Out of all the films I have seen so far by Mario Bava, Black Sabbath is easily my least favorite. It is certainly stylized and beautiful to look at, and taken on their own, each short is pretty decent, but as a feature film, it is quite weak. Maybe it is because I have never really been a fan of anthology films like this, so I am biased from the beginning, and part of me feels like I would have liked these a lot more had I seen them as three separate shorts. But at the same time, each story, with the exception of The Telephone, feels undercooked. They could all have easily been turned into great feature-length films, but as shorts, they are more tantalizing snippets of what could have been. Boris Karloff's performance in the third and final story, The Wurderlack, deserves the praise that has been heaped on to it, but without it, would the sequence have worked as well? Probably not. I think part of the problem with the short-sequence format is that it really exposes Bava's weaknesses. His films are always better when you look at them as a full picture as opposed to the individual elements, because he had no problem with sacrificing logic, or traditional standards of quality in favor of dripping style, but this kind of approach works best in the feature-length format, because it allows the director to really just go crazy. Black Sabbath is really only for Bava competitionists. All others would do well to skip this one.
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