5 bambole per la luna d'agosto

"Maestro of the Macabre" Mario Bava directs this island-set murder mystery, which owes more than a little to Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. Although it has some of the hallmarks of giallo – a bevy of vixens luxuriating upon middle-aged sleazebags, ropey dubbing, and murder wounds that bleed peri-peri sauce – it isn't exactly a slasher. It's brief and bloody but not particularly brutal.

The opening starts like a fairy tale – albeit a very 1970s Italian one. Isabel (Justine Gall) prances through the woods like Carroll's Alice and comes to a house. Through the window she watches a forbidden party taking place. It appears that she witnesses a ritual murder – except it turns out to be a game.

But then a real corpse is found and the real game begins. On a remote island populated by self-interested, alcoholic, amoral millionaires ("Filthy swine from the same mould!"), everyone is a suspect.

The chief one initially is George (Teodoro Corra). He's brought a bunch of smug gits to the house to hammer out a business deal. They're all vying to purchase a secret scientific formula from Professor Fritz (William Berger). So when the professor cops it, the accusations start to fly and tensions start to fray. The bodies pile up quicker than you can say "Dario Argento".

Five Dolls wasn't a big release at the time and it's not a classic movie by any means (Bava himself disregarded it), but it's solid and reasonably tense. Naturally, once the murders begin everyone behaves like cogs in a movie narrative machine rather than a convincing human being, but that's par for the course. This is virtually a tech demo for Bava's craft – he's the Hitchcock of Italian cinema, as his choices of shots, focus, and fluid camera shifts show. And if nothing else you have a fantastic, unique jazzy score from Piero Umiliani, who even gives the bodies in the freezer their own jaunty piano theme.

Murder mystery fans will be frustrated by the film's pace, which sometimes gives us literally seconds between homicides. We're furnished with few clues to play with and the final twist is a dirty cheat. But let's not pretend there's no pleasure in watching these sharks eat each other; we're here to find out which of them makes it out alive, period.

Five Dolls is drenched in atmosphere and the production design gives a wonderful sense of the otherworldly – we could be on an alien planet. Silly and sexy, it's not an essential movie, but if you're interested in a macabre and hallucinatory curio from one of horror's most influential artists, look no further.

Seemingly Mario Bava was not pleased with having to direct this film. He carried out his duties as a director for hire though but despite the presence of the beautiful giallo regular Edwige Fenech, his disinterest to the project shows and the movie is wildly uneven but hugely likable. It's about an inventor who, along with a group of would-be investors, assemble on an island. The investors want a formula from the inventor and are willing to pay big for it but he does not want to sell out. Before long people start being murdered one by one. It's a variation on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.

It has the breezy atmosphere that many late 60's Italian thrillers have. It wasn't until after Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage became an international success that the giallo genre became more direct, aggressively suspenseful and violent. Five Dolls is very much a product of the gialli that came before this. Its lounge music soundtrack and languid nature testify to this. As an actual mystery thriller it's pretty lacking it has to be said. It feels like Bava's contempt for the material is reflected in his complete indifference in creating a suspenseful or thrilling movie. While it's a whodunit with quite a number of murders, they are all committed off-screen. This is not to the film's advantage at all. Characters suddenly die from out of nowhere with no build up. Sometimes it feels like Five Dolls is a lampoon of the genre. Judging by the black humour Bava utilised in the following year's Bay of Blood it is entirely possible that he isn't taking things entirely seriously here either.

What Five Dolls does have though is a beautiful look and feel. This is hardly surprising I suppose seeing as its Bava's trademark. The cinematography is always interesting, with several well composed shots and good use of the beach-front location and villa. While the production design, fashions and cool décor are all appealing. The interest of the film, therefore, is more in watching a chic melodrama involving a group of largely unsympathetic rich people. It works better as this, than as a thriller. Still, it does have some nice macabre touches that would have graced his best films, such as the repeat scene of the murder victims hanging up in the freezer wrapped in plastic; or the shot of crystal balls rolling en mass down a set of stairs and into a bathroom leading us to yet another dead body. But perhaps best of all is the opening party scene which introduces all of the characters. It's campy to the max, with lots of slow zooms into all of the character's faces, while Fenech dances in a crazy sensual way. This sequence, like many others, benefits from the score by Piero Umiliani. It's a very eccentric soundtrack of organ-driven Italo-pop. Five Dolls is certainly a film that favours style over substance.

Five Dolls for an August Moon is not one of Mario Bava's best films but it is among his most charming. Despite the inherent weakness of its plot and mystery-thriller elements there's just something extremely likable about it. It's of its time in the best possible sense.

Art direction and cinematography are as distinctive as any of Bava's other giallo films of the period, but the garbled script to what is essentially little more than a standard body-count movie really lets this one down. After a plodding and talky start, the film disintegrates into a total mess. Bava pulls off the odd visual flourish, but such scenes never gel together. Still, the mesmeric use of zooms, focus pulls, and tracking shots and the stylish use of colour ensures that, from an entirely aesthetic perspective, this film never becomes boring, and as an auteur piece, is well worth a watch. Now, if only I could work out what the hell happened in it...

The late Italian director Mario Bava (1913-1980) made a handful of genuinely great films, like Black Sunday, Lisa and the Devil, and Blood and Black Lace, along with many that almost transcend kitsch, i.e. Diabolik and Black Sabbath, and some that are simply wonderful kitsch. Of the third category, this may be the best example.

A group of rich, decadent swingers in the most tasteless fashions of the time (the year is 1970) cavort about on an island owned by one of them. One guest is a scientist with a formula that could be worth a fortune. When he refuses to sell the formula, everybody on the island starts dying one by one (a la Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians,) the bodies literally piling up in the meat locker, just one example of the hilariously dark humor Bava brings to this dubious premise.

Bava made no bones about this movie being a paycheck job, or of his shame for it - the script was atrocious, the producer refused to let him have any say in the casting, or let Bava use most of his usual crew, and budget cuts forced the director to have almost every murder take place offscreen. But Bava's films always had a misanthropic wit(except Black Sunday, with its clear-cut good versus evil scenario,) and in the case of "Five Dolls For An August Moon," it almost seems like the director's contempt for the project actually made the end result funnier and more brazen than expected. Bava had a technical facility that most money-burning present day directors would kill for, and a complete lack of pretensions to being anything other than a hard-working director for hire. When the chemistry was just right, it could create a glorious bauble (or, less often, something even better.)

Is it good? Well, as the saying goes, how could something so right be so wrong?