by Brendan Foley
Mario Bava’s Rome shares no more connection to our world than Middle Earth or Hoth. Actually, his metropolis is even more divorced from reality than those fictional wonderlands, since at least the people of those worlds acted like actual people. Not so the humans at the heart of films like Evil Eye aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much, now on Blu thanks to Kino Classics. Between the exaggerated sets and outsized performances, the wacky plots and illogical turns, and the off-putting dub, it all adds up to deliriously heightened pulp.
And of course, that’s part of the fun. Bava’s best works come with a cheeky awareness of genre and a boundless sense of play. His films often seem to be spilling off the edge of the frame with characters and story, suggesting that every street corner is inhabited with some cross section of weirdo or mutant.
Evil Eye doesn’t hit the delirious highs of Twitch of the Death Nerve or Kidnapped! but its 90 minutes contain a daffy riff on Hitchcockian thrillers and lay the groundwork for the entire giallo subgenre. Not bad for a film that Bava himself spoke dismissively of.
Nora Davis (Letícia Román) is a somewhat flighty young woman with a deep love for murder mystery novels. Nora arrives in Rome to visit her elderly aunt, only to have the ailing woman die that very night. Nora makes the appropriate arrangements, the funeral has a respectable turnout, and she then returns home, saddened but a little wiser to the world.
Haha, just fucking with you. No, what actually happens is a terrified Nora runs to get help for her aunt, only to get mugged and struck on the head, and when she comes to it’s to see a nearby woman screaming in pain as a shadow-cloaked man pulls a knife out of her back. And you thought jet lag was the worst part of travelling.
The next morning, there’s no sign of either body or blood, and a hilariously elaborate chain of events results in the cops dismissing anything she has to say. Nora begins to dig into the case herself, all the while being circled by an ever-mounting number of mysterious figures. Some good old fashioned gum-shoeing ensues. It’s great fun to watch the mystery twist and swerve, constantly bringing in new players and motives to confuse poor Nora all the more.
Evil Eye’s biggest problem (especially in the extended American cut which adds several ‘funny’ scenes, including a sequence in which a painting of Nora’s uncle continuously eye-fucks her until she covers it up. No, really, that happens. The new Blu contains both original and American cuts) is the too slack pacing. Nora comes to believe that what she witnessed was actually a vision of a decades old murder, and her investigation into the vision/dream/prophecy that she witnesses connects to an unresolved serial killer case, with an implication that Nora may be next on the chopping block. But there’s no real urgency to any of this, and Nora takes only laughable precautions in the wake of ongoing threats of brutal murder.
In attempting to mix Hitchcock with out-and-out horror, Bava misses out on the best of both categories. The film has none of Hitch’s cool elegance of plot or of character, but it also lacks the balls out thrills that Bava’s own unapologetic slashers and creature features indulge in. Isolated sequences show what a fantastic touch Bava is at suspense, utilizing his experience as a cinematographer and designer. Nora’s apartment is a wide open space surrounded by shaded windows through which you can only see the shadowed outlines of figures, and Bava wrings great chills out of various stalking figures in the background.
Best of all is a later sequence featuring Nora walking down an empty hallway towards a mysterious voice, the hallway illuminated by a series of naked hanging bulbs, swinging frantically in the bustling wind. In scenes like this and others, you can witness Bava’s mastery at creating an almost dream-state, where logic and sense are secondary to the experience of rendering chills and thrills down his customers’ spines.
Also there’s one part where her main love interest (John Enter the Dragon Saxon) basically rapes her and then they’re in love afterwards. That’s fucked up, and not in any way that was intended.
Because the film never really builds up a strong head of steam, pace wise, there’s a ponderousness to the film’s plotting that does not help buy into the ludicrous logic of the story. In better movies, this sort of thing would be forgivable; hell, Bava pulled off way more convoluted mystery plots in other films (always happy for an excuse to write out Twitch of the Death Nerve because Twitch of the Death Nerve is the greatest title ever). It’s not like giallo films like Argento’s Suspiria and Deep Red spent a lot of time making sure the stories were air tight. Indeed, part of the joy of those films is in seeing the writers and directors place themselves into tortuously twisted logic corners and then blast their way out. Coupled with the unreality that we’ve already discussed, the ridiculousness is part of the point.
As a proto-giallo, Evil Eye doesn’t find that same sweet spot (and the tweaking and trimming done by AIP for the American cut does not help), so anyone looking to get into Bava would probably do well to seek out his later, color films, where his master’s touch was more in sync with the final films. But Evil Eye is still a great deal of fun, and I would recommend it to anyone with a taste for this style and subgenre of film. While later films would flesh Bava’s world out with a good deal more confidence, this film showcases the early sketches, and those are fascinating in their own right.