FTER COMPLETING his work on Inferno, Mario Bava returned to the mostly uneventful life he had been liv-
ing before. Effectively retired, he occasionally advised young colleagues on the art and sci- ence of special effects, but most of all he con- tinued to read—especially science fiction, because the international popularity of George Lucas’ Star Wars, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) had convinced him that the time was right for an Italian science fiction revival. Indeed, these films had been such boxoffice smashes in Italy that a num- ber of the older Italian sci-fi pictures had been dusted-off for quick reissue, including Anto- nio Margheriti’s I criminali della galassia [1965], Pietro Francisci’s 2+5: Missione Hy- dra [1966], and Bava’s own Terrore nello spazio.
BAVA strikes a medieval iconic pose, haloed by a lighting scrim, on the set of ECOLOGIA DEL DELITTO.
Thanks to the local success of these films,
Italian producers were becoming more recep- tive to science fiction proposals. In 1977, for example, Luigi Cozzi was able to mount Starcrash (released 1979), an adaptation of the “Stella Starr” comic strip starring British model/actress Caroline Munro, which he di- rected under the pseudonym “Lewis Coates.” The special effects for this film were provided by Bava’s “honorary nephew” Armando Valcauda, who in an era of highly expensive effects photography, was proving himself an able successor to his “dear uncle’s” brand of economical and imaginative camera trickery. Twenty years later, the special effects seen in major productions are beginning to look so dated that George Lucas felt compelled to “up- date” his Star Wars Trilogy with additional CGI (computer generated imagery) when pre- paring their theatrical re-release in 1997, while Valcauda’s work—admittedly not in the same league—has lost none of its original, naïve, handmade charm.
