Baba Yaga (1973)

Studio: Blue Underground
Theatrical Release: Sept. 20th, 1973
Blu-Ray Release: Feb. 28th, 2012
Rating: Unrated!
Review By Craig Sorensen

Walking home from a party, pretty professional photographer Valentina (Isabelle De Funés) is almost run over by a strange woman named Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker of The Greatest Story Ever Told).  Baba takes one of Valentina’s stocking clips for some reason and takes off.  In the morning Baba Yaga shows up to return the clip and places a curse on Valentina’s camera.  Whenever she tries to take a picture something awful happens.  Anyway, so Valentina also receives a crazy looking doll in fetish gear from the woman that has a bad habit of coming to life and trying to stab her models.  Valentina begins to believe that Baba Yaga is a witch.  But will she be able to convince her boyfriend Arno (George Eastman of Porno Holocaust)?

So, Baba Yaga is nuts.  Nuts in the best tradition of over the top, ‘60s pop art, pretentious Freudian Italian films from the ‘70s.  I don’t think that a lot of it makes any sense but I guess that’s beside the point.  Baba Yaga is more a mood piece, for when you’re in that crazy, full of nudity mood I guess.  Corrado Farina’s film is from the mid 70’s but it seems to have more in common, stylistically speaking, with the films of the 60’s.  Other Italian films from the 1970’s are still playing with Freudian fever dreams (look at the Giallo genre) but Baba Yaga wraps the whole thing in such a mod wrapper that I always forget that I’m watching something from 1973.  The art direction, editing and cinematography are all about a decade behind.  Which I guess makes sense considering the ‘60s fumetti background that Baba Yaga has.  The film is based on the comic Valentina which follows the character Valentina Rosselli (obviously) through various dream-like adventures involving lots of sex.

The film tries to translate that ‘60s comic vibe to varying degrees of success.  Farina uses grainy still photographs at a couple of points in the film to try to emulate comic frames.  They’re edited together in such a way as to read quickly like an installment of the comic.  For the most part it work I suppose.  A lot of the dream sequences come off as a bit silly and pretentious, which is probably the point.  This seems to be lifted directly from the comic as well.  I don’t think that they end up working as well in this form.  They seem a little too cheap looking I think.  Still, the film’s got style to spare and I always have a good time watching it.

Of course, this being an Italian/French co-production, the film is filled with beautiful girls, almost all of whom take their clothes off throughout the film.  Pardon me if this seems a bit sexist, but that isn’t detrimental in the least to my enjoyment of the film.  Quite the opposite in fact.  It’s probably the films main selling point.  Isabelle De Funés is gorgeous as Valentina Rosselli.  She doesn’t have a long career (she only starred in nine films according to IMDB) which is surprising because she does have quite a bit of screen presence.  On the other hand, Caroll Baker has had a very long career.  She made Baba Yaga in the middle of a string of Gialli for the likes of Umberto Lenzi and Gianfranco Piccioli.  She seems to be having a good time with the role and surprisingly (for me anyway) does offer up nudity as well.  Everyone is nude in this film, even George Eastman, although, thankfully that’s not full frontal.  Yes old ‘Big Ape’ himself is the romantic lead in this.

Blue Underground’s new transfer of Baba Yaga looks pretty fucking good to me.  You get a new AVC encoded 1080p transfer in the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  I don’t own the last DVD that Blue Underground released but I would imagine that this blows that transfer out of the water.  The last version of this film that I owned was an old VHS tape under the Kiss Me, Kill Me title.  I can tell you that this makes that tape look like I was watching the film through mud.  The film is kind of a soft looking film, so don’t go into this expecting a super sharp image.  It looks very film like to me though and I’m sure that this is pretty close to how the film would have looked theatrically.  You get two audio options, the English and Italian language tracks, both in DTS-HD Mono.  And both sound great.  Piero Umiliani’s music comes through nice and loud.  I love the music in this by the way.

It’s nice to be able to write about special features after all these Made-On-Demand movies from MGM.  Blue Underground gives you your goddamn money’s worth!  First, you get a nice twenty minute interview with director Farina.  It’s an informative video and Farina is fairly candid about the film, his actors and the films success (or lack thereof).  You also get a nice documentary on Guido Crepax, creator of the original Valentina comic.  After that you get about ten minutes worth of deleted scenes, including some racy scenes involving our two main actresses.  There is also a nice comic to film comparison feature.  You also get the usual poster & still gallery and trailer.