Horror Extreme Movie Catalog
Black Sabbath
Theatrical Release Date: 05/06/1964
MPAA Rating: 
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Editorial Review - Amazon.com
When American audiences first saw Mario Bava's 1963 horror trilogy, it wasn't the same film he had made in Italy. Finding it too terrifying for kids (imagine that!), AIP pictures trimmed it of violence and intensity, rescored it, and renamed it in order to cash in on the success of Black Sunday. New tongue-in-cheek introductions with costar Boris Karloff were added, the segments were rearranged, and one segment was completely rewritten in the dubbing. It was a good film even in its butchered form, but the original Italian version is excellent. The correctly ordered stories begin with "The Telephone," a gripping, ornate thriller that anticipates Bava's later "giallo" horror classics such as Blood and Black Lace. (In the American version, lesbian overtones were removed and the escaped criminal killer was turned into a vengeful ghost.) Karloff stars as a demonic, wild-haired patriarch in the eerie "The Wurdulak," a gorgeous vampire tale shot on misty, menacing sets. The masterpiece of the collection is "The Drop of Water," a chilling ghost story with shiver inducing imagery: the piercing dead eyes of the restless corpse will haunt you long after the film is over. Bava's original framing sequence ends with a playful tribute to the magic of moviemaking and storytelling, a sweet coda to remind us that it's only a movie. The print suffers slightly from wear and tear and water damage but the colors are sharp and vivid. It's a bit disconcerting to hear Karloff dubbed in Italian, but that's a small price to pay for seeing the film in its original, uncut form. The DVD also features an extensive gallery of production and promotional stills, biographies, and liner notes by Bava historian Tim Lucas. --Sean Axmaker
Black Sabbath
A Customer Review by Aggie
I had seen this movie a number of times on tv...It is a few different stories...I love the old B-movie scary, vampire legends...only when I viewed the movie on tv, it was dubbed in english...I had no idea this would be in Italian with subtitles...disappointed with that...I really think the voice of Boris makes the whole vampire story stand out...oh well...thumbs down on this version....
A mixed bag of horrors
A Customer Review by Trevor Willsmer
Mario Bava's entry in the Cormanesque compilation horror stakes, The Three Faces of Fear aka Black Sabbath suffers the format's common problem - the variable quality of the individual stories. In this case, in the Italian cut at least, that's somewhat exacerbated by having the best of the three in the middle of the picture, leaving it somewhat anticlimactic. The stories' heritage isn't in doubt, based on stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy and Maupassant, but neither opener The Telephone, about a woman harassed by phone calls that may be from the lover she betrayed to the police, or A Drop of Water, about a nurse who finds herself terrorized by her imagination after stealing a ring from a dead woman she laid out, offer much in the way of surprise or chills. Neither, it's true, does the central and longest story, The Wurdalak, yet that tale of a family gradually picked off by vampires cursed to drink the blood of those they love most in the world is executed with enough panache, striking visuals and unexpected nastiness (a child is the first to die) to keep you intrigued even though you know exactly where it's going.
A dubbed Boris Karloff provides the star power for this sequence as well as the introduction and epilogue, which features an initially inept shot that turns into a truly delightful in-joke by the time the end credit is ready to appear (the new intros he filmed for the US version of the film are not included on Anchor Bay's DVD of the original Italian version, although they can be glimpsed in the disc's US trailer, part of an actionably misleading US advertising campaign that included a poster of a headless horseman that doesn't appear in either version of the film!).
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