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Synopsis:
A woman, Dora (Daria Nicolodi), her young son, Marco (David Colin Jr),
and her second husband, Bruno (John Steiner), move into their new
home. Dora is tense and edgy, as the house is where she lived with
her first husband until his suicide. While tidying the house, Dora
is disturbed to find a large porcelain hand pushed down under the
cushions of her couch. She jumps at hearing Bruno in the next room,
and confesses to him that she thought she felt the presence of Carlo
(Nicola Salerno), her first husband. Bruno sooths her fears. That
night, after sending Marco to bed, Dora and Bruno make love on the
couch. Nearby, the porcelain hand moves, and in his room, Marco
suddenly sits up, hissing, "Pigs!" The next day, after Bruno, who is
a pilot, has left, Dora and Marco play in the yard. Dora is
disturbed by Marco’s embrace of her, which all at once seems to
suggest something sexual. Marco asks why his father never comes to
see him, and Dora must tell him that his father is dead. That night,
Marco asks if he can sleep with his mother, which Dora permits. As
his mother sleeps, Marco climbs out of bed, watching his swing in
the backyard, which seems to move by itself. Marco returns to bed,
stroking his mother’s hair and face. In her sleep, Dora responds to
the touch, and suddenly the hand caressing her becomes decayed and
putrefying…. Dora and Bruno hold a dinner-party for their old
friends. One of the guests is Dr Aldo Morasi (Ivan Rassimov), a
psychiatrist who treated Dora after Carlo’s death. One of the other
guests makes a cruel remark about Dora driving Carlo to suicide and,
when Aldo objects, adds unfeelingly that Dora knew that Carlo was a
drug addict when she married him. As Dora and Bruno kiss, Dora sees
Marco looking at them with hatred. Later, Marco abruptly tells his
mother that he will have to kill her. Dora tells Bruno about the
incident, but he dismisses it. When Dora showers, Marco spies upon
her, and steals a pair of her panties from a drawer. Hearing Marco
calling for her, Dora is shocked to find him in the cellar, pressed
against a brick wall and shivering with fever. She carries the boy
to his room and, while searching for a thermometer, finds her
missing panties, which have been torn to shreds. Marco suddenly
recovers and runs out into the yard. Dora pursues him, and trips
over a rake that Marco has left in her path. As she reaches for her
injured ankle, Dora sees a decaying hand clutching at her, and
starts to scream….
Comments: Shock,
Mario Bava’s last cinematic release, is a strangely schizophrenic
work. On one hand, it is a hodge-podge of themes lifted from most of
the major horror films of the preceding ten or fifteen years:
Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby,
The Exorcist and The Omen are all
clearly amongst its sources. On the other hand, the film is
uniquely, unmistakably Bava. From the very opening shots, with the
camera prowling about a normal yet oddly spooky house, the guiding
hand behind Shock is quite apparent. Thematically,
too, the film sits securely in the director’s oeuvre. Hints of
necrophilia and unnatural family relationships, and the inexorable
linking of sex with death and decay, tie Shock to
Bava’s masterpiece,
La Maschera Del Demonio, as well as to works
such as La Frusta E Il Corpo and Lisa E Il
Diavolo.
However, it differs from most of its immediate
predecessors in that the acting is stronger, the plot is clearer,
and the film as a whole relies more upon psychological terrors and
expertly executed hallucinatory sequences than upon gross-out
scenes. There are a couple of nasty episodes, but for an Italian
horror film of the mid-Seventies, Shock is
remarkably restrained in the bloodletting department. In fact, some
of the most disquieting moments are entirely bloodless: the finding
of the ceramic hand; the mutilation of a doll; Daria Nicolodi’s hair
writhing like Medusa’s snakes; and surely only Mario Bava could make
a slinky so disturbing. The film’s recurrent hand imagery is
brilliantly used, and is as fascinating at is it repulsive.
Bava also plays cleverly with audience
expectations, as when what looks like a tacky "ghost" effect turns
out to be a light shone through a photograph from which Marco has
ruthlessly excised his stepfather. David Colin Jr gives a striking
performance as Marco. His shifts from "normal child" to "possessed
child" and back again are convincing, and the expression he assumes
while watching Dora and Bruno kissing is totally unnerving. Bava’s
filming of the boy is also remarkable, turning an ordinary if
vaguely creepy little kid into something monstrous. There is one
unforgettable shot of Marco, upside-down, and surrounded by his
Disney sheet-set. Somehow, having this child framed by Mickey,
Minnie and Goofy adds the final touch of horror to the
characterisation.
By the time the film was
made, the motif of the demonic child had become yawningly familiar,
but Shock takes the theme further than any
contemporary American or British horror film would have dared. The
incestuous overtones are blunt and troubling. The tenor of the
scenes in which Marco spies upon his naked mother is balanced neatly
between childish curiosity and adult perversion. However, after the
playful wrestling of Marco and Dora has turned into something else
entirely, the boy’s natural scared-kid request to share his mother’s
bed becomes utterly grotesque.
As Dora, Italian horror
mainstay Daria Nicolodi gives an excellent performance. Her
portrayal of a woman undergoing a breakdown as her past literally
comes back to haunt her is quite unsettling. The strength and
independence of the actress’s character in Argento’s
Profondo Rosso, the film Nicolodi made immediately prior to
this, seems to hover over her role in Shock, giving
an added edge to Dora’s battle to hang on to her crumbling sanity.
Good as her acting is, Nicolodi is helped enormously by Bava’s
clever visuals, as Dora begins to suffer not just nightmares, but
nightmares within nightmares (notably when she finds that the brick
wall in the cellar has taken up residence in her bedroom). There is
also a beautiful moment when what Dora thinks is spilled blood
coalesces into fallen rose petals.
What is particularly
disturbing, however, is Shock’s lack of compassion
for its beleaguered heroine. Italian horror films are not exactly
famous for their feminist sympathies; and this one clearly feels
that Dora is getting what she deserves. Given the story’s
denouement, I suppose some viewers might choose to agree with the
film’s sentiments. However, by the time the backstory of Dora’s two
marriages had been filled in (including her junkie first husband’s
attempts to hook her as well, and Bruno’s role in her initial
trauma), I found it impossible not to feel that she’d been punished
enough. This made the film’s conclusion doubly upsetting – which I
suppose in horror film terms means a job well done.
Much as
there is to praise about Shock, the film also has
some unfortunate shortcomings. Along with the scary visuals are a
few too many lazy "falling object" shock effects (although I must
confess that nothing in the film made me jump as much as Bruno’s
razor falling off a shelf. Afterwards, I couldn’t help contemplating
the significance of Bruno choosing an electric shaver!). The music
is a mixture of classical-inspired piano, which works, and the
inevitable electronic rock score, which more often than not disrupts
the mood. It is also disappointing that Bava chose to spell out the
reality of his story’s supernatural events, particularly since this
is done through resorting to cheap tactics such as the overused
"contact lens" effect. I feel that a more subtle and ambiguous
handling of Shock’s is-it-real/is-it-not aspects would have made for
a much stronger work. Still, the film is a big improvement over its
immediate predecessor, Gli Orrori Del
Castello Di Norimberga, and overall makes quite a suitable
coda to Mario Bava’s horror film career.
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