Baron Blood
by Mario Bava
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DVD details
Actor: Antonio Cantafora, Elke Sommer, Joseph Cotten, Massimo Girotti, Rada RassimovDirector: Mario Bava
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Letterbox, 1.85:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-12-07
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Image Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Baron Blood
DVD Review: Atmospheric chiller
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm quite new to Mario Bava's films, and thanks to my film historian acquaintance, I have become more well-versed with this director's body of work and have some of his other films at home, for my viewing pleasure. I have to admit that I have watched works of the other Italian horror masters' such as Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, and found those films to be a bit too much for my tastes, with lots of gore and sexuality, but I've come to really appreciate Bava's earlier movies for their great sense of Gothic atmosphere as well as creepiness, not to mention the attention paid to characterization.
In "Baron Blood", the story begins with a young graduate student, Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora) who is visiting his ancestral country, Austria. Peter lives with his uncle and meets an attractive woman, Eva (Elke Sommer) who is helping with the restoration efforts of a castle that used to belong to Peter's ancestor, Baron von Kleist, a 16th century nobleman who was evil incarnate. Peter is obsessed with unearthing the Baron's past, and has brought with him an old scroll which contains an incantation (and counter spell) that will awake the Baron's spirit from its fitful slumber. Peter convinces Eva to go to the Baron's castle and recite the incantation, not realizing that they are about to unleash a malevolent spirit who mercilessly kills the innocent. The rest of the story deals with Peter and Eva's efforts to banish the Baron's spirit to the hell that it came from.
I love Bava's attention to details and atmosphere, something I highly prize in horror movies (a quality that is sadly lacking in many contemporary horror movies) - from the first glimpse of the Baron's castle, a sense of pervasive menace permeates the film, and the viewer knows that sinister forces are afoot. The make-up of the Baron in his monstrous guise may be cheesy-looking, but very reminiscent of older monster movie classics, and I loved the sense of nostalgia evoked by the Baron's horrific visage. Highly recommended for fans of classic horror and Italian horror. And now, I'm off to watch "Black Sabbath" and "Black Sunday"!
DVD Review: "B"-horror Movie with a few chills...!!
Summary: 3 Stars
Another Mario Bava movie...Bava was an Italian horror director whose movies had MAJOR influence on American horror movies of the late 70's and 80's (including "Friday the 13th" and "Alien"). "Baron Blood" may not be one of Bava's most well regarded but is one that falls under the better "late-night" horror fare by today's standards. It is defintitely low budget and cheesy in parts - in other words clearly a "B-movie" - but it's interesting in parts how it combines elements at times of both being genuinly creepy, and at others being just "so bad it's good." Some of the shots of the castle inside and out, and the Baron are positively creepy! This movie also stars the legendary Joseph Cotton!DVD Review: Bava Gothic Shock Horror
Summary: 5 Stars
Elke Sommer plays Eva Arnold, an architectural student employed on the restoration of Baron von Kleist's creepy castle from the 11th century AD, whose boss introduces her to Peter, Kleist's American nephew, and a real good looker played by an actor who you'd never place as American.
Karl Hummel, the math professor, is played by Massimo Girotti, who stepped off the set of BARON BLOOD and onto the French locations of Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS--quite a stretch for our Massimo! Dr. Hummel has a lovely wife, a cottagey-type home in the Austrian village on the outskirts of the castle, and his daughter, Gretchen, a plain-looking redheaded tyke filled with mischief and given to spying. There are so many scenes with Gretchen poking her head through the banister of the staircase, as the grownups talk on downstairs while drinking Austrian wine, that I expected she would get her head caught between the bars. Instead she develops an unexpected acuity and she's the only one who a) can identify Joseph Cotten as Baron Blood and b) can tell Elke Sommer and Peter how to return Baron Blood back to his crypt, from which they have accidentally awoken him. That little girl seems like a nut, and she's ugly as sin, but she's got brains and she's got courage. Later she played an important part in Dario Argento's PROFONDO ROSSO, and still later she was the usher girl in Bava Junior's DEMONS.
BARON BLOOD is a terrifying Mario Bava shocker with a wicked cool performance by Joseph Cotten as the revived Baron von Kleist. In his wheelchair and waxy makeup he seems treacherously close to death. Indeed it's hard to imagine that Cotten himself would be alive for another 20 years after wrapping up his shoot here. His face looks like it's been Botoxed long before anyone had ever heard of the term. And yet his eyes "glow with evil," as little Gretchen notes. She's no dumbkopf that Gretchen. A sinister bond seems to link the little girl with the ageless, cadaverous stranger in town: a takeoff on his role as Uncle Charlie in the Hitchcock-directed SHADOW OF A DOUBT I suppose?
DVD Review: Good Bava
Summary: 4 Stars
This was the supposed sequel to Lisa and the Devil, Bava's shimmering, near-incomprehensible masterpiece. In Baron Blood, Bava has toned the story line down considerably. One of the overiding themes still is cause and effect; that is, in the world of Bava, our actions that we know are wrong but that we do anyhow can have horrifying consequences. At least in this movie, the repercussions manifest themselves in the lifetimes of the principal characters. The story resolution is much more believable (not to say digestable) than Lisa and the Devil. Unfortunately, by stepping a little more into the mainstream with Baron Blood (less risks are taken with the principle characters this time around), Bava has sacrificed much of the haunting uneasiness that made Lisa so enjoyable. He also doesn't have Telly Savalas in this film either!DVD Review: Color Gothic
Summary: 4 Stars
Its hard for me to appreciate gothic horror set in modern times. Color takes away from gothic atmosphere as do planes, automobiles and electric lighting. The basic story is a good one and Bava does manage to pull off the gothic look, although not nearly as well as in earlier black and white films. Well acted and not a bad movie, just not as good as expected from Mario Bava.
Description of Baron Blood
In Italian director Mario Bava's sumptuous Technicolor Gothic horror classic an American student Peter Kleist travels to Austria on summer holiday to learn more about his family roots. By reciting an incantation on a piece of ancient parchment, he succeeds in scaring up a genuine ancestor--Baron Otto von Kleist, a 16th century sadistic nobleman whose appetite for cruelty earned him the nickname "Baron Blood." Before Peter can reverse the incantation, the parchment burns...How many innocents will die before Peter learns how to send the evil Baron back to the hell from whence he came?Mario Bava's 1972 ghost thriller returns him to his gothic horror roots: a magnificent castle, an ancient curse, a cruel killer from the past resurrected by his ancestor to continue his reign of terror. That description sounds like a Technicolor reworking of Bava's masterpiece, Black Sunday, but Baron Blood evokes a mood similar to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films, notably Vincent Price's cruel manipulations in The Masque of the Red Death. Baron von Kleist (a.k.a. the notorious Baron Blood) is resurrected in a bit of schoolboy theatrics gone terribly wrong. The bloody, disfigured corpse rises from the grave to murder hapless townspeople and stalk miniskirted Elke Sommer, finally transforming himself into the respectable but mysterious millionaire Joseph Cotten. "Sadist. Murderer. Merely matters of terminology," he says, smiling while restoring his beloved torture chamber to the sounds of tape-recorded screams. Bava spikes the often slack story with eerie images (the crook-necked dead stare of a hanging man, blood seeping under a heavy oak door, a tower adorned with corpses spiked on jutting pikes). Cotten makes a sinister von Kleist, with an ominous tremble in his voice that belies his seemingly frail, wheelchair-bound body. The uncut version restores bloody scenes cut from American prints and the original jazzy score, but the gorgeous color photography is muted by a slightly murky transfer. The accompanying essays by Tim Lucas are thoughtful, informative, and wonderfully detailed, especially considering their brevity. --Sean Axmaker
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