By TESS HENSON

Amnesia can be a blessed thing, and ignorance can be bliss. Especially when the person who suffers from an ailment such as loss of memory is blocked from remembering a terrible deed--however justified--they may have committed.

Such is the dilemma of our titular protagonist, Dora Baldini (Daria Nicolodi), in macabre movie maestro Mario Bava's final film titled Shock (1977) (AKA Al 33 di Via Orologio fa sempre freddo, 1977, Italian working title; Beyond The Door II, 1979, USA; and Suspense, 1977, UK).

Dora, after spending a time in a mental hospital for a breakdown and subsequent amnesia, has acquired a new husband, Bruno (John Steiner), and with him and her son Marco (David Colin, Jr., the same boy-child from the original Beyond The Door). They have moved back into a house where she lived before with her previous husband, whom she believes to be dead. At first they all seem very content in the house, but very soon Marco starts acting strangely.

It seems he has a strange connection with a certain area in the corner of the basement, which he returns to again and again. As Dora tries to settle down in her old home she also begins to experience flashes of memory. She is starting to remember the traumatic events, which took place during her first marriage, and they are not very pleasant. Her new husband, Bruno, is an airline pilot and is often away on flights, leaving her alone in the house with her odd-acting son. When Bruno is home however, they seem like quite a normal family, hosting parties and showing genuine affection for one another.

However, it is during one of these parties that Marco says something to his mother that quite shocks her: "...mother, I HAVE to kill you." Thinking that Marco is just having a hard time adjusting to his new surroundings, she hesitantly shrugs it off for the time being until she can discuss it with Bruno. Later on, after expressing her concern for her son with Bruno, he attempts to sooth her fears and begins making love to her on the living room floor. Marco has crept down the stairs from his bedroom and spies them in the act. "Pigs..." he hisses under his breath and slinks back upstairs.

The next day after Bruno leaves for work, Marco and his mother are playing around outside. At one point they fall down together on the ground, sort of wrestling each other. Marco pins Dora beneath him and begins to move against her like he saw Bruno doing the night before. Dora pushes him off quickly when she realizes what he's actually doing and discontinues what had been up to that time, an innocent romp with her six-year-old son. Things continue to snowball, with her son becoming increasingly unruly and her nightmarish dreams revealing more and more memory of the terrible events that previously took place in the house.

Dora naturally becomes frightened of both her son and her dreams, and decides that she does not wish to live in the house any longer. She expresses to Bruno that she wants to sell the house as soon as possible and move. Bruno, being the concerned and caring husband that he is, tries to sooth her fears, but to no avail.

A bit of backstory: It seems that Dora's first husband was an abusive drug addict who enjoyed shooting up his wife against her will almost as much as he liked getting his own self off. It is these images of memory that Dora continues to experience in her horrifying dreams that begin to blur the line of reality.

It also becomes increasingly obvious to the viewer that her son Marco, has become possessed by the ghost of his father as he continues to act out in maliciousness against her. Dora's dreams become more detailed and realistic, even to the point that she begins to sleepwalk near the end of the film. It is then that we are made privy to the reality of her situation, and the cause of her breakdown, amnesia & revealing nightmares.

It seems that in her previous marriage Dora had finally had enough of the abusive relationship with her former husband, and when he tried to inject her with the addicting drugs one last time, she rebelled, and with a sharp carpet knife slashed him to bits. Bruno, who was then just a concerned friend of hers, walled the body up in the basement and considered it a godsend that she was so traumatized from the deed and the drugs that she didn't remember anything. Because her husband was something of a vagabond, they decided to tell everyone that he had just left on one of his many trips and never came back. It was all quite neat, with no curious strings dangling to make anyone wonder.

So, it is now evident that her dead husband has possessed not only her son, but also herself through her dreams, and will not be placated until she is dead. During her last waking nightmare, Dora sees terrible things, like Marco actually becoming her dead husband and attacking her with the same carpet knife she used to kill him. She also continually hears a strange pounding noise coming from the basement. When she finally descends the stairs, she finds Bruno in the corner with an axe, knocking a hole through the wall where her dead husband's body is buried.

As she has regained full memory of past events, she begins to attack Bruno, begging him not to unearth the body. He tries to explain to her that he needs to move the body elsewhere if they are to sell the house, so no one else will find out what they have done. Dora loses her mind completely and wrestles the axe from Bruno's hand, swings, and plants it firmly in his chest. Now the only person who could help her is dead.

She crouches in a corner, completely hysterical and again sees the ghost of her husband approaching with the carpet knife. As he closes in on her, we see that the knife is really in her hand, as she slits her throat from ear to ear and takes her own life. As dawn approaches, we see Marco out in the front yard playing on a swing and then serving imaginary tea to his father's ghost. The two of them are at last together. Roll credits.

While this is not the best of Mario Bava's films, it is interesting to note that he decided to take a more straight-ahead approach to directing with this offering. Gone are the lush, dark colors; gone is his penchant for the zoom; and there are no eerie faces peering through windows. The film was co-written by his son Lamberto, who also served as the assistant director, and it makes me wonder if maybe Bava The Younger had more than just a hand in the directing of the film as well, as it seems more of a Lamberto than a Mario film.

There is an interview with Lamberto on the DVD version of this film where he talks about being influenced by the works of Stephen King, and he states that he wanted to bring a similar sense of story to this film. Since King's stories mostly revolve around horrific things that happen on seemingly normal days to seemingly normal people, perhaps Lamberto encouraged his father to give the film as much of an "everyday" look as he could. If so, he succeeded.

I'm not saying that it's not an eerie looking film to watch; some of the nightmares that Dora has are sort of psychedelically strange, and are filmed in that sort of "melting away" style that can be quite disturbing. Other scenes, like Marco playing on the swing are subtle in their terror. I, being a big fan of that sort of grainy looking, late-Seventies/early Eighties feel, really enjoyed the visual style of this film.

The acting is good enough, with Daria Nicolodi giving a sympathetic performance as a victimized woman on the event horizon of lunacy. John Steiner as Bruno is also, if not pretty to look at, an adequate actor in the role of the caring husband who will seemingly do anything to protect Dora and even Marco.

The kid however, David Colin, Jr., man, is he irritating! Yeah, I suppose he's creepy enough, but more often than not I just wanted him not to speak. I'm not certain if his voice was dubbed - but if so, the filmmakers chose the most high-pitched, whiny little boy-voice they could find, and for me it just doesn't work.

Other than that, I feel that Mario left us with an exceptional last film--a great swan song. Bava did have the chance to work on at least one other film before he passed on to Eurotrash Paradise, Dario Argento's Inferno, in which he filmed an amazing underwater sequence that's not to be missed. However, if you're looking for a film in which Bava receives full credit as director, I don't think you'll be disappointed at all with Shock.

My source for this article is the Anchor Bay DVD version, which is presented in wide screen at the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and is enhanced for 16 X 9 TV's. The features on this disc include an interview with Lamberto Bava, the international trailer (Italian with English subtitles), U.S. Beyond The Door II TV spots, talent bios, and English, French, and Italian soundtracks.