The film lost its director just days before filming was scheduled to begin, leading producers Mario and Pietro Bregni to appeal to Mario Bava to take over. Though there is no record of who the original director was, Mario Bava biographer Tim Lucas reasons that it was mostly likely Guido Malatesta. Bava was very reluctant to take on the project, since he felt the script was a poorly written ripoff of Agatha Christie's novel "And Then There Were None", but agreed to do it under the condition that he be paid up front. He was further dismayed when, at the meeting where he was presented with the contract for the movie, the Bregnis told him that the original director's departure was so last-minute that the cast and technical crew had already been selected and filming was to begin in just two days, leaving him no time to rework the script. However, in addition to insisting on the use of his usual camera crew (headed by Antonio Rinaldi), Bava made two significant changes to the film's script: putting the corpses in polythene bags inside a walk-in freezer (di Nardo's script put them in underground graves with cross-shaped headstones) and adding on the twist ending with Farrell and Isabelle. The film's budget was so low that most of the cast had to wear their own clothes. The exterior of the Stark house was a matte painting painted by Bava himself, while the interior was a real beach house located not far from the beach where many of the scenes were filmed, on the Torre Astura coastline. "Five Dolls for an August Moon" was the only film where Bava had to do the editing entirely by himself. Debuting on Valentine's Day 1970, "Five Dolls for an August Moon" was a failure at the Italian box office. "Five Dolls for an August Moon" was one of Bava's most obscure films, and did not receive an official American release until 2001 when Image Entertainment distributed it on DVD. After the Image disc went out of print, Anchor Bay re-released as part of the "Mario Bava Collection Volume 2" box set on 23 October 2007. The film was released in France as "L'île de l'épouvante" / "Island of Terror". In 2013, Kino International released the film on Blu-ray in the United States. AllMovie gave it two stars out of five, calling it "a confusing and not terribly exciting whodunit."