REVIEW OF MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK

Tim Lucas has made a believer out of me. As much as I’ve enjoyed Bava films over the years I really had no idea of the scope of his career or contributions to cinema. If there is a drawback to Mario Bava All The Colors of the Dark it lies in the problem of making such an expensive book available to all the people who should be encouraged to read it. Hopefully libraries around the country will take up the challenge. While self publishing is often referred to as vanity publishing nothing could be further from the truth here. This volume is simply required reading for any extensive study of Bava, his output and his influence and can hardly be construed as anything less than a labor of love of all things cinematic.

As a book this is a stunning volume. At roughly 11 x 12 x 3 and 12lbs it’s easily one of the largest books you’ll own. Pics on the Mario Bava Book Blog showcase various injuries people have incurred as a result of careless shelving. So be careful out there people! The reinforced stitched roundback binding looks to be extremely durable an the book itself features gold stamping on front and spine and a full-color French-fold laminated dust jacket and full-color endpapers. My Advice? Purchase some library plastic NOW! You don’t want this thing getting defaced or scratched.

At 1128 pages you would think Lucas prose would wear out but this book reads like it took the full twenty years to write with a good portion of that spent on a solid period of editing . Even a cursory glance reveals not only an astonishing level of scholarship on the part of Lucas but a subject worthy of that study. Part purveyor of humor and wonder, part purveyor of dread, terror and madness Bava wrote, photographed, produced and directed
Motion pictures like a cartographer charting out undiscovered but mythic territory. Whether Western, fairy tale, horror story, murder mystery, or spy story one feels definitively submersed in the geography of it, as if the type of story were actually a specific place in and of itself.

Countless examples of poster artwork, behind the scenes stills, publicity material and absolutely gorgeous color photographs augment Lucas’ rich text to create a volume that is simply a must own for anyone interested in Italian cinema. You also get a complete filmography and videography and storyboards from a number of films including the unfinished Baby Kong. The price is a whopping $250 US a difficult amount of money to part with in the best of times for most of us. But this book offers a liftime of enjoyment and insight and is easily worth foregoing a few months of DVD and memorabilia purchases to afford.