Vindictive Cutlery.

 

I was keen to see KNIVES OF THE AVENGER as I’d never seen either of Mario Bava’s Viking mini-epics, and had heard about the Norse ships he made out of pasta. But this movie doesn’t show any sign of linguine long-ships, though there’s an effective matte shot of a distant boat.

I was also very curious to see how Bava’s low-tech, low-budget saga-let would hold up against the C.G.I. 3.D. phantasmagoria of Robert Zemeckis’ BEOWULF. My feeling about that movie, discussed at length in an earlier post, is that the modern technique wasn’t in any way useful in capturing the timeless or ancient qualities of the myth it’s based on.

Bava scores heavily against Zemeckis, and right away. His first images are of sand, sea and stones. Runic-style symbols etched in the shore with a stick. Carved rocks. The pounding of the sea. Simple images, but everything in them is genuinely prehistoric, even older than the story being begun. Rather than distracting us with ultramodern razzmatazz that can’t evoke anything more that the number-crunching of geeks, Bava gives us, as much from necessity as choice, an atmospheric still-life captured by his gliding camera eye.

The film isn’t one of the maestro’s meisterwerks– but it is a pretty good spaghetti western in Scandinavian drag (I think it’s actually better than Bava’s “real” westerns), with a very smart and unexpected plot twist a half hour in, and some beautifully lit cavescapes for the climax. Somebody should, er, borrow that plot twist for a better movie.