According to the liner notes on this DVD, in Italy back in the 1960s you were considered to be a homosexual unless you made a really bad Italian sex comedy. Well, Mario Bava (Baron Blood, Planet Of Vampires) was no flamer so he immediately decided to jump into this dubious genre and take a brief hiatus from his usual horror fare. The results are probably what you would expect them to be from a movie that was made solely to prove the manhood of an Italian horror director.

The tale is a Rashomon-style one of what happened between a guy and girl who were out on the town one night in the late 1960s. Gianni (Demonia’s Brett Halsey) is an Italian playboy who hooks up with a young tart named Tina and they go out and then go back to his place and problems ensue. Those of you familiar with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon already know the gimmick that’s central to this film. The events of the evening are relayed to the viewer by a variety of characters who had differing perceptions of what transpired. The title of the movie refers to the number of versions of the story you get. One version from Tina, one from Gianni, one from the perverted doorman, and a final one by some guy in a lab coat who plays with Hot Wheels.

The opening credits serve notice of the type of past-its-expiration-date antics we’re in for as they’re made up of a hodgepodge of trashy hippie music and pseudo-psychodelic animation. I will admit that as this annoying music kept playing I began to have the urge to break out my Nehru jacket, put on the granny glasses and just boogie-down until the fuzz comes to bust my chops.

As most of mod hipsters did in the Summer Of Love, Gianni is out cruising the park looking for hot mamas. He spies this leggy dish named Tina and convinces her to go out with him that evening. They go out to this club and it’s a real happening scene, dig? They dance like people who have no inkling how to dance are wont to do and eventually they head back to Gianni’s pad.

Okay, now this is for the ladies in the house. If you go to a guy’s bachelor pad and there’s a swing suspended from the ceiling, you should know that he just might be kind of groovy in a “player” kind of way. Also, if you go to a guy’s bachelor pad and he ends up wearing nothing but these gay little blue and black bikini briefs and starts leering at you then you have to expect a certain amount of what the gentlemen refer to as “slap and tickle.” Events deteriorate from there as he tries to force himself on her. Tina scratches him and gets her dress torn and manages to escape.

But is that how it really happened? Maybe there’s a different explanation. It seems that like all would-be rapists, Gianni has a different take on the events of the evening in question. The story he relates to his drinking buddies portrays himself as just a shy dude looking for a good time and he can’t help it if he’s irresistible to the fairer sex. In his version, when he goes to pick up Tina at her mom’s house, her mother is young and attractive is all over Gianni.

In this version of the story, Tina is quite the insatiable little hellcat and with Gianni is his little pair of panties, I mean bikini briefs, who can blame her? He explains how her dress was torn and how he got the scratches and it all stems from the fact that she just couldn’t keep her hands off of him.

Around this point in time the movie becomes a bit tiresome because I’m realizing that I am going to have to sit through the same basic story about the same shallow people a couple of more times. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So does Gianni’s version sound like the real deal? You and I both know that that’s not what went down and that if anyone would have the straight dope it would be the doorman.

Ahh, our good friend the doorman. He is by far the most interesting character in the movie. First of all he has an office in the apartment building where Gianni lives and it’s decorated with pictures of naked ladies that he has cut out of some of the finer men’s magazines of the day. Secondly, he looks exactly like all the old, bald, sweaty, greasy, middle-aged fat losers that populated adult bookstores before the Internet made them obsolete.

He is also, as you may have surmised, a bit of a peeper. That’s how he gets in on all this action. The milkman shows up in the morning and the doorman tells the milkman what he saw last night in Gianni’s apartment. There was a classic scene where the doorman had to run up several flights of stairs to peep Gianni. He ran really fast and I had to smirk because I was reminded of British funnyman Benny Hill. We can never get enough of the whole dirty old man gimmick, right? Geezers leering at over-endowed tarts? Funny stuff! Anyway, the bottom line on the doorman’s version is that Gianni is gay and got it on with a guy that showed up while a woman who showed up with that guy tried to get in on with Tina. Hey, with those girly underpants Gianni was wearing, who knows?

The film winds up with some geek in a lab coat blathering about how this and that might have happened but that maybe it happened another way. Then we go back and see a fourth version of the story. When he’s finished he’s holding a toy car that’s supposed to be Gianni’s car. Then he puts down the car and we go to a clip of Gianni driving off into the sunrise. This was kind of like Mr. Rogers and the land of make believe. I was hoping that we’d get to hear King Friday XIII’s version of events.

Four Times That Night is hobbled by the fact we have to sit through the same boring story four different times. I suppose the movie is interesting from a curiosity standpoint. It’s a non-horror movie from Bava and it has dated terribly with the bad clothes, music, and social views. The mixture of comedy with an attempted rape was somewhat disconcerting. Maybe that kind of stuff was laughable back in the sixties, but it will probably turn off modern audiences. Put this one way down on the list of Bava films to see. If this film is indicative of the majority of 1960s Italian sex comedies, there’s a reason we haven’t seen hardly any turn up on English-friendly DVDs.

© 2009 MonsterHunter