Bay of Blood (1971)

If you are a friend of fully sympathetic, heroic characters in your movies, you have come to the right film. Bay of Blood features a cast of sociopathic killers, who mutilate each other with pointy, sharp and blunt objects as easy and unconcerned as I brew myself another cup of tea.
Director Mario Bava never even makes one of the characters the protagonist, instead opting to leave the viewer more than a little disoriented by the tempo in which potential protagonists die or turn out to be amoral murderers (mostly both). This tactic, along with the grotesquely beautiful visuals and the goriest violence of 1971, give the proceedings a strange feeling of abstraction and an nearly overwhelming off-ness.
All this might sound a little off-putting, but I sat in front of the monitor transfixed and a little uncomfortable by the cynicism of the whole thing, not wanting the movie to end as fast as it does.

(And by the way: Bay of Blood looks in part like the most stylish slasher movie ever made, just nearly ten years too early and graced with some of the genre conventions of the giallo.)