Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)

A scientist and his wife are visiting the beautiful island home of a wealthy friend, taking in a relaxing vacation before the scientist reveals his new, world-changing chemical formula at a convention. His rich friend and a handful of other rich visitors have an ulterior motive for hosting the scientist - they want to buy the formula before he can unveil it and reap the future profits for themselves.

When the scientist refuses their individual and combined offers, frustration starts to set in and people begin to get killed. As person after person is killed and the freezer begins to fill with corpses, the list of suspects is whittled down until we finally learn... whodunit.

Five Dolls for an August Moon is not really a horror movie, as it turns out. I was expecting a giallo with all the trappings - black-gloved killer, flashing knives, bloody violence... That's what I think of when I think of director Mario Bava, but it's not what I got here. Five Dolls is basically a murder mystery, with most of the killing happening offscreen and relatively bloodlessly.

And unfortunately, it's kindof a dull and confusing murder mystery at that. It's a jumpy movie, springing from character to character as it goes scene to scene. Some scenes are so short and jumpy that you barely have time to register which characters were in the scene that just went by. I had to spend the whole movie constantly reminding myself who was who, and what their relationships were, and so on. It was all pretty hard to follow.

It is a Mario Bava movie, so you know it looks good. There are gorgeous shots of the beautiful island setting, as well as of the interesting and opulent (in a late-60s sort of way) vacation home. There is also groovy music throughout that gives the whole movie a breezy feeling, even when the body count starts rising.

There is one very nice moment of suspense as a character has to reach across a maybe-not-quite-dead body for something, and there's a solid twist at the end. The aesthetics of the movie are pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the movie itself just isn't.