Classic Horrors Club

Thank goodness for Wikipedia! Had the entry for Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) not included a lengthy synopsis of the plot, I would have been unclear about the goings on. It’s not that it’s incoherent in any way, but there are a lot of characters that get killed one by one, for no clearly evident reason.

That caused me to find the movie familiar. When Wikipedia also told me it was, as last-minute director, Mario Bava, said, “a poorly written ripoff of Agatha Christie’s novel, ‘And Then There Were None’,” I somehow cut it more slack. I’m not sure why, because while this explained some of the broad strokes, I still didn’t understand the finer points.

Four couples are spending the weekend at the home of “industrialist” George Stark (Teodoro Corra) and his wife, Jill (Edith Meloni.) One of the men, Professor Gerry Farrell (William Berger), has invented a formula that each of the others wants to purchase. He’s not selling, though. This is such a focus of the film, that I kept unsuccessfully trying to tie the killer’s motive to it.

When we do learn the motive, it makes sense, I suppose. It’s just out of the blue and there haven’t been any clues to make it plausible. Worse is a tacked-on ending that Bava himself reportedly added. It’s an additional twist, but again, there was no previous indication that such a turn of events would be possible. That makes it unsatisfactory.

Many scenes are long and the opening seems interminable. However, the Bava colors are there and even the version I watched on Tubi looks gorgeous. I don’t consider it dull; I must have been concentrating so hard on keeping track of the characters and figuring out which one was married to whom and which one just got killed. It may have been easier if it was subtitled instead of dubbed.

It’s still hard, though, to track the romantic interests. At one point, it seemed that one of the women told another that she loved her and wanted her to separate from her husband. In no other scene do we see them together or even making eyes at each other. 

Farrell’s wife, Trudy (Ira Furstenberg), is sleeping with the houseboy, Charles (Mauro Bosco), who is the first one killed when they’re having a romantic afternoon aboard a boat. (I’m just now realizing that there’s no logical way the killer would have either been on board or had a motive to kill Charles.)

That isn’t all, but it’s all I have the energy to relate. At the end, there are two people left standing, each with a gun pointed at the other, but who is the young Isabel (Justine Gall) that’s constantly running from one end of the island to the other and peeping inside the window while the swinging couples are frolicking inside?

All of these issues, yet I still somehow enjoyed Five Dolls for an August Moon. I think that is its title because of one recurring plot point. Whenever someone dies, they wrap them in plastic and hang them in the meat locker. It allows for dialogue such as, “It looks like we’ll all end up in this freezer.

It seems I enjoy movies with unlikable characters, the more the merrier. I got strong vibes of Devil Times Five with its houseful of despicable people that nobody likes, including themselves. You need a scorecard to keep track of the relationships. It’s just kind of fun for me to watch bad people misbehave and get what’s coming to them.