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ECOLOGIA DEL DELITTO (1971)
Director/Cinematographer: Mario Bava
Story: Dardano Sacchetti and Franco Barberi
Screenplay: Mario Bava,
Giuseppe Zaccariello, Filippo Ottoni and Sergio Canevari
Camera
operator: Antonio Rinaldi
Editing: Carlo Reali
Music: Stelvio
Cipriani
Main players: Claudine Auger (Renata); Luigi Pistilli
(Albert); Leopoldo Trieste (Paolo Fassatti); Laura Betti (Anna
Fassatti); Claudio Volonte [Claudio Camaso] (Simon); Chris [Christea] Avram (Frank Ventura); Anna
Maria Rosati (Laura); Isa Miranda (Countess Federica); Brigitte Skay
(Helga); Paola Rubens (Denise); Guido Boccaccini (Bobby); Roberto
Bonanni (Duke); Giovanni Nuvoletta (Filippo Donatti); Renato Cestie (Little boy); Nicoletta Elmi (Little girl)
Alternate titles: A Bay of Blood; Antefatto; Reazione a catena; Ecology
of a Crime; Before the Fact; Twitch of the Death Nerve; Bloodbath;
Carnage; Last House on the Left Part II; New House on the Left
Aspect ratio:
1.85:1 |
SYNOPSIS:
As in SEI DONNE PER L'ASSASSINO and CINQUE BAMBOLE PER LA LUNA D'AGOSTO,
greed is the motivating factor: desire for a lovely piece of property,
owned by the invalid Countess Federica, sets the story in motion.
Despire her wealth, the countess is isolated and lonely. As she gazes
out of a window, the rain drops running down the window pane seem to
stain her face like tears. Within a few minutes, however, she is
murdered by her husband, Filippo Donatti, who is then killed by an
unseen assailant and dragged into the bay. The presence of a suicide
note, pilfered from the countess' diary, leads the police to assume that
she took her own life.
 Bava next introduces Frank Ventura, a real estate agent, and his
secretary/lover, Laura, as they lie in bed discussing their plans to
take over the bay. They realized the bay's potential to fetch a large
price on the real estate market, and have convinced Donatti to kill his
wife when she refused to sell. All that Ventura requires is Donatti's
signature, though he does not realize that he, too, has been killed.
Back at the bay, Paolo Fassati, an entomologist who owns a small place
on the grounds, is hard at work trying to capture an insect. He runs
into Simon, who Bava later reveals to be the countess' illegitimate son.
Simon also lives on the property, sustaining himself with the squid he
catches in the bay.During their conversation, Fassati suggests that
the countess was murdered. Very defensively, Simon insists that it was
a suicide. In the course of this short scene, Bava neatly establishes
these two characters. The entomologist with his almost child-like
enthusiasm for insects is perhaps the only likable character in the
film; he speaks openly and honestly, and has nothing to hide. Simon, by
contrast, is sinister and mysterious. Bava introduces him with a
grotesuqe closeup as he bites into a still-living squid in order to kill
it. As the story soon establishes, killing is part of Simon's nature.
Meanwhile, a group of teenagers unwarily make their way to the bay.
With an uncany sense of the wrong place to be at the wrong time, they
break into Ventura's cottage for a little love making. One by one, they
are killed off by Simon, whose sadistic streak insures that much blood
is spilled.
 It is also established that it was Simon who killed Donatti, and that he is now working with Ventura. With Ventura's assurance that he will give
him money enough to leave the country, Simon agrees to sign over the
property to him. What they fail to realize is that Donatti also has a
daughter, Renata, and that she is determined to take the land for
herself. The countess' will has not yet been discovered, and Ventura
worries that Renata might be the real beneficiary, so he persuades Simon
to "talke care of her," as well.
Accompanied by Albert, her weak-willed husband, Renata pays a visit to
Fassati and his wife Anna. A fortune teller with a very supercilious
nature, Anna slyly insinuates that the countess' death was probably
Donatti's work and that Simon may be the one to inherit the property.
Shocked to discover that she has a half-brother, Renata decides that he
will have to be disposed of, little suspecting that he is also hot on
her trail!
After finding Donatti's mutilated body on Simon's boat, Albert and
Renata stop at Ventura's cottage, which is apparently deserted. When
Albert leaves for a moment, Ventura tries to dispose of Renata, who gets
the upper-hand and kills him instead. This scene is accidentally
witnessed by Fassati, and when he tries to phone the police, Albert
strangles him. Meanwhile, Renata takes care of the nosy Anna by
decapitating her.
Things are complicated further when Laura shows up looking for Ventura. Simon, infuriated to discover that she and Ventura conspired with
Donatti to murder his beloved mother, disposes of Laura, before finally
being dispatched by Albert. With all of the loose ends apparently tied
up, Albert and Renata plan on going home to await the "news" of their
inheritance. In an ironic twist, Bava has them shot to death by their
own children, whom they have ignored throughout the course of the film,
when they playfully point a loaded shotgun in their direction. The
little girl then turns to her brother and remarks, "Gee, they're good at
playing dead, aren't they?" before skipping off to play by the water.
CRITIQUE:
 Following a string of minor vehicles, ECOLOGIA DEL DELITTO marks an amazing return to form for Bava.
The film's first image, following the titles sequence, is a rapid
travelling shot which follows a fly as it swoops about in the air before
dropping dead and plummeting into the bay. This witty, but seemingly
insignificant, sequence, neatly sums up the two major themes of the
film: the inevitability and suddenness of death, which most of the
characters are destined to encounter; and the fact that man, for all of
his pretenses about civilization, is little more than an insect -- and a
particularly nasty insect, at that.
Bava's main inspiration for this film seems to have been the classic
Ealing studios comedy KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949), directed by
Robert Hamer. In that film, the great character acto Dennis Price gives
a wonderfully droll performance as a cast-off member of a titled family
who contrives to speed his inheritance by doing away with his relatives
(all played by Sir Alec Guinness). The tone and subject matter are much
the same, but Bava's film is much more extreme in every respect,
especially in terms of violence.As in Bava's other thrillers, there
are no heroic characters for the audience to root for. Most of the film
is carried by the bitchy Renata and her spineless husband Alfred, but
Bava does not ask the viewer to sympathize with their plight. Even the
nominal innocents, including the quirky entomologist and his fortune
telling shrew of a wife, are so broadly portrayed as to be caricatures.
The main difference between the characters here and their counterparts
in CINQUE BAMBOLE PER LA LUNA D'AGOSTO is that, sympathetic or not, they
are interesting; the entomologist, beautifully played by Leopoldo
Trieste, even manages to be endearing, so much so that the audience is
sorry to see him killed.
 ECOLOGIA may not present a particularly cheeful portrait of human nature, but there is a ring of truth to it, and the presence of strong
female characters like Renata reveals much about Bava's frequently
misunderstood attitudes towards women. Bava recognizes their ability to
be either victim or victimizer. He sees their potential to be stronger
than the male. And, most importantly, he understands the irony behind
their relations with men: the man frequently flatters himself that he is
using the female to his own ends, but this is simply an assumption
informed by chauvenistic attitudes. For example, Frank thinks that by
sleeping with Laura, he is keeping her in check, while it is actually
the other way around. Unlike many directors of horror films and
thrillers, Bava refuses to relegate his female characters exclusively to
the level of weak, screaming, addle-brained victim.
The convoluted narrative (based on a story by Dardano Sacchetti, also
known for his collaborations with Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and
Lamberto Bava), is strewn with a number of unexpected plot twists.
Perhaps the most inspired detail is the way the film becomes a kind of
modern-dress version of MACBETH once the story comes to concentrate on
the Albert and Renata. Like Shakespeare's play, Bava's film deals with
a weak-willed husband driven to murder by his unbalanced, power-mad
spouse. Once albert's hands become stained with blood (literally, in a
scene that manages to top a parallel scene in Roman Polanski's stunning
1971 film of MACBETH in terms of pure shock effect), he becomes more
assertive and enters whole-heartedly into the task at hand.
 Bava also avoids passing moral judgment over his characters: for example, the horny teenagers (this fixture in many dismal FRIDAY THE
THIRTEENTH-style films is indebted to this sublime example) are not
killed because they are having pre-marital sex -- they are simply too
stupid to realize that there is a murderer around. Even the two children
(one of them played by red-headed Nicoletta Elmi, later to be seen in
Bava's GLI ORRORI DEL CASTELLO DI NORIMBERGA, 1972, as well as Lamberto
Bava's absurdly popular DEMONI / DEMONS, 1985, and Argento's masterpiece
PROFONDO ROSSO / DEEP RED, 1975) are not above spoliation, transformed
as they are into murderers by watching their parents' example.
The various murder scenes are incredibly bloody, but the humorous edge
prevents the film from becoming a tour through a slaughterhouse (to
borrow one critic's misguided but irresistible description of the
resurrection scene in Terence Fisher's marvelous DRACULA -- PRINCE OF
DARKNESS, 1965). There is a decapitation, multiple slashings, a face
split in two by a meat cleaver, a stabbing in the groin, a love-making
couple skewered together by a jungle spear, and so on. So vivid were
these scenes, in fact, that over the years ECOLOGIA has been cut and
re-cut ot satisfy the censorship standards of the day. The uncut
version has since surfaced on video, thus preserving Bava's most
mischievously funny work in its entirety.
Review © Troy Howarth
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