Crew
Director – Jorge Grau, Screenplay – Jorge Grau & Juan Tabar, Based on the Short Story Un Fou (Diary of a Madman) (1885) by Guy de Maupassant, Photography – Fernando Arribas, Music – Antonio Perez Olea. Production Company – Emaus Films, S.A..
Cast
Fernando Rey (Oscar Bataille), Marisa Mell (Patricia Bataille), Espartaco Santiago (Wilson Vargas), Elisa Laguna (Laura Castro), Maximo Valverde (Javier Duran), Julian Navarro (Inspector Navarro), Julio Morales (Jacques Morel)
Plot
A payment is sent to the Paris address of Jacques Morel, only for it to be discovered that he was executed for murder three years earlier. The writer Wilson Vargas goes to the resort town of El Grove in Spain, searching for the source of the letter. Also holidaying in El Grove is Oscar Bataille, the magistrate who presided over Morel’s trial. In the past, Vargas wrote articles critical of the harsh sentences passed by Bataille. Bataille’s wife Patricia is also an ex of Vargas’s. She is unhappy in her marriage and she and Vargas renew their relationship behind Oscar’s back. Meanwhile, there are a fresh series of killings in El Grove, which mimic exactly the murders that were conducted by Morel. Bataille becomes involved in helping the local police to hunt for the killer.
Jorge Grau (1930-2018) was a director prolific in the Spanish sexploitation industry of the 1970s. His most famous work was the early zombie film The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (1974). In genre material, he also made the Elizabeth Bathory film The Legend of Blood Castle (1973).
Violent Blood Bath is based on Un Fou (1885), a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-93), which is usually translated as Diary of a Madman. This has been adapted to the screen previously with the Vincent Price starring Diary of a Madman (1963). What is interesting is how the short story and the two films adapted from it are all three wildly different works. (There is also a subsequent French film version Le Horla (2023), which I have not seen at present).
The de Maupassant original is told in the first-person and is simply a diary left by a late judge, which details how he found an overpowering desire to kill and then contrived to have innocents executed for his crimes. In the Vincent Price film, the judge is possessed by a spirit known as The Horla, something that does not exist in the short story. And in Violent Blood Bath, we get a Police Procedural plot that follows an investigation into a payment sent to an executed killer that leads to the trail of a renewed series of killings, none of which is present in the story. While the magistrate is the narrator in the short story, it is only in the end revelation here that we discover the magistrate was the killer all along and is suffering from some kind of Split Personality and that he had an innocent man condemned for his murders.
Violent Blood Bath has had the label Giallo thrown at it. It has some plotting aspects in common with giallo – an unknown maniac killing beautiful women. However, there are some crucial differences. In giallo, the focus is on a series of psycho-sexual killings, which are depicted with extravagant and often sadistic regard. There is none of that – or any of the directorial flamboyance of giallo – here. At most, we see a point-of-view shot as the killer approaches one girl beside the pool but that is it.
What we have feels more like it is a regular continental police procedural of the day focused around little more than an investigation into a spate of killings, but where there is little focus on the killings themselves. In fact, there is more focus on Espartaco Santiago’s affair with the magistrate’s unhappy wife Marisa Mell. This does tend to make the film’s entertainingly lurid English-language release title Violent Blood Bath a contravention of the trade descriptions. The Spanish title Pena de Muerte, which translates as Penalty of Death, seems a better approximation. It all comes together with okay effect at the revelation of the killer’s identity, but the thriller aspects are not very well handled.
Trailer here