BAVA Box Clarifications

A despoiled vestal virgin and her lover are bound in barbed wire and set for sacrifice in Mario Bava's ERIK THE CONQUEROR.

I need to follow-up on my previous posting about the second Bava box specs. It seems that a number of readers failed to notice that little dividing line that I placed between the nine titles included in the box and the three Bava titles that Anchor Bay are selling separately. Consequently, I am seeing online advisories for people to cancel their ERIK THE CONQUEROR orders because it's also being included in the second Bava set. But it's NOT!

To restate things more clearly, the ninth film in the box set is RABID DOGS, not ERIK THE CONQUEROR. ERIK is only being sold separately. The good news is that Deep Discount DVD is having an Anchor Bay horror "Buy 2 Get1 Free" sale, so you can now pre-order THE MARIO BAVA COLLECTION VOLUME 2 (nine movies!) for a mere $30.18, and add on ERIK THE CONQUEROR absolutely free! See this page for details.

Nor did I mean to suggest that LISA AND THE DEVIL was going to be cut. What I said, or should have said more plainly, is that Anchor Bay's remastered disc will not carry over a sexually explicit "deleted scene" that was included on the previous Image disc. Bava had nothing to do with shooting it, and I'm personally in favor of its omission.

More Bava in Time for Halloween

It's being announced elsewhere, so I might as well join the bandwagon and report that Anchor Bay's MARIO BAVA COLLECTION VOLUME 2 will be released on October 23. The titles included in this set are: BARON BLOOD, LISA AND THE DEVIL and HOUSE OF EXORCISM, ROY COLT & WINCHESTER JACK, FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, BAY OF BLOOD, and 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON. The audio commentaries I recorded are for LISA AND THE DEVIL, BAY OF BLOOD, and BARON BLOOD -- and I recorded them in that order, for those who may be interested in auditing them sequentially and hearing my voice disintegrate in slow motion. The Alfredo Leone/Elke Sommer commentary recorded for Image Entertainment's HOUSE OF EXORCISM release will be ported over for that title.

ERIK THE CONQUEROR (which will be the complete original export version, not the AIP reduction) will be released separately at the same time, also with a commentary by me, which I'll be recording before the end of this week. The closing shot and end card of the film (curiously missing from the German DVD release) has been restored, which should make this gorgeous-looking release of even greater interest to collectors.

Finally, I mentioned here recently that I managed to record the first three commentaries in a single marathon session last Thursday night. Someone on one of the horror discussion boards has suggested that my expeditious work somehow speaks poorly of me and makes the set's extras as a whole seem less attractive, because -- they presume -- the commentaries have got to be a reckless mess. I resent this because, first of all, I don't do careless work and certainly wouldn't boast about doing careless work; I only mentioned the marathon session because I felt so pleased to have succeeded in my aims against the odds and the clock. It was an achievement. Secondly, I didn't set the deadlines for these commentaries, but as a professional, I agreed to live up to them. I refused to let the quality of my work suffer due to time constraints and, if it somehow did suffer despite my best efforts, I wouldn't have released it. As I write this, it remains for those three recordings to be edited and synched to the movies, so I don't know yet myself how everything is going to turn out -- but I think even the raw tracks were on par with other commentaries I've done.

PS: I wanted very much to record an audio commentary for 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON but time simply didn't allow it.