- If you're determined to watch a dubbed Italian horror film from the 60's, I expect you could do a lot worse than Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill (aka Operation Fear). Let me just start this review by admitting that I only sought out this film after reading that it had strongly influenced David Lynch. Now that I've seen it, I can appreciate the origins of that claim. Kill, Baby, Kill contains several hallucinogenic horror scenes that could have informed any number of Lynch's works. Furthermore, it features one particularly disorienting chase through a haunted house that Lynch directly references in the final episode of Twin Peaks. I'm not sure if this film and Twin Peaks make more or less sense when combined, but at least I can confirm that the influence is there.
- The plot of Kill, Baby, Kill initially resembles that of Dracula in that Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) visits a small Eastern European village only to encounter witchcraft and unexplained death. As a visiting coroner, Paul is initially skeptical of the superstitions behind practices such as embedding coins in the hearts of the recently deceased or applying "leech vines" to potential victims. When he convinces a young woman (Micaela Esdra) to rid her life of such practices, however, she impales herself to death in a manner reminiscent of an earlier victim. Paul soon discovers that a witch named Ruth (Fabienne Dali) has been encouraging the villagers to take bizarre precautions against the supernatural, but it takes him considerably longer to realize that these measures are actually a very good idea. It turns out that the village really is being terrorized by evil forces commanded by the aged Baroness Graps (Giana Vivaldi) and her mysteriously resurrected daughter.
- The best scenes in Kill, Baby, Kill tend to be either those that capture the truly excellent Gothic scenery of Calcata, Italy or those that are so abstractly weird as to be completely disorienting. The prime example of the latter is indeed the aforementioned chase scene in which Paul runs through the Graps mansion, encountering the same room again and again. His pursuer is catching up as they run, and we soon discover that it is not only the rooms that have been duplicated. That brilliant scene aside, the rest of the film is a perfectly adequate, if not completely memorable, Italian horror fest. Perhaps its most striking ingredient is an abundance of naive charm that has long since gone out of fashion in the genre. Certainly it's better than its contemporaries, many of which were subjected to the scrutiny of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and, well, it's just not that difficult to be better than the average modern horror film.
