General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Five Dolls for an August Moon

Five Dolls for an August Moon (Italian: 5 bambole per la luna d'agosto) is a 1970 Italian giallo (Italian thriller genre: stylish, gory murder-mystery films) film directed and edited by Mario Bava, in which a group of wealthy guests gathered on a private island to buy a chemist's valuable resin formula are killed one by one by a murderer among them.¹ The film stars William Berger, Ira von Fürstenberg, Edwige Fenech, Howard Ross, Helena Ronee, Teodoro Corrà, Ely Galleani, Edith Meloni, Mauro Bosco, and Maurice Poli.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	5 bambole per la luna d'agosto; released in France as L'île de l'épouvante (Island of Terror)¹^•³
Director and editor	Mario Bava, who also shot uncredited second-unit photography and contributed uncredited additional material¹^•²
Screenplay	Mario di Nardo (story and screenplay)¹
Music	Piero Umiliani, the psychedelic easy-listening composer whose jaunty score plays over the recurring freezer scenes¹^•⁴
Italian release	14 March 1970; UK release 25 November 1970 (BBFC-classified at 81m 36s, distributed by Border Films)¹^•⁵
Production	P.A.C. (Produzioni Atlas Cinematografica), producer Luigi Alessi; censorship visa 55536 dated 13 February 1969³^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Hoping to cash in on a guest's groundbreaking resin formula, a businessman gathers his fellow industrialists and their spouses for a getaway on his own island, yet a murderer among the guests throws the holiday into chaos.¹ In the Italian synopsis, the chemist Frick Hangel, creator of a new synthetic resin, is invited with his wife Trud to the villa that the chemical industrialist George owns on a deserted islet; the magnate and his partners intend to buy the formula at any price, but they do not reckon with a ruthless murderer who kills the guests one by one.³

The film begins as wealthy vacationers stage a mock ritual sacrifice of a virgin to the god Kral, and the woman chosen for the rite then pretends to have actually died, at first frightening and then amusing her onlookers.⁷ The opening unfolds with snap pans and zooms during a booze-soaked party with ritualistic mumbo-jumbo and a mock sacrifice; the humorous reveal that this initial "murder" is a sham, staged with a retractable knife and stage blood, sets the mood for later events.⁴ A day later a real murder is committed: the house boy is found washed up with a stab wound, and the guests wrap the body and place it in the cold store.⁸

As the body count rises, each cadaver is wrapped in a transparent plastic body bag and hung in the freezer alongside the others like a side of beef, accompanied by a jarringly jaunty number on the soundtrack.⁴ The film ends with a double twist in which one of the defunct characters turns out to have been very much alive.⁶^•⁸

Production

Bava stepped in at the 11th hour to replace another director on this work-for-hire project, and atypically he exerted little control over the plotline, which he subsequently denigrated as a shoddy knockoff of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.⁴ As a sort of revenge against the substandard material, Bava refuses to show most of the film's frequent acts of violence; he also experiments with narrative structure and shifts the soundtrack's mode of employment from diegetic to non-diegetic.⁴ The film was shot in Eastmancolor in panoramic (widescreen) format on 35 mm.³

The cast plays four couples occupying a flamboyant modernist island getaway. Among them are three businessmen trying to convince the remaining guest, a chemist whose newly created process is worth a fortune, to part with his formula; once he refuses their bids, the guests begin dying in unexplained ways.⁴ William Berger plays Professor Gerry (Fritz) Farrell, Ira von Fürstenberg plays Trudy Farrell, Edwige Fenech plays Marie Chaney, Howard Ross plays Jack Davidson, Helena Ronee plays Peggy Davidson, Teodoro Corrà plays George Stark, Ely Galleani plays Isabel, Edith Meloni plays Jill Stark, Mauro Bosco plays Charles, and Maurice Poli plays Nick Chaney.²

Release

The film debuted in Italy on 14 March 1970, followed by the UK on 25 November 1970, France (as L'île de l'épouvante) on 22 November 1972, Turkey on 4 December 1972, and Spain in 1972.¹ The BBFC classified the cinema version at 81 minutes 36 seconds on 25 November 1970 for distributor Border Films; a 78m 31s version was classified on 24 February 1994 for Redemption Films Ltd, and a 77m 21s Italian-language version was classified on 4 December 2015 for Arrow Film Distributors.⁵

Five Dolls for an August Moon was long one of Bava's most obscure films and did not receive an official American release until 2001, when Image Entertainment distributed it on DVD. The Kino Lorber Blu-ray was mastered from a 35mm negative of the English-language version; because the actors spoke Italian, French, and English on set, there is no real original-language cut of the film.⁹

Reception and legacy

Contemporary Italian critics were unimpressed. Segnalazioni Cinematografiche (vol. 69, 1970) called it an intricate story that, despite frequent twists, is almost entirely devoid of suspense, and the critic Vice, writing in Il Giorno on 15 March 1970, complained that Bava had inflated the story with corpses, rendering it confused and overly contrived.³ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer score of 34% based on 4 reviews.¹⁰ Budd Wilkins, reviewing the 2013 Kino Lorber Blu-ray for Slant Magazine, wrote that the film "isn't top-tier Bava by any means, but for those with eyes to see, there are pleasures aplenty to be gleaned from this playfully abstract jeu d'esprit."⁴

Bava himself reportedly called it his worst effort.⁹ Reviewers have generally located the film's value in its style rather than its plotting: the visual mastery includes an emphasis on blue tones, frequent zooms and focus pulls, and an impressively fluid Steadicam-style shot created before the technology existed.⁹ One celebrated sequence shoots a fistfight through wooden latticework, breaking the action into an abstracted mosaic, then follows a toppled container of crystal spheres as they tumble down a spiral staircase and across a tiled floor before revealing a recently deceased character in a tableau morte.⁴ Mediaset's catalog notes that Bava drew on Christie's Dieci piccoli indiani and that both Dario Argento and Quentin Tarantino later paid homage to the film.¹¹ The film can be seen as a relatively bloodless dress rehearsal for Bava's follow-up, the far more sanguine slasher trendsetter A Bay of Blood.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026