Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Antonio Bido's "The Bloodstained Shadow" is something of an unremarkable and by the numbers giallo. The director shows knowledge, enthusiasm and appreciation for the form, but sadly fails to endow his slow moving and lethargic effort with the style, panache, and quirky humour one associates with the more successful exponents of the form.

Bido however was no stranger to gialli, his previous film the 1977 effort "The Cat with the Jade Eyes" proved the young director was capable of knocking out a serviceable contribution to the genre, but rather like "The Bloodstained Shadow" was largely derivative and predictable. Bido sees Dario Argento has his major inspiration, but his films lack the visual splendour and the wild and exaggerated aesthetic stylisation of Argento's troubling and baroque universe. Instead, to his credit, Bido opts for a more plausible and realistic approach and one which takes a more objective approach to the rather routine murder mystery at the heart of proceedings. Like the majority of these films the convoluted narrative rests on a past event which has been repressed and which comes bubbling to the surface to haunt its perpetrator. This pivotal narrative event opens the film and precedes the credits, and is shot in an imaginative way, providing the only major instance of style in the film. This event is later commemorated in the film, in an often used motif in gialli by a painting, the purpose of which is to provide the enigmatic key which unlocks the puzzle several years later. This plot device was first utilised by Argento in "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" and Bido is clearly referencing it.

The films rural setting on an island off Venice aids the sense of buried memories, repression and hidden histories which Bido is seeking to uncover. The community like the one witnessed in Pupi Avati's unforgettable masterpiece "The House with Laughing Windows" is presented as largely hypocritical and wallowing in perversity and lunacy. In this regard Bido's effort slots neatly into a strain of gialli which locate the events of the film in a rural community, and sits alongside other contributions such as Avati's aforementioned effort and Lucio Fulci's "Don't Torture a Duckling". These are films which set up oppositions between the largely unhelpful and unwanted forces of modernity and a simpler and less self-indulgent type of living (the rural communities however are normally seen as dens of hypocrisy and perversion in which murders are covered up.)

Fulci's "Don't Torture a Duckling" is the masterpiece of this strain, a film in which he juxtaposed a hideous giant motorway that fragments and eats into the countryside bringing with it vice and immorality, with a superstitious community who think nothing of chain whipping the local witch. Bido reverses this by suggesting the vice is already there and not a product of the modern world, but a product of Catholic doctrines and dogma. The religious tone of the film is most notable and Bido must be commended for bravely challenging the purity of Catholicism. There is a great deal of value in this film, but the interest remains thematic rather than visual, but a fine soundtrack written by Stelvio Cipriani and performed by Goblin adds a touch of class to raise this slightly above its average competitors.

Directed by Antonio Bido, "The Bloodstained Shadow" is a modern, gothic giallo. Though it imitates the works of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci, it has a very original plot that is also complex. I didn't have a clue to the murderer's identity until the very end.

This movie was filmed in beautiful Murano, outside of Venice. Stone buildings, narrow alleys, and cobbled sidewalks are built next to numerous canals lined with small boats that serve as the main mode of transportation. Top notch acting, a great musical score by Goblin, and a good body count keep this film moving along.

The mist enshrouded graveyard and narrow alleys reminded me of a Mario Bava movie, especially "Baron Blood." The plot is similar to Dario Argento's "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" and "Deep Red" in that someone, a priest in this case, witnesses a murder. There are superstitious villagers and cases of child molestation as in Lucio Fulci`s "Don't Torture a Duckling."

I recommend that all fans of Italian gialli see "The Bloodstained Shadow" as well as the other giallo that was also directed by Antonio Bido, "Watch Me When I Kill." (See my review on this original, innovative giallo.) Both movies deal with murders committed in the past.