4K THAT NIGHT

 

                              Calisto Calisti as the Lecturer in FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT.

Last night I celebrated the memory of Mario Bava (born 112 years ago around this time) by revisiting FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT (1968), in its Italian version. Yes, there's no denying it's one of his lesser films, but seeing it via Indicator’s new 4K release was like seeing it through a new lens. 

 

To appreciate this oddity in his filmography, we need to set aside the expectations we bring to his work in horror and fantasy, and consider it in the context of what else was coming out of Italy at the time of its first crisis since the Hollywood on the Tiber years - stories set in strangely artificial worlds like THE WITCHES and THE DOUBLE, and early erotic gialli like THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH and PARANOIA. It’s not as well-heeled as those others but it’s very appropriate to such company, which means that Bava—who was reacting (and perhaps overreacting) to the production interference he received during DANGER: DIABOLIK—was reaching up with this one, not opting out, and attempting to say something witty yet genuinely philosophical about human perception and the acts of seeing and processing information in the guise of a mild sex comedy. 

 

Star Brett Halsey remembers not being sure at the end of each day if he’d be coming to work tomorrow (the production was that precarious) and it’s a testament to Bava’s control that he was able to make a film as stable as this one looks; it’s only the mock-science sidebars from the white-coated narrator played by Calisto Calisti that feel half-baked and fall short of what fuller concentration might have made of them. And yet it is the presence of this character that ties the film, as an analytic musing on the science of optics, to the early documentaries on the sciences that Bava worked on as a young man.

 

I recorded my audio commentary for this film for Kino Lorber’s 2019 Blu-Ray, and I don’t think I bothered at the time to examine the film anew since writing my chapter on the film for my Bava book some years prior. I listened to most of my commentary to see how it held up, thinking I’d done it longer ago than it really was, and it holds up; when Indicator approached me, I thought perhaps I should record a new track but they felt it wasn’t necessary and I now agree with their call. I am especially happy to see that the film too is aging better than I expected. It encompasses a very early effort to include gay relationships in what begins as an emphatically hetero story, starting out as exploitative but taking a surprising turn in which Pascale Petit discusses homosexuality calmly, openly, and warmly in response to a provincial character’s initial recoil. (If memory serves, her tone in the English dub is more calculating and sinister.) There is also an unfortunate white hair in the gate through a good deal of Secondo Tempo, but the film is so clever, well-designed, and symptomatic of his Continental Pop period. And the Italian dialogue is often witty, as opposed to the painful dubbing of the English cut.

 

Bava is one of the most supremely visual artists of genre cinema, and here he steps back to question and explore exactly how he/we/anybody sees - and processes that information, an intriguing response to working in a genre whose principal purpose is to please and excite the eye. It feels a little too rushed at times, a little too consistently frantic (which I suppose is true of many Italian comedies), and the budget could have used another investor but, I have to say that, while I’ve always been one of this film’s apologist defenders, this was the first time I’ve watched it and fully enjoyed it. 

 

(c) 2026 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

LAST SUMMER (1969) ... AND A MOVIE FROM THE PREVIOUS SUMMER

Bruce Davison, Catherine Burns, Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas in LAST SUMMER.

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings watching Frank & Eleanor Perry’s LAST SUMMER, based on a novel by Evan Hunter. I’m very torn about the film itself, which I find provocative and dangerous in all the right ways, but also a bit of a short story forced to feature length, and shot in a way that is not much more than straightforward, with lots of close-ups more typical of a TV-movie. The performances are very good, but in a sense, they were written to be very good and I’m not inclined to say that the young actors did anything substantially greater than doing their jobs to the best of their ability. I like Catherine Burns very much in the film but I guess I’m not the target audience who have made a cult of her work here, and the fact that the personally critical response to it caused her to withdraw from screen acting and public life. I find the ending of the film, even in this restored version on the Warner Archive Blu-ray, as rushed and incoherent as it has always been in the choppy prints, and I find Burns’ omission from the shots after the climax less thought-provoking than narratively irresponsible. My feelings on these matters were not changed by listening to the audio commentary, featuring Larry Karaszewski and Perrys biographer Justin Bozung, but I was illuminated on some other points - such as why the film spends so much time on the seagull, and various behind the scenes details. It’s a very good track.

 

Peggy Steffans (credited as Esme Kane) stumbles upon a teenage tryst in DEEP INSIDE.

 

While watching the film, I took notice of the fact that it was shot on Fire Island in 1969 and remembered that Joe Sarno’s film DEEP INSIDE was also shot there two summers earlier in 1967. The Sarno film (which incidentally launched the Cannon Films empire) was released in April 1968, around the same time Evan Hunter’s novel came out, so there is no question of either influencing the other, but as I’ve thought more about it, the more I’ve realized how much the two stories have in common. Whereas the book and Perry film separate the adult and teenage characters almost entirely, the Sarno film includes some young adults but focuses primarily on the adults, who seem amused by the teenage misbehavior they remember being part of. You can’t really compare the levels of acting found in the two films, but the big themes of LAST SUMMER were old stand-bys for Sarno by the time he made DEEP INSIDE: teenage rebellion sparked by adult hypocrisy and infidelity, polyamory, and - most importantly - the effect on others of one powerful personality. In the case of LAST SUMMER, this is Barbara Hershey’s precocious sexual tease, a ringleader and provocatrice with an avowed IQ of 157; she has a counterpart in DEEP INSIDE’s Milcy, played by Peggy Steffans. Also like DEEP INSIDE, LAST SUMMER rises slowly to a fierce boil, building to an unforgivable event that destroys or badly compromises friendships. In DEEP INSIDE, Milcy’s plan to avenge an old rivalry backfires badly on her, while LAST SUMMER exacts no such punishment, leaving its climactic crime in the viewer’s lap unresolved. 

 

Ultimately, LAST SUMMER shows mainstream cinema finally catching up with Sarno’s advanced ideas about the role played by psychology, even aberrant psychology, in sexual relationships - just as the introduction of the MPAA ratings system began to force softcore exploitation fare toward the ultimate survival strategy of hardcore. Oddly enough, just as DEEP INSIDE went through a period when it was considered a “lost” film, LAST SUMMER (at least in its most complete form) similarly became impossible to see for a nearly identical length of time, recently resurfacing as a Warner Archive Blu-ray release in July 2026, about two years after a 35mm print of DEEP INSIDE was recovered, restored, and included in Vinegar Syndrome’s 2024 box set THE LOST PICTURE SHOW.

 

(C) 2026 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.