Twitch of the Death Nerve

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Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction)

January 25th 2010 00:26

Reazione a Catena (1971), or A Bay of Blood and Twitch of the Death Nerve, as it is most popularly known, was Mario Bava’s most controversial movie. It is also his most influential, and is considered by horrorphiles as the blueprint to the modern slasher flick. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) was the first American movie to copy the stylistic of an unseen killer, using their POV as a visual motif, and featuring mischievous adolescents in peril who die in gruesome fashion. Then John Carpenter pared it back and made a box office killing with Halloween (1978) and the stalk’n’slash sub-genre was well and truly established.

Bava wanted another opportunity to work with actor Laura Betti, and the two of them cooked up a story concept (an elderly heiress is killed for control of her fortunes and thus relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field) which they named Odore di Carne (The Stench of Flesh). Later as the movie went into production it had working titles that translated as Thus Do We Learn to be Evil, and That Will Teach Them to be Bad. Finally the title of Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction) was settled on for its premiere at the 1971 Avoriaz film festival. Bava’s old pal Christopher Lee was in the audience and was apparently so disgusted with the graphic violence that he left the screening in protest. The movie went on to win the festival award for Best Makeup and Special Effects (to the legendary Carlo Rambaldi).

In American the following year the movie was released as Carnage, sporting the alluring tagline The 2nd Film Rated V for Violence (the first being Mark of the Devil from '69), and in newspaper ads announcing that “Carnage is the real thing – the first movie that dares to show Hard Core Violence” (and a bold snatch of full-frontal nudity too!). The MPAA, however, threatened legal action against the US distributor alleging that the advertisements intruded on their exclusive right to rate motion pictures. The movie was subsequently pulled from release only to re-appear later under a new title (and campaign) as Twitch of the Death Nerve. It apparently holds the record for having had more alternate titles than any other movie, including Blood Bath, Ecology of a Crime, The Antecedent, and most bizarrely, The Last House on the Left – Part II (even though Wes Craven’s original movie had come out a year later!)

The movie was shot on a low-budget; so cheaply, in fact, that Bava doubled as his own cinematographer (strikingly), utilised a child’s toy wagon as his camera dolly, and faked an elaborate forest setting by having crew members hold up tree branches and leafy twigs strategically in frame to create the illusion (which is surprisingly convincing!). Despite the low production values Bava still manages to achieve a lush atmosphere, and Rambaldi’s murder set-pieces are excellent - two of which were blatantly ripped-off, almost shot-for-shot, in Friday the 13th – Part 2 (1981) – especially the sickle-machete to the face.

Twitch of the Death Nerve Roberto Bonanni

The editing and camerawork are solid (allowing the indulgent use of crash zooms), but the storytelling has a strange kind of aloofness, which permeates the characters. This is a stylistic exercise: thirteen characters and thirteen murders. It is a deliberate shocker with a very high body count designed to shake the audience of its time out of their comfort zone by presenting a series of graphic murders that are linked by fate and seemingly orchestrated by a higher darker nature. Is it the bay itself that is acting as a kind of judge, jury and executioner; dealing out extreme measures to those that threaten to compromise its existence and surroundings …?

One shouldn’t read too much into Bava’s blackly comic joyride of the macabre and grotesque. He was having fun at the audience’s expense – and many of the critics too; who cried foul, claiming the master of the Gothic horror had abandoned any decorum and good taste only to produce a careless disaster. Twitch of the Death Nerve isn’t an especially great movie (while Black Christmas is a better slasher, it was Dario Argento who took Bava’s stylistic baton and ran long and hard with it), but it is an important one, and it has some good scenes and great moments; the slimy octopus sliding over a water-logged corpse is one in particular.

For anyone at all interested in the history of the slasher flick Twitch of the Death Nerve is essential viewing.

Laura Betti as Ann Fossati

Here's the brilliant and surreal original Italian trailer:

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

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