#8 - Black Sabbath (1963)
Another Mario Bava film where the title was completely changed for the US (the original title is something like "Three Faces of Fear" in Italian). Obviously this one was to capitalize on the success of Black Sunday, even though they are completely unrelated. This is a three-part horror anthology, with Boris Karloff performing an intro and outro as well as starring in the middle segment.
The first segment, "The Telephone", is a decent thriller about a woman who gets some threatening telephone calls which may or may not be a prank. This story has a lot of tension, but doesn't actually make much sense. The second, "The Wurdalak", stars Karloff and is sort of an eastern European take on the vampire myth. There are some great atmospheric sets, but I didn't think there was anything very scary about it. The final segment "A Drop of Water" is basically a riff on Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart", where a woman steals a ring from a dead woman and is haunted by her guilt (which for some reason involves lots of loud leaky faucets). This one is actually pretty creepy, if only for the absolutely horrifying corpse that is doing the haunting.
The best part of the film is the very end, where we see Karloff again riding an obviously fake horse. He delivers some spooky dialogue, laughs a bit, and then the camera zooms out and we see the film crew creating the effect, which is actually pretty cool. Overall, this isn't a great film, but it has it's moments, and as always Karloff brings a touch of class. Plus, awesome poster.
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