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Monday, July 22, 2013

Bay of Superfluous Titles

Here is a still from the 1971 Mario Bava giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve.


It’s one of the few I’m comfortable posting, because most of the Google image search results for this title yield gruesome results. It’s that kind of movie, but know at least that it pulls off the bloodshed with a certain level of style: The opening scene illustrates my claim nicely: a double murder, sure, but one committed in a formal drawing room, at least. That’s class right there — death amid decor.


Aside from classy murder set pieces and its status as a proto-I Know What You Did Last Summer, Twitch of the Death Nerve is also famous for being released in various markets with a bajillion titles. And I took Wikipedia’s promise of it having “probably more titles than any other movie ever released” as a challenge to collect them all. And here they are — working titles, foreign release titles, and any other possible way this slasher whodunit was marketed at one movie-goer or another.

Twitch of the Death Nerve

Odore di carne (“The Odor of Flesh”)

Cosi imparano a fare i cattivi (“Thus do we live to be evil”)

Antefatto (“Before the Fact”)

Ecologia del delitto (“The Ecology of Crime”)

Reazione a Catena (“Chain Reaction”)

Bahia di Sangre (“Bay of Blood”)

A Bay of Blood

Carnage

Last House on the Left — Part II

Last House — Part II

New House on the Left

Blood Bath

Bloodbath Bay of Blood

Bloodbath Bay of Death

A Mansão da Morte (“The Mansion of Death”)

O Sexo na Sua Forma Mais Violenta (rendered by Google Translate as “Sex in Your Shape More Violent”)

Den blodige bugt (“The Bloody Bay”)

Kravgi tromou (rendered by Google Translate as “Shouts horror”)

O krikos ton eglimaton (rendered by Google Translate as “The Link Crimes”)

Sfagi sto akrogiali tis idonis (rendered by Google Translate as “Massacre at Beaches Pleasure”)

To spiti me ta alysidota eglimata (rendered by Google Translate as “The House with the Stimulus Crimes”)

Chimidoro no irie (rendered by Google Translate as “Irie Bloody,” but I’m guessing it’s more at “Bloody Bay”)

Krwawy obóz (“Blood Camp”)

Blutrausch des Teufels (“Bloodlust of the Devil”)

Im Blutrausch des Satans (“The New Blood of Satan”)

As you may have surmised from watching the opening scene, White People Problems could have been the subtitle to literally any one of these alternate titles. But you have to appreciate the effort on the part of whatever marketer in whatever region sitting and thinking about how they could best trick people into watching a movie about awful people murdering each other in a grand, bloody effort to secure the biggest possible inheritance.

Previously: more fun with bizarre film title translations.

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