The murder yarn unspools in and around the fashion salon Christiana Haute Coutoure, which is essentially an old dark house full of beautiful young women and lorded over by Christiana Cuomo (Eva Bartok). All is not well within these well-appointed walls, however. The tetchy Christiana is a recent widow; the nervous Marco (Massimo Rigie) has a drug habit and a crush on one of the models; the sickly Franco (Dante DiPaolo) has his own habit; among the girls, Nicole (Ariana Gorini) runs cocaine and Peggy (Mary Arden) is hiding a recent abortion.

Grisly events are set in motion when Isabella (Lea Krugher) shows up dead, stuffed into a closet. She leaves behind a black dress, a green brooch, and a bright red diary that apparently holds any number of secrets belonging to her co-workers, all of whom regard the tiny book with anxious glances. Before long it becomes clear that Isabella's killer is now after that diary, and is willing to leave any number of corpses on the trail to its recovery. Pity poor Nicole, who contrives to take the thing home with her to tear out certain pages before it's handed over to the police ...

Although few of the women are "slashed," per se, Blood and Black Lace is clearly the first real slasher movie. Its obvious inspiration, the black-and-white Psycho, was a model of restraint in comparison to Bava's oversaturated nightmare of blood, skin, mannequins, and masks. By today's horror standards, the two murders seen in Psycho are positively lazy, but Blood and Black Lace still seems up-to-date. For all the recent uproar over violence in popular entertainment, the smug disembowelments and stabbings of the Scream movies are nowhere near as upsetting as the more diabolically imaginative murders deployed here.

But what makes them special is the staging, which is lushly cinematic. Like his acolyte, Dario Argento, director Mario Bava revels in the sensual challenges of photographing a horror film with the simultaneously garish and unspeakably lovely Technicolor palate. As you might expect, that leads to a lot of deep crimsons and dark shadows. But Bava's visual sense extends to tour de force tracking shots, with his camera shuttling across the periphery of the salon in a way that reveals it to be a sort of dollhouse, populated by beautiful but disposable mannequins, viewed by Bava's omniscient eye.

But what really seals the deal is Bava's imagining of the killer. Sandwiched between bulky trenchcoat and fedora, the figure's masked face is what's really disturbing -- a blankness that suggests the moral vacuity of the hulking figure's mind, and that invites the audience to project its own ideas of what a killer is. It's the sort of bleak, frightening figure Paul Verhoeven tried -- and failed -- to make credible in Hollow Man. Mutely menacing and thoroughly masculine, this is one of the great masked killers in film history.

In his carefully observed audio commentary on VCI Home Video's new DVD, Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas makes a point of noting, repeatedly, that the killer's victims are treated with sympathy by Bava; presumably, he's heading off criticism that Bava was a mysogonist who enjoyed staging the murder of half-naked girls. He's right, of course. These characters are full-blooded women, and each time one of them is knocked off, there's a sense of loss. Of course, that quality actually amplifies the sadistic, almost fetishistic staging of the murder scenes, so in a sense Bava can't win this one.

VCI's DVD presentation is just about immaculate. The opening credit sequence, previously unseen in the U.S., looks so good it's startling. It looks like VCI has used some electronic trickery to render the film's English, rather than Italian, title over a freeze-frame, which I think is a shame, but that's a minor complaint. The image throughout the film is a revelation, bright and colorful and very nearly pristine. I detected a bit of softness in the picture, especially compared to some of the trailers included on the disc, and videophiles will surely cavil about the lack of a 16x9 transfer. But for the rest of us, this is an outstanding presentation of an underrated horror film.

VCI has simultaneously released The Whip and the Body, the film Bava made just prior to Blood and Black Lace. It features similarly striking visuals, as well as long, dialogueless sequences that are nearly experimental in tone. There's a swooning S&M; romance at the heart of the story that failed to light my own particular fire, but it does share the pleasantly surreal sensibility of, say, Belle de Jour-era Luis Bunuel. The performers do give their all, particularly Daliah Lavi, in deepening thrall to her sadistic ex, Christopher Lee. The DVD image is not quite as striking as that of Blood and Black Lace, and again, the opening titles have been electronically reconstructed, but it's plenty good enough. (The collection of original trailers that's included as an extra, with shockingly poor video quality, will give you an idea of what Bava fans had to put up with prior to the release of this disc.) If you're wondering just what the big deal is, another audio commentary by Tim Lucas serves as an excellent guide. The picture's admirers count The Whip and the Body among Bava's very best, and it's well worth seeking out, but where Bava's eroto-horror is concerned, I prefer the more outré Lisa and the Devil.

DVD aspect ratio: 1.60:1

DVD aspect ratio: 1.90:1