Brutal. It is an anomaly in Bava’s filmography, the closest to it being The Whip and the Body, but Rabid Dogs strips that film of its formal rigor snd just makes it ugly. The tension is tunneled and through close-ups of sweaty faces and weird angles in the claustrophobic space that is a car. It is a true thriller, genuinely so tense, every moment is building up towards something. The close-ups on Lea Lander’s face are particularly entrancing, her eyes just seem to be in another world - it is true terror. Maurice Poli’s moral ambiguity is also quite terrifying, specially since his character is the one with the gun, and that is amplified theough Bava’s lens. A masterclass of building tension, and it is a shame this is an outlier in Bava’s filmography, because I could do with 10 more of these.
Brutal. It is an anomaly in Bava’s filmography, the closest to it being The Whip and the Body, but Rabid Dogs strips that film of its formal rigor snd just makes it ugly. The tension is tunneled and through close-ups of sweaty faces and weird angles in the claustrophobic space that is a car. It is a true thriller, genuinely so tense, every moment is building up towards something. The close-ups on Lea Lander’s face are particularly entrancing, her eyes just seem to be in another world - it is true terror. Maurice Poli’s moral ambiguity is also quite terrifying, specially since his character is the one with the gun, and that is amplified theough Bava’s lens. A masterclass of building tension, and it is a shame this is an outlier in Bava’s filmography, because I could do with 10 more of these.
