence of the murder scenes, including a woman being battered against a tree trunk, the bathtub killing, the gauntlet murder and shots of Peggy Peyton (Mary Arden) being held against a hot stove. The UK censor cuts were restored in the 2000 Nouveaux DVD release, apart from an overhead shot of blood flowing in the bathtub water.

Arrow Video released the Blu-ray Disc on 21 April 2015 in the United States and 13 April in the UK.

It followed Bava’s worldwide hits Black Sunday (1960) and Black Sabbath (1963), both released by AIP, who surprisingly rejected Bava’s movie as being ‘too intense, too adult’. So the Woolner Brothers released the movie in the US with only one minor change, replacing the original title sequence with gory semi-animation by Filmation, featuring mannequins being riddled with bloody bullet holes.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7817

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