My take: If you keep in mind that this was one of the the first movies with a creepy child ghost, it makes it a whole lot better.
Rating: 2.5 out of 4 stars
Kill, Baby…Kill!, originally called Operazione paura, is an Italian horror film directed by the same man who created Blood and Black Lace. That man is Mario Bava. After having seen Blood and Black Lace, I expected a whole slew of gory deaths and hot Italian women. But this film was more in line with a Hammer film than his previous work.
It’s a period piece that follows Dr. Paul Eswai, a doctor in town to investigate a series of strange deaths. The individuals all appear to have committed suicide, but each of them seemed young, healthy and completely sane prior to death.
Along with the inspector and a hot young woman named Monica, the doctor discovers that the town is living under a curse. Ever since the death of a young seven-year-old girl named Melissa, townsfolk have been tormented by her ghost. If you see the face of Melissa, you are doomed to die.
The ghost of Melissa amongst her creepy dolls.
The film itself has a pretty straightforward story, but what keeps you interested is how innovative this film was at the time. As Jonathan Rigby points out in Studies in Terror that David Lynch wholesale lifted a scene from this movie for his film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Additionally, “The image of Melissa herself would be recycles by Frederico Fellini in the “Toby Dammit” episode of Histoires extraordinaires (1967) and by Martin Scorsese in The Last Temptation of Christ (1987). And the whole paraphernalia surrounding her — the bouncing ball, the girlish giggling on the soundtrack — would sink deep into the fabric of the ghost-child subgenre.”
For these reasons, Kill, Baby…Kill! is worth watching. I would recommend this to people who enjoy a good ghost story or classic Italian horror.
I watched it on Netflix’s instant watch. Here’s the trailer on YouTube:
Leave a Reply