5 Dolls for an August Moon (1970)

It’s amazing what Mario Bava could accomplish when he had free creative reign considering films like Lisa and the Devil (1973) and Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), but with 5 Dolls for an August Moon (5 bambole per la luna d’agosto), we have an example of Mario Bava as a director for hire, being pressured to return to the newly booming giallo genre he helped create with the previous entries Blood and Black Lace (1964) and The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963).

Admittedly, 5 Dolls is a more conventional affair in comparison to Lisa and Twitch and is obviously influenced by Agatha Christie’s seminal Ten Little Indians. I wouldn’t call it an adaptation but more of a self-conscious tribute with several trendy updates and sly nods to the source material. It turns out that Bava didn’t think highly of Ten Little Indians at all. When he was approached with the script, written by Mario di Nardo, and asked to direct the film he mainly accepted the job, despite some apprehension, because he would get paid up front, which disputes a previous notion I had that 5 Dolls was Bava’s own take on Christie’s classic novel. Making an Agatha Christie inspired giallo was the fashionable thing to do at the time, and, not being able to add much to the script, Bava directed a giallo he would end up having very little regard for, which is unfortunate because it’s one of my favorites. It also has one of my favorite soundtracks, by Piero Umiliani.

The story concerns ten characters, five of them women (most likely the titular 5 dolls), on an island. In the spirit of Ten Little Indians, with no way of presently leaving the island, they are killed off one by one by an unknown assassin whom they eventually realize has to be one of them.

Baba Yaga (1973)

Comics have had their fair share of controversy, dating back to the ‘40s and ‘50s, most notably with the book Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham in 1954, where mature comics were practically demonized and said to contribute to juvenile delinquency. Wertham’s status as a respectable child psychologist gave his book merit, resulting in a national boycotting of comics, and so the Comics Code Authority seal-of-approval came about. The seal was used on the cover of comics to assure parents that the stamped comic complied with the censorship standards and guidelines set forth by the Comics Magazine Association of America. Nevertheless, this restriction put numerous comic companies out of business, and the industry took a huge blow.

Italy had its own comic code stamp introduced in 1962, known as the “Garancia Morale” seal-of-approval. However, when the comic series Diabolik was created by sisters Angela and Luciana Giusanni of the Astorina publishing house in 1962, they avoided being restricted by the boundaries that adhering to a moral stamp-of-approval would cause by declaring outright on the cover that the material was for adults. Ultimately, the dark, murdering antihero Diabolik was a huge hit and numerous similar title characters (usually with a K in the title) sprang up, such as Kriminal, Mister X, Sadik, and Satanik, and the fumetti neri genre eventually became increasingly more violent and erotic. It ultimately grew to be very controversial, so much as to create moral panic, with the publishers of Diabolik eventually facing criminal charges.

The fumetti neri genre that started with Diabolik, nonetheless, paved the way for adult themed comics. One of the most popular controversial Italian comic artists of the time was Guido Crepax, and the erotic comic series he’s most known for, Valentina, was adapted to film by Corrado Farina as Baba Yaga, a cult Eurohorror that’s a real surreal oddity.