SLEEPLESS (Italy - 2001) Directed by Dario Argento. Written by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini and Carlo Lucarelli. Cast: Max von Sydow, Stefano Dionisi, Chiara Caselli, Gabriele Lavia, Rossella Falk, Paolo Maria Scalondro, Roberto Zibetti, Roberto Accornero, Barbara Lerici, Barbara Mautino, Conchita Puglisi, Massimo Sarchielli, Elena Marchesini, Guido Morbello, Aldo Massasso, Diego Casale, Alessandra Comerio, Daniela Fazzolari. (Unrated, 117 mins) Those Dario Argento fans who lament his decline after his trailblazing run from 1970's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE to 1987's OPERA often speak of those later films as if he just suddenly started making terrible movies out of the blue. The shift was gradual, though it's easy to let an outright fiasco like 1998's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA cloud your judgment and taint everything surrounding it in his filmography. While things started to get precipitously bad around 2007's MOTHER OF TEARS, Argento's early 21st century output following PHANTOM--SLEEPLESS, THE CARD PLAYER, DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK?--has its merits and those films aren't as bad as their reputations suggest, even if they're unquestionably second-tier Argento. Such is the case with 2001's SLEEPLESS, a minor giallo in the Argento canon in retrospect but an important one at the time, as it was such an unabashed "give the fans what they want" movie that SHAMELESS might've been a better title. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was met with such hostility and was so flatly rejected by everyone, that SLEEPLESS served as an olive branch, made with the promise of being the old Argento you know and love, and he even got disbanded DEEP RED and SUSPIRIA composers Goblin to reunite for the soundtrack.
If Argento wasn't such a gifted stylist, the greatest-hits pandering he engages in throughout SLEEPLESS would almost be embarrassing. He's like a legendary classic rocker coming off an ambitious, badly-received concept album and a costly tour that flopped and is now determined to win back the fans by promising to play nothing but the old hits. There's endless, constant callbacks to his earlier classics in scene after scene after scene--a teeth-bashing murder and a set-up similar to the "walking dummy" bit from DEEP RED; a riff on the way someone suddenly appears in the frame like the climax of TENEBRAE; murder sequences in the rain like TENEBRAE, and another bit with a woman outside a train station that recalls Jessica Harper waiting for a taxi in a torrential downpour outside the airport in SUSPIRIA, or Eleonora Giorgi outside the library in INFERNO; a parent trying to cover for a their murderer child in PHENOMENA; an aging protagonist with a disability like Karl Malden's blind earwitness to murder in THE CAT O'NINE TAILS; a locked, abandoned villa that holds a secret, much like DEEP RED; a long tracking shot across the carpeted floor of a theater leading to a brutal murder that's strongly reminiscent of the famous Louma crane shot in TENEBRAE; and most important to all of Argento's gialli, the notion of the amateur sleuth who's hung up on a barely-remembered and seemingly insignificant detail that's ultimately the key to the mystery.
SLEEPLESS opens with a brief scene in Turin in 1983, as detective Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow) comforts a little boy who was hiding and listening as his mother was brutally murdered via an English horn being repeatedly, violently crammed into her mouth and throat. She's the latest victim of a "killer dwarf" in what's been dubbed by the press as "The Dwarf Murders." Cut to 2000 and the bizarre murders start once again, and though the murderer claims to be the Killer Dwarf, it's immediately deemed the work of a copycat, since the primary suspect in the Dwarf Murders drowned in what was ruled a suicide 17 years earlier, though his body washed away and was never found. The current detective on the case, Manni (Paolo Maria Scalandro) has no leads and reaches out to pick the brain of the retired Moretti, now an elderly widower with a heart condition and a spotty memory and seemingly in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's. Though he's foggy on some of the details, Moretti is still brought in as a consultant and ends up reconnecting with Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), the now-grown little boy from 1983 who's coincidentally been summoned from Rome to Turin by his childhood friend Lorenzo (Roberto Zibetti) when the Dwarf Murders become front-page news once again.
Much like Karl Malden and James Franciscus in THE CAT O'NINE TAILS, David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in DEEP RED, Anthony Franciosa and Christian Borromeo in TENEBRAE, and Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence in PHENOMENA, von Sydow's Moretti and Dionisi's Giacomo become yet another in a long line of Argento's unlikely sleuth teams resorting to their own investigation when the police either dismiss their concerns or have reached a dead-end. As you might guess, as they get closer to the truth, their lives are in danger (someone attempts to poison Giacomo's beer in a crowded bar at one point, but Lorenzo ends up drinking it and almost dies), and numerous red herrings abound, among them Lorenzo, his Giacomo-hating, asshole father (DEEP RED and INFERNO co-star Gabriele Lavia), and the killer dwarf's still-grieving, embittered mother (a semi-retired Rossella Falk, veteran of numerous vintage non-Argento gialli like Luigi Bazzoni's THE FIFTH CORD, Paolo Cavara's BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA, and Umberto Lenzi's SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS). And, as usual, the key to the mystery involves some obscure detail, in this case a little-known nursery rhyme for which Moretti can't remember the words, and a strange hissing sound heard amidst his mother's blood-gurgled screams that has stuck with Giacomo all these years and he still can't identify. There's absolutely nothing new here, but it's fun to see all of these Argento tropes being served up like giallo comfort food, not to mention the immeasurable boost it gets from the regal screen presence of the great von Sydow.
For these reasons, and in looking at Argento's subsequent decline through the benefit of hindsight, SLEEPLESS has aged better than expected. Much of that is due to the terrific transfer on Scorpion's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead), which represents the first proper presentation the film has had in America. Artisan Entertainment picked it up for the US and released it straight-to-video in the fall of 2001, but the DVD was a subpar transfer, and to add insult to injury, was only offered in 1.33:1 pan & scan. Of course, this was prior to the days of widescreen HDTV being the standard, but even then, most DVDs offered both widescreen and 1.33:1 "fullscreen" versions--either as two-sided discs or two different packages--the fullscreen option there for those holdouts who still couldn't grasp the concept of letterboxing. Now, at last, SLEEPLESS looks and sounds like it should, but it still has its faults that keep it firmly entrenched as second-rate Argento. The initially-welcome familiarity becomes a slight liability after a while, as one gets over the joy of Argento being Argento again and realizes that, no matter how much better this is than PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, it kinda just becomes Dario Argento's homage to Dario Argento. The killer, once revealed, starts using a weird vocal affect that sounds less like a sinister serial killer and more like a lost Festrunk brother; and at just under two hours, it's entirely too long, which makes the film's final minutes even more bizarre in the way Argento has the closing credits roll over the final scene as shit is still happening. It probably sounded like an outside-the-box idea on paper as a way of messing with the audience, but in execution, it's jarring and distracting, like the film is already 20 minutes too long but now he's in a mad rush to wrap it up. He would do the same thing over a final scene with Stefania Rocca in THE CARD PLAYER, but it was in a much less obtrusive fashion. SLEEPLESS is a far from perfect film, and it doesn't even crack the top ten of any "Best of Argento" lists, but at the same time, it also doesn't belong anywhere near the bottom, and at least now, with a quality Blu-ray presentation, it can be assessed on its own admittedly flawed terms by devout Argentophiles.
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Italy - 1998; US release 1999) Directed by Dario Argento. Written by Gerard Brach and Dario Argento. Cast: Julian Sands, Asia Argento, Andrea Di Stefano, Nadia Rinaldi, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Istvan Bubik, Lucia Guzzardi, Aldo Massasso, Zoltan Barabas, Gianni Franco, David D'Ingeo, Kitty Keri, John Pedeferri, Leonardo Treviglio, Massimo Sarchielli, Luis Molteni, Enzo Cardogna, Itala Bekes, Ferenc Deak B., Sandor Bese. (Unrated, 104 mins)
Every bad movie has its defenders, and while a few people have gone to bat for Dario Argento's 1998 version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, it's almost universally regarded as his worst film, though it later got some stiff competition from 2012's DRACULA. A revisionist take on Gaston Leroux's classic novel, PHANTOM is usually cited as the point of no return in a decline from which Argento has yet to recover. It was recently released on Blu-ray by Scorpion, along with 2004's THE CARD PLAYER, another title from the director's much-maligned modern era, with 2001's SLEEPLESS on the way, because physical media is dead. Unfortunately, the passage of time has not turned THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA into an unjustly neglected gem that was misunderstood in its time. It's still the laughably awful, hopelessly misbegotten train wreck that it's always been, the only differences now being that a) the clarity of HD at least reveals a generally nice-looking film that's well-shot by the great cinematographer Ronnie Taylor, an Oscar-winner for his work on 1982's GANDHI and an Argento collaborator on 1987's OPERA, and along with the appropriately ornate production design by Antonello Geleng, reveal qualities that were significantly diminished when the film went straight-to-video in the US in 1999, courtesy of the lowly T&A and D-grade action purveyors at A-Pix Entertainment (though it must be said that 1080p doesn't do any favors for the primitive CGI and the embarrassing, Tommy Wiseau-esque greenscreen work), and b) Argento repeatedly having his daughter Asia disrobe on screen once she turned 18 for 1993's TRAUMA and then again for some violent rape scenes in 1996's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME has always been a little, well, weird.
For instance, here he depicts her, albeit briefly, engaged in a fully-nude, doggy-style, soft-focus sex scene with the title character that's prefaced with a leering, lingering close-up of her ass that takes up nearly the entire screen. This is followed later by the Phantom raping her character as she initially fights him off but eventually gives in and is shown enjoying it. Asia Argento has always cultivated a reputation as an edgy, hell-raising wild child, but these scenes were strange and ill-advised in 1999 and are completely uncomfortable and a little gross two decades later following her involvement in the Harvey Weinstein scandal and then with sexual assault accusations leveled at her by her HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS co-star Jimmy Bennett. Asia worked again with her father on 2007's MOTHER OF TEARS and 2012's DRACULA (his last film to date), and while most fans regard THE STENDHAL SYNDROME as his last front-to-back good movie (some go back as far as 1987's OPERA, but I might even say 1985's PHENOMENA), maybe there's some connection between the beginning of Dario Argento's slow, sad, ongoing decline coinciding with when he started having his daughter get naked in his movies.
Asia Argento is the ingenue Christine Daae, the understudy to obnoxious diva Carlotta Altieri (Nadia Rinaldi) in a production of Faust at the Paris Opera House in 1877. Christine finds an admirer in the Phantom (Julian Sands, in a role Argento initially pitched to John Malkovich), a notorious mystery figure who lives in the catacombs beneath the opera house, where he was abandoned as an infant and raised by rats (!). The Phantom--who isn't disfigured and wears no mask--develops a telepathic communication with Christine and the pair soon fall in love as Christine is powerless against seductive Phantom pick-up lines like "Your perfume...your female smell...it flows through my veins like the melody of the rolling ocean!" The Phantom offs various interlopers who get in the way of his love for Christine, with Argento wasting a ton of screen time on opera house staffers Alfred (David D'Ingeo) and Paulette (Kitty Keri), who are introduced with a sex scene (their copulation gets a reaction shot from a caged bird), then endlessly venturing into the catacombs where it takes forever for the Phantom to kill them. Competition arrives in the form of the lovestruck Baron Raoul de Chagny (Andrea Di Stefano), but Christine keeps their relationship platonic, even as the Phantom becomes possessive and escalates to violence, madness, and murder to keep her close to him.
Argento and co-writer Gerard Brach (a longtime Roman Polanski collaborator going back to REPULSION) opt to make everyone in Paris ugly and grotesque (the monstrous Carlotta's awful treatment of everyone, plus Eurocult stalwart Aldo Massasso as a pedophile arts patron who keeps trying lure little girls with chocolates) while giving the Phantom a relatively handsome visage. This is unlike every other interpretation of the character within the horror genre--most notably Lon Chaney in 1925, Claude Rains in 1943, Herbert Lom in 1962, and Robert Englund in 1989--though with his long blond wig and wailing away on an organ, Sands often resembles an emo Rick Wakeman. It's an approach that just never works, mainly due to the overwrought performance of Sands, who was appropriately menacing in the first two WARLOCK films--which altered the course of his career from Merchant-Ivory regular (A ROOM WITH A VIEW, MAURICE) to cult horror star for several years--but he makes an annoyingly needy, clingy, codependent Phantom here. It's too bad almost nothing works in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, because this is clearly a more prestigious production than what Argento was doing around this time, especially with revered names like Taylor, Brach, and composer Ennio Morricone onboard.
This most assuredly is not a junky horror movie, but Argento is having a really off day, even recycling what appear to be some unused steampunk-inspired props from the previous year's THE WAX MASK, which he intended to produce for Lucio Fulci but assigned to Sergio Stivaletti after Fulci died during pre-production. For all of his trailblazing success with his early gialli and his SUSPIRIA supernatural horrors, Argento stumbles badly when he ventures into classic horror: DRACULA, with its crummy digital effects, a whiny title vampire (Thomas Kretschmann) calling himself "an out-of-tune chord in the divine symphony" and transforming into a human-sized mantis while being pursued by a sleepwalking Rutger Hauer as cinema's dullest Van Helsing, is just about as bad as THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Argento went on to make some OK-but-not-great films down the road, like SLEEPLESS (a back-to-basics giallo, basically an acceptable mea culpa after PHANTOM was flatly rejected by everyone), THE CARD PLAYER, and 2005's DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK?, but he's never totally regained his mojo or been anywhere close to "vintage Argento" strength since. The Blu-ray features a commentary by film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, where both acknowledge the film's flaws and its extremely low standing among Argentophiles (even referring to it as the director's "folly") while offering a reasoned, rational defense of it that probably won't change your opinion, but refreshingly avoids resorting to desperate, hyperbolic, "Dario can do no wrong!" fanboy apologia.
THE CARD PLAYER (Italy - 2004) Directed by Dario Argento. Written by Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini. Cast: Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Silvio Muccino, Adalberto Maria Merli, Claudio Santamaria, Fiore Argento, Cosimo Fusco, Mia Benedetta, Giovanni Visentin, Claudio Mazzenga, Conchita Puglisi, Micaela Pignatelli, Luis Molteni, Jennifer Poli, Elisabetta Rocchetti, Vera Gemma, Antonio Cantafora, Gualtiero Scola, Robert Madison, Emanuel Bevilacqua. (Unrated, 104 mins) After his base's talk-to-the-hand rejection of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the giallo throwback SLEEPLESS served as an acquiescing Argento's "give the fans what they want" movie. Continuing in that vein, THE CARD PLAYER is his attempt to bring the giallo into the 21st century. It's second-tier Argento without question, and looking at it again a decade and a half later, the film has taken on an even greater air of familiarity thanks to all the post-CSI police procedurals that your dad watches. From Claudio Simonetti's score that sounds like an alternate version of the NCIS theme to its high-concept plot that incorporates the internet in the most simplistic ways and doesn't really completely understand how computers work, THE CARD PLAYER feels very much like a two-hour pilot episode of a hypothetical CSI: ROME. Probably best known to American moviegoers for her supporting role in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, Stefania Rocca stars as Detective Anna Mari (whose name is similar to Asia Argento's Detective Anna Manni in THE STENDHAL SYNDROME), who's challenged by a killer via e-mail to a game of online poker for the life of an abducted British tourist, seen on a live webcam begging for her life. For every hand the killer wins, he amputates something, his ultimate goal being to murder her on camera. That's exactly what happens when hapless cop Sturni (Claudio Santamaria) volunteers to take him on and loses every hand. Mari eventually teams with John Brennan (Liam Cunningham, several years before playing Davos on GAME OF THRONES), a blustery, alcoholic forensics expert dispatched from the British embassy to assist in the investigation. Their luck doesn't improve when bull-headed police commissioner Marini (Adalberto Maria Merli) orders them to not engage and refuses to allow them to play when the killer abducts another girl, who's soon found floating in a river with a Joker card inserted into her vagina. They eventually resort to bringing in young poker expert Remo (Silvio Muccino), which proves helpful when Marini's daughter Lucia (Fiore Argento, Dario's eldest daughter) is the next woman taken.
There's a noticeable lack of "classic" Argento set pieces in THE CARD PLAYER, as most of the suspense sequences revolve around characters gathered around Mari's desk and grimacing at her computer screen as they wait for the cards to be revealed. It's an unbelievably silly story, and the killer's identity should be obvious to anyone who's seen a murder mystery before. But still, Argento, working with frequent writing partner Franco Ferrini (PHENOMENA, DEMONS, DEMONS 2), manages to squeeze in some inspired moments amidst the SE7EN-meets-ROUNDERS goofiness (we could probably use more of the tap-dancing, opera-singing, comic relief coroner). One vintage giallo bit has something in an ashtray on Mari's coffee table catching her eye, as she quickly realizes that it's a reflection of the masked killer watching her while hiding in the bushes right outside an opened patio door, the proximity very reminiscent of David Hemmings barely having enough time to lock the door into his music room when he realizes the killer is in the apartment with him in DEEP RED. And later, off investigating on his own, Brennan has one of those classic giallo realizations where he accidentally cracks the case after piecing together two seemingly unrelated details involving a mysterious sound in a public place and strange seeds from a rare plant, a stylistic callback to discovering the killer's identity in Argento's 1970 directing debut THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE.
Sure, the filmmaker is repurposing some old ideas, but it's in these moments that THE CARD PLAYER gets some of that distinct Argento momentum going, something that's certainly lacking in the astoundingly dumb climax that literally has the killer securing Mari to the railroad tracks like a silent movie villain, but forcing her to play online poker for her life. THE CARD PLAYER has a great cinematographer in Benoit Debie (IRREVERSIBLE, ENTER THE VOID, SPRING BREAKERS), but doesn't really take advantage of it, as Argento opts to give the film a generally TV-like look to go along with CSI-ready dialogue like "We're playing by his rules!" It also has some pacing issues in the middle and has another jarringly abrupt final shot like SLEEPLESS, but it gets some much-needed gravitas from Cunningham and Rocca, who make a good team and are about as close as late-period Argento is gonna get to David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in DEEP RED.
THE WAX MASK (Italy/France - 1997; US release 2000) Directed by Sergio Stivaletti. Written by Lucio Fulci and Daniele Stroppa. Cast: Robert Hossein, Romina Mondello, Riccardo Serventi Longhi, Gabriella Giorgelli, Aldo Massasso, Umberto Balli, Valery Valmond, Gianni Franco, Antonello Murru, Daniele Auber, Massimo Vanni, Omero Capanna, Goffredo Unger. (Unrated, 98 mins) 1997's THE WAX MASK began life as a heavily-hyped collaboration between Italian horror legends Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, the latter ailing and inactive since 1991's little-seen DOOR TO SILENCE, and far removed from his furiously prolific 1979-1984 glory days that gave us the likes of ZOMBIE, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, and THE BEYOND among others. After scrapping plans to make a new version of THE MUMMY, producer Argento and director Fulci settled on THE WAX MASK, a new take on the 1953 classic HOUSE OF WAX, itself a remake of 1933's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, with some elements of Gaston Leroux's short story "The Waxworks Museum." The writing process and pre-production--delayed while Argento finished THE STENDHAL SYNDROME--brought numerous disagreements, with Fulci unexpectedly wanting to go for atmosphere, while Argento wanted more splatter, since that's what established Fulci's fame, but Fulci's already precarious health took another downturn and before filming could even begin, the Godfather of Gore died on March 13, 1996 of complications from his long battle with diabetes. With the script already written, Argento pressed forward as a tribute to Maestro Fulci, assigning directing duties to renowned makeup effects wizard Sergio Stivaletti, whose trailblazing work was a highlight of latter-day Italian horror classics like Argento's PHENOMENA, Lamberto Bava's DEMONS and DEMONS 2, and Michele Soavi's THE CHURCH, THE SECT, and CEMETERY MAN. Making his directing debut, Stivaletti was given some wide latitude by Argento to tailor the project to his own vision. As a result, he significantly reworked Fulci's initial script--written with Daniele Stroppa, with some uncredited contributions from Argento--and the end result is a bizarre hodgepodge of giallo, gothic horror, and steampunk, almost like HOUSE OF WAX and Mario Bava's BARON BLOOD mashed up with a looney tunes third act that veers unexpectedly into sci-fi territory.
It's not very good, but it's better than anything else Fulci made after 1988 and it's better than Argento's next project, his career nadir THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, for which THE WAX MASK occasionally feels like a stylistic test run. In Paris in 1900, a little girl witnesses a black-clad figure murder her parents, with police determining that her father's heart was ripped out with a claw-like instrument. Cut to Rome in 1912, and the girl has grown up into Sonia (Romina Mondello, later seen as Rachel McAdams' obnoxious friend in Terrence Malick's TO THE WONDER), who went to live with her blind Aunt Francesca (Gabriella Giorgielli) after being orphaned. Shy Sonia gets a job as a costume designer at a new wax museum operated by Boris Volkoff (Robert Hossein), whose villainy should be obvious the moment you hear that he's named "Boris Volkoff," and has not one but two super-creepy assistants (Umberto Balli, Antonello Murru). The wax museum has made news before it's even opened, as a local man took a bet that he could spend the night in it and ended up dying of a fright-induced heart attack over something he saw (that's the plot of the Leroux short story). Volkoff is very protective of his exhibits and refuses to allow them to be photographed, and while a pestering reporter (Riccado Serventi Longhi) investigates the local man's death while also trying to make time with Sonia, the body count increases along with the number of Volkoff's exhibits, as a black-clad figure in a hat murders various people--mostly prostitutes from a nearby brothel--and transforms their corpses into new wax museum figures.
Anyone who's seen MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM and HOUSE OF WAX knows who's responsible, especially once a new exhibit echoes the Paris 1900 murder scene, triggering traumatic memories for Sonia (Volkoff doesn't initially know who she is) while attracting the attention of French detective Lanvin (Aldo Massasso), who's been obsessively chasing clues for the last 12 years and is especially interested in Volkoff's Paris 1900 exhibit since it includes details of the murder scene that were never made public. It's at about this point where Stivaletti steers THE WAX MASK to Crazytown in ways that are best discovered by going in cold, but even then, it still won't make a whole lot of sense. Veteran French actor/director and RIFIFI co-star Hossein--whose career dates back to 1948 and is still working today at 91--is appropriately sinister without hamming it up, though one wishes he would cut loose a little more, especially considering how batshit things get by the end.
Then again, it's really difficult to judge anyone's performance in this if you watch the English dub, which is absolutely atrocious, filled with florid line readings like Balli's character telling Sonia about his childhood abuse: "My father beat me until I bled...my skin carries the scars and my heart carries the hate which I shall always bear." Though venerable dubbing stalwarts like Carolynn de Fonseca and Ted Rusoff are briefly heard voicing some minor characters, most of that old gang had died or moved on by this point, leaving relative amateurs to do much of the heavy lifting, and anyone who watches enough of these Eurocult movies will instantly hear that the dubs on these later Italian genre titles just don't have the charm, the chops, or any sense of quality control. While there is some striking production design and some eye-popping colors, the entire film has a television feel to it, starting with the video-burned title and some stagy interiors. The climactic fire at the wax museum tries to emulate the exteriors of the witch houses burning at the end of Argento's SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, but Stivaletti can't pull it off with primitive CGI that already looked dated even by late '90s standards. THE WAX MASK opened in Italy in April 1997, just over a year after Fulci's death (he gets a dedication at beginning of the opening credits, which is a nice touch). As expected, it skipped US theaters and went straight-to-DVD courtesy of Image Entertainment in September 2000 in a non-anamorphic, early-days-of-DVD transfer that left much to be desired. While the dubious One-7 Movies released it on Blu-ray in 2016, Severin's new extras-packed Blu-ray set (because physical media is dead) is a huge improvement if you've only seen the Image DVD. Plus it offers an Italian track with English subtitles, though Hossein spoke French on set and is still dubbed in Italian, and everyone else speaking Italian sounds dubbed as well.
Guadagnino and his BIGGER SPLASH screenwriter David Kajganich (whose writing credits also include 2009's BLOOD CREEK, a little-seen horror film that deserved a bigger audience) fashion their SUSPIRIA with the very Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Lars von Trier-esque subtitle "Six Chapters and an Epilogue Set in a Divided Berlin." Specifically, 1977 West Berlin, with the omnipresent Berlin Wall and the city in turmoil with bombings and recurring invocations of Baader-Meinhof, the far-left militant Red Army Faction, and the October hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by the PFLP. In the midst of this is Markos Dance Academy student and Red Army supporter Patricia Hingle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who befriends elderly psychotherapist Dr. Josef Klemperer ("Lutz Ebersdorf"--more on him shortly) and frantically spells out the details of a wild story that the place is run by a coven of witches. When Patricia disappears--those close to her believe she went underground with a terrorist outfit--her spot at Markos becomes available and is given to Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), who's also running away, fleeing a domineering, terminally ill mother and a repressive Mennonite upbringing in rural Ohio.
A rebellious outcast in both her congregation and her own family going back to her childhood--whether she was constantly daydreaming about dancing, obsessed with learning all she could about Berlin, or being caught masturbating in her closet--Susie feels destined for Markos, and more specifically, its renowned choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), who soon takes the naive, sheltered American under her wing as her protegee for sinister reasons that have to do with more than dancing. Meanwhile, Dr. Klemperer (in the worst-kept secret of 2018, "Lutz Ebersdorf," initially described by the filmmakers as a practicing doctor and non-professional actor making his debut, is really Swinton under extensive prosthetics), haunted by the disappearance of his wife during the Holocaust 35 years earlier, is disturbed enough by Patricia's story and the notes scribbled in her left-behind journals that he begins his own investigation into her claims about the Markos Academy, one that dovetails with Markos dancer Sara (Mia Goth), who bonds with Susie but remains troubled by Patricia's vanishing.
That plot synopsis is really just scratching the surface of everything Guadagnino and Kajganich are up to here. SUSPIRIA '18 does a masterful job of capturing late '70s Berlin, with the gray, dreary atmosphere, the constant rain, the political tumult (bombs and commotion are frequently heard outside the walls of the Markos), the nods to Fassbinder and the casting of Volker Schlondorff regular Angela Winkler (THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM, THE TIN DRUM) as Miss Tanner, the right-hand to Madame Blanc. The film takes place in a Berlin that's literally divided by a wall, but also by politics and history, particularly the still-open wounds of WWII, as represented by the mournful Klemperer. That extends to the scheming and machinations going on in the academy, with the staff divided over whether to give control to Madame Blanc or the aging and unseen founder Helena Markos. The score by Radiohead's Thom Yorke is moodily effective--a complete contrast to the progasmic bombast of Goblin--but doesn't really signify "Berlin" in a musical sense.
Rest assured, Guadagnino doesn't forget that he's making an Italian horror film, whether it's numerous instances of stomach-turning gore, a truly nightmarish climax that goes completely off the rails, a Yorke piano cue that sounds directly lifted from Fabio Frizzi's score for Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND, or a late-film cameo by Jessica Harper. There's also Argento-specific callbacks, from the friendship between Patricia and Klemperer reminiscent of Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasance in PHENOMENA, and Swinton's disguised second performance recalling Adrien Brody's ridiculous "Byron Deidra" act in the dreadful latter-day Argento dud GIALLO. In a physically demanding performance, Johnson is an effective Susie, whose character arc goes in a vastly different direction than Harper's did in Argento's film, allowing Goth's Sara to resonate more for the audience in a way that wasn't required of Stefania Casini, her predecessor in the role. The dance instructors who make up the coven are well-cast, particularly Winkler, Paul Verhoeven vet Renee Soutendijk, and Sylvie Testud, who's made up in way that looks like a tribute to Jane March's "Richie" in COLOR OF NIGHT. Swinton is a terrific Madame Blanc, whose mentoring of Susie echoes Klemperer's belief that "love and manipulation...they share houses very often." Guadagnino perhaps overindulges his friend and frequent star Swinton, who actually has a third role by the end of the film, coming perilously close to making this her own personal DR. STRANGELOVE (her work as Klemperer is a triumph of old-age prosthetic makeup that the Oscars should recognize, but she doesn't do enough with her voice to totally sell the "Lutz Ebersdorf" illusion). While an over-the-top, arthouse deep dive into late 1970s West German politics, history, sociology, and culture seems like a strange approach to remaking a legendary and beloved Italian horror film, it's too lofty in its ambitions and too unpredictably gonzo to simply dismiss, regardless of how much of a daunting horse pill it can be at times.
THE SECT aka THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER
(Italy - 1991; US release 1992) Directed by Michele Soavi. Written by Dario Argento, Giovanni Romoli and Michele Soavi. Cast: Kelly Curtis, Herbert Lom, Tomas Arana, Maria Angela Giordano, Michel Adatte, Carla Cassola, Angelina Maria Boeck, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Niels Gullov, Donald O'Brien, Yasmine Ussani. (Unrated, 117 mins) The second and final collaboration between director Michele Soavi and producer/co-writer Dario Argento (following 1989's THE CHURCH), THE SECT is finally out on Blu-ray in the US, where it's fallen into relative obscurity over the last quarter century since its VHS release as THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER. There was talk that Anchor Bay was planning to release THE SECT during the big Eurocult DVD explosion around 2000 or so, but it never materialized, possibly due to expensive music rights clearance issues with the prominent inclusion of America's "A Horse With No Name" over the opening credits and into the first scene. A visionary filmmaker with an eclectic group of mentors--he was an actor and a regular assistant to both Argento and Lucio Fulci, and he found an unexpected fan in Terry Gilliam, who saw his 1987 film STAGEFRIGHT at a European film festival and hired him to handle second unit on THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN--Soavi's films from 1987 to 1994 constitute the last gasp of greatness from the golden age of Italian horror. Things had been on the decline for years, with aging directors moving to TV, Fulci ailing and effectively retired, and Argento beginning the long, slow descent into mediocrity that's ongoing to this day. Soavi was supposed to be the savior of Italian horror, but its fate was sealed long before the health problems of Soavi's young son, born with a rare liver disease that he wasn't expected to beat, prompted the director to put his career on hold indefinitely following his 1994 masterpiece DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, aka CEMETERY MAN, which is more or less the end of an era. By the time Soavi's son beat the odds and bounced back from what was considered a terminal illness, Italian horror was over aside from the occasional Argento disappointment, and Soavi found a home on Italian TV, where he remains a busy and in-demand hired gun to this day.
THE SECT is absolutely brilliant on a technical level. There's inspired visual flourishes and fluid and often tricky camera work that makes it a dazzling and colorful film to look at, but the script feels like a patchwork hodgepodge of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE WICKER MAN, with recycled Argento elements (particularly INFERNO, with its secret gateway to Hell and a murderous evil arising during lunar eclipse) and Soavi foreshadowing some DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE motifs to come, most notably a briefly reanimated corpse and the changing appearance of tiny figures in a snow globe on the heroine's bedside table. The film opens in southern California in 1970, when a group of free-spirited hippies are slaughtered by members of a cult ostensibly led by the very Charles Manson-like Damon (Tomas Arana), who quotes Rolling Stones lyrics and is revealed to be a middleman who answers to a wealthy, unseen figure in the back of a nearby parked limo who tells him to wait patiently, that his time will come, and it "may be years down the road." Cut to Frankfurt, Germany in 1991, as a young woman has her heart cut out by a deranged man (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), who is cornered by police in a train station and insists "They made me do it!" before grabbing a gun and blowing his brains out. A shabbily-dressed old man (the legendary Herbert Lom) is nearly run over by schoolteacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis), who takes him to her house to get some rest. He dies the next morning after going through a door and finding a hidden basement beneath the house with a deep well with very blue water, leaving behind a shroud with his face outlined on it. Numerous other bizarre occurrences take place around Miriam: the mother of one of her students vanishes; her colleague Kathryn (Mariangela Giordano of BURIAL GROUND) is attacked by the shroud when it gets caught in a wind gust and promptly starts to behave in a possessed manner before being stabbed to death and coming back to life in the hospital; strange ribbon-like turquoise strands start appearing in Miriam's tap water; she finds a creepy woman wandering around in the basement; and she starts getting messages on her answering machine from the dead man, who is revealed to be Moebius Kelly, the leader of the Satanic cult and the man in the limo in the 1970 prologue. His plan is, of course, to use the innocent--and presumably virginal--Miriam as the vessel to deliver Satan reborn, as she faces the terrifying realization that almost everyone in her life--present and past--is part of a conspiracy to ensure that this happens.
It's a tough call, but THE SECT might be the straight-up strangest work in Argento's entire filmography. If it feels like it's pieces of several scripts stitched together, that's because it was. Soavi incorporated parts of a still-unfilmed script he wrote in the '80s titled THE WELL, while Argento is said to have had the biggest input in the 1970 prologue. While this wasn't a Steven Spielberg/Tobe Hooper, POLTERGEIST situation, Argento's paw prints are all over both THE SECT and THE CHURCH. As was the case with Lamberto Bava's two DEMONS films, producer/co-writer Argento was a constant presence on the set (look at any behind-the-scenes photo from DEMONS and Bava is standing there listening while Argento is pointing and appearing to give instructions), and it's been documented that Soavi was slightly frustrated by Argento's insistence on being involved in every aspect of THE CHURCH. Argento toned down the control-freak act and backed off Soavi a bit during the production of THE SECT, but his involvement is felt throughout, mostly from a recycling of ideas and images from INFERNO and, to a lesser extent, SUSPIRIA, so much so that one could arguably view THE SECT as an unofficial spinoff of the "Three Mothers" saga. Other bits obviously conceived by Soavi either foreshadow DELLAMORTE (the snow globe, the corpse of Kathryn coming back to life and attacking Miriam, the mythic elements of death and rebirth) or reference THE CHURCH, most notably the idea of a demonic sect operating in a secret underground location of a building that's a portal to hell (see also SUSPIRIA, INFERNO). It's very deliberately paced and even a tad overlong at just under two hours, and there's some moments that just don't work: the shroud attacking Kathryn is unintentionally hilarious; the constantly-invoked rabbit motif is overdone, especially the part where Miriam's apparently sect-controlled pet bunny watches TV and uses the remote control, resulting in a bunny reaction shot when it sees a magician (Soavi) pulling a rabbit out of a hat on a TV show; and a late-film sexual assault of Miriam by a demonic stork that crawls out of the basement well probably read a lot better on the page than it looks on the screen.
THE SECT is a flawed jumble of a film whose story is frequently an unwieldy mess, but it's so well-made and carefully crafted on a visual level, and so bizarre if looked at as a nightmarish fever dream that its lofty ambitions carry the weight and help it hit more often than it misses. The script really could've used one more draft and a final polish to tighten the plot a bit, but it mostly works. Lom, in what's probably his last great role, commands the screen as Moebius, and Arana makes the most of his limited screen time, with one memorable shot of the stoned Damon glaring into the camera as Soavi dissolves to a blazing sunset that's one of the most effective images of the filmmaker's career. Curtis, the eldest daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, is fine as the naive and almost childlike Miriam. Soavi settled on the actress after his first choice, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 and 5 star Lisa Wilcox, turned him down when she found out she was pregnant. Curtis, two years older than Jamie Lee, never found the level of fame and success enjoyed by her younger sister, but she never really vigorously pursued it either. She worked as a stockbroker after graduating from college in the late '70s and into the early '80s before giving acting a shot when Jamie Lee got her a tiny part as one of Dan Aykroyd's former fiancee's friends in 1983's TRADING PLACES (she's wearing the blue headband in this clip). Other than THE SECT, her only starring role in a feature film was in an obscure 1987 German comedy called MAGIC STICKS. She had a few guest spots on TV shows like THE EQUALIZER, HUNTER, and STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, but her most prominent role after THE SECT was as a regular on the 1996-99 UPN series THE SENTINEL, which she left after the first season. Curtis' last acting credit was a guest spot on a 1999 episode of JUDGING AMY, and from then on, she's been credited on several of her sister's films as her personal assistant.
TWO EVIL EYES (Italy - 1990; US release 1991) Directed by Dario Argento and George A. Romero. Written by George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Adrienne Barbeau, Ramy Zada, Sally Kirkland, Martin Balsam, E.G. Marshall, John Amos, Kim Hunter, Madeleine Potter, Bingo O'Malley, Tom Atkins, Jeff Howell, Holter Ford Graham, Julie Benz, Christine Forrest, Chuck Aber, Anthony DiLeo Jr., Tom Savini. (R, 120 mins) In its earliest stages of development, TWO EVIL EYES was intended by producer Dario Argento to be a four-part anthology horror film celebrating the work of Edgar Allan Poe, with the Italian master of horror joined by fellow genre legends George A. Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter. By the time production began in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1989, Craven and Carpenter bowed out, leaving Argento and Romero as the remaining participants, each helming a present-day Poe segment running approximately one hour in length. TWO EVIL EYES was supposed to be timed with the ill-fated Poesploitation craze of 1989, which primarily saw rival producers Roger Corman and Harry Alan Towers cranking out a series of Poe adaptations in honor of the 140th anniversary of the writer's death (this included two competing versions of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH). Most of these films weren't released until 1990 or 1991, thereby making the anniversary element pointless, and that went for TWO EVIL EYES as well. While it debuted in Europe in January 1990, it wouldn't hit US theaters until much later in October 1991, courtesy of Taurus Entertainment, who gave it a limited release on just 150 screens. Though an Italian production and Argento's baby, both segments of TWO EVIL EYES were shot in Romero's Pittsburgh stomping grounds, with the beloved NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD auteur providing his usual behind-the-scenes crew for Argento to use, including production designer Cletus Anderson, editor Pasquale Buba, and makeup effects maestro Tom Savini. Though he did some location work in Central Park for 1980's INFERNO, TWO EVIL EYES marked the first time Argento shot an entire project in the US, and he would return to the States for 1993's TRAUMA, which found him unable to create much of a stylish giallo atmosphere in exotic Minneapolis.
Romero kicks things off with "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar," previously filmed by Roger Corman as the closing segment in 1962's TALES OF TERROR and best remembered for Vincent Price waking from the dead and melting into ooze over scheming hypnotist Basil Rathbone. Wealthy Ernest Valdemar (Bingo O'Malley) is in a coma induced by his physician and amateur hypnotist Dr. Robert Hoffman (Ramy Zada). Hoffman is having an affair with Jessica (Adrienne Barbeau), a former flight attendant who became an aging Valdemar's trophy wife years ago and is anxious to reap the benefits of his impending passing ("I let him use me," she explains. "For pleasure and for show...and I intend to be paid for my services"). Hoffman puts Valdemar under hypnosis to ease the pain but that's also the time that he can control the old man's mind, getting him to repeat things over the phone to his suspicious attorney Pike (E.G. Marshall) and signing documents transferring untold amounts of cash over to Jessica. They need to keep Valdemar alive for three weeks before the estate transfers to Jessica, but he dies while under hypnosis, putting him in a purgatory where he remains "alive" and part of our world and "the next," with the ominous "the others" attempting to use him to cross over. Romero takes some significant liberties with the story, his attempt to wedge in some social commentary about the greed of the wealthy doesn't really work (nor does the shot of blood dripping on money--Romero wasn't usually so ham-fisted in his societal critiques), and it's flatly shot in a way that makes it resemble a gorier-than-usual episode of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE, but "Valdemar" has some effective moments that make it better than its reputation. It's certainly a lesser work in the Romero canon, trying but not quite succeeding in re-establishing that CREEPSHOW mood--with Barbeau as another bitchy harridan, plus the presence of Marshall and O'Malley, not to mention Romero's then-wife Christine Forrest, playing a mean nurse just like she did in 1988's MONKEY SHINES--but it just looks bland and Romero doesn't feel as engaged as he might've been if this project was his idea rather than him being the only guest who showed up to Argento's party thinking Craven and Carpenter would be there as well.
Argento's "The Black Cat" is almost universally regarded as the superior half of TWO EVIL EYES, and while it's got some signature Argento style and, like Romero's "Valdemar," is a reasonably entertaining horror piece, it's too uneven in its approach to be a complete success. A lot of the problems with "The Black Cat" stem from a miscast Harvey Keitel, caught just before his spectacular early '90s resurgence thanks to films like BUGSY (his only Oscar nomination to date), THELMA & LOUISE, RESERVOIR DOGS, and BAD LIEUTENANT. Though he was occasionally appearing in prestigious offerings like THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and THE TWO JAKES around this same time, he was also making ends meet by taking a lot of hired gun gigs in instantly obscure European films that nobody saw. As anyone who's seen the FROM DUSK TILL DAWN documentary FULL TILT BOOGIE will recall, Keitel has been known to be a needy method actor who requires extensive one-on-one time with his directors, and if there's one thing for which Argento has zero patience, going back to his combative working relationship with Tony Musante on 1970's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, it's actors who pester him with questions about character motivation. Argento's been bitching about Musante for 47 years, and while little has been said about his experiences with Keitel, the actor doesn't really look happy to be there, almost like he's intentionally shutting down and withdrawing inside himself when his character is going crazy and he should be a little more animated.
"The Black Cat," written by Argento and frequent collaborator Franco Ferrini, is a mash-up of several Poe stories, filled with characters named after Poe protagonists. Keitel is Rod Usher, a Pittsburgh crime scene photographer who's working on compiling his shots of murder and death into a morbid coffee table book called Metropolitan Horrors. His dark side seems to be known to his younger girlfriend Annabel Lee (Madeleine Potter), a new age-y violinist who adopts a black cat, much to Usher's disapproval. While she's away on a short tour, Usher gets drunk and kills the cat. Of course he denies it, though Annabel isn't buying it, especially when he buys her a new cat--from a sultry barmaid named Eleonora, played by Sally Kirkland--and she catches him trying to murder that one as well. In a violent rage, Usher kills Annabel and walls her up in a closet, while her students (among them a young Julie Benz), nosy neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Pym (Martin Balsam and Kim Hunter), and dogged detective Legrand (John Amos) keep bothering him with questions about her disappearance, clearly not buying his story that she left him. All the while, Usher is tormented incessantly by a ringing phone a la "The Tell-Tale Heart," along with a persistent meowing coming from somewhere in the house.
Where Romero's segment had almost no visual flair at all, Argento goes full throttle, with some arresting camera work, dazzling Steadicam moves throughout Usher's massive three-story house, and some uniquely Argento-ish touches like a premonition of death in the form of a noose-shaped white marking on the cat's otherwise black hair. It ends in an abrupt fashion, which would typify a lot of Argento's films in the coming years, where he often starts the closing credits while the final scene is still playing out (I'm thinking specifically of 2001's SLEEPLESS), and breaks the cardinal rule of horror anthologies that the end segment has be an ace closer to send the audience out buzzing (though Pino Donaggio's closing credits score sorta helps). Regardless of its flaws, Romero's "Valdemar" has the more relatively crowd-pleasing ending, but "The Black Cat" never gets around Keitel being completely wrong for the part. He's a weirdo from the start and it's hard to grasp why Annabel is even interested in this creep, but Keitel makes the mistake of overplaying it early and underplaying it later. He's screaming "I didn't do anything!" immediately after murdering the first cat in a way that only a guilty person would, but later on, when he's being driven batty by the phone and all of the meddling interlopers, he suddenly seems half-asleep, mumbling and morose. It's a strange, mannered performance that never finds the right tone, and it's all the more perplexing because Keitel is one of our great actors, though given the track record of both of them, it's not hard to imagine Keitel and Argento not getting along. Horror fans would've gone to see TWO EVIL EYES in theaters had it been playing anywhere near them. Romero was in his commercial Hollywood phase at the time, between MONKEY SHINES and the Stephen King adaptation THE DARK HALF, and Argento's notoriety among American horror enthusiasts was significant even though much of his work was still difficult to see in the pre-DVD era (his 1987 film OPERA had finally been given a straight-to-video release just a month earlier in September 1991, retitled TERROR AT THE OPERA), with his post-1990 output showing some wild inconsistency that morphed into a precipitous decline from the late '90s onward that continues to this day. TWO EVIL EYES opened the same weekend as HOUSE PARTY 2 and CURLY SUE, but landed in 17th place and was out of theaters a week later, leaving most Argento and Romero fans to discover it in video stores. It doesn't represent either filmmaker at their pinnacle--for that we'd have to go back to 1979 when SUSPIRIA-era Argento helped finance DAWN OF THE DEAD, got Goblin onboard for the score, and recut the film as ZOMBI for European audiences--but it's entertaining enough to make it required viewing for superfans and completists.
George A. Romero and Dario Argento on the set of TWO EVIL EYES
DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR (Italy - 1985; US release 1986) Written and directed by Michele Soavi. (Unrated, 71 mins) For horror fans who weren't around at the time and only know him now as a genre elder statesman at best or an aged has-been at worst, it's really difficult to convey just how revered Dario Argento was in the 1980s. It was a time of Jason, Freddy, slasher movies, Stephen King, and pre-CGI makeup and special effects wizardry by the likes of Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, and Tom Savini. There was no internet, no social media, and very little in the way of fan/creator interaction. Horror fans of the '80s were in the know thanks to books like Michael Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, John Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide, and Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies, publications like Fangoria, watching old and new favorites on late-night broadcast and cable TV, and taking blind chances at the video store on Friday and Saturday nights. But knowing the work of a director like Argento really separated the players from the pretenders in horror fandom. So lionized was the "Italian Hitchcock" that he earned the adoration of many fans just on his reputation alone, as most of his essential work was nearly impossible to see in the US at that time. A partial remedy was made available when the 1985 documentary DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR was given a straight-to-video release by Vidmark Entertainment in 1986. Like Paramount's fan favorite TOM SAVINI'S SCREAM GREATS, WORLD OF HORROR was a behind-the-scenes look at a horror master that became a video store staple when it wasn't exactly easy to see a lot of Argento's films and if they were available, they were usually the butchered US versions. 1970's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and 1975's DEEP RED were common sights in any reputable video store (PLUMAGE largely intact; DEEP RED missing around 20 minutes), and though it was released uncut, 1980's INFERNO didn't see an official US release until Key Video's VHS in 1985. 1982's TENEBRAE was drastically cut and barely released in the US in 1984 as UNSANE, and another three years would go by before Fox Hills released that edited version on video. And 1977's SUSPIRIA, generally regarded as Argento's masterpiece, wouldn't be granted a US home video release until 1989, courtesy of Magnum Entertainment.
Argento with a young Jennifer Connelly
on the set of PHENOMENA
It wasn't exactly a surprise when Argento's 1985 film PHENOMENA was hacked down for the American market, its running time going from 110 to just 83 minutes. It was acquired by New Line Cinema, then riding high on the huge sleeper success of Wes Craven's 1984 hit A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. PHENOMENA was recut and retitled CREEPERS and New Line gave it a decent-sized rollout in major markets, making it Argento's most widely-seen-in-the-US film since SUSPIRIA eight years earlier. CREEPERS got extensive coverage in Fangoria and was already well known in horror circles by the time it hit video stores some months later. 1985-86 was arguably the height of Argento-mania as far as media exposure (including an awkward appearance plugging CREEPERS on THE JOE FRANKLIN SHOW) and the cult horror fan following were concerned. Around the same time, Argento also produced and was the guiding creative force behind Lamberto Bava's DEMONS, released in the US by New World in 1986. DARIO ARGENTO's WORLD OF HORROR spends a lot of time on the behind-the-scenes footage from PHENOMENA/CREEPERS and DEMONS, and while it may seem superfluous and dated now (it's a bonus feature on Synapse's new 3-disc special edition PHENOMENA Blu-ray), it vividly captures Argento at a pivotal moment in his career. He would churn out one more undisputed masterpiece with 1987's OPERA (which was picked up by Orion, who retitled it TERROR AT THE OPERA and prepared a trailer but abruptly shelved it, leaving it unseen in the US until Southgate Entertainment released it straight-to-video in 1991), and then his career began a slow-motion implosion that's ongoing to this day. There were a few small victories--1996's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME has some devoted fans but can't overcome the fatal miscasting of Argento's 21-year-old daughter Asia as a hard-bitten veteran cop, and even forgettable trifles like 1991's TWO EVIL EYES, 1993's TRAUMA, 2001's SLEEPLESS, and 2007's MOTHER OF TEARS have their moments--but there's little complimentary to say about the likes of 2004's absurd THE CARD PLAYER, 2009's GIALLO, and 2012's DRACULA, aside from the fact that they look like classics compared to 1999's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, an unwatchable clusterfuck that represented Argento hitting bottom. He's lost his mojo and, at 76 and last seen attempting to crowdfund a big-screen version of E.T.A. Hoffmann's THE SANDMAN with Iggy Pop, doesn't appear to be getting it back anytime soon. In that respect, DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR shows the auteur at the peak of his powers just before the decline, a time when there was zero doubt that he was a genius who lived up to the hype.
Michele Soavi
DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR was produced by Argento but doesn't come off like a self-aggrandizing, ego-stroking puff piece. He assigned the project to his top protege Michele Soavi, an assistant director and part-time actor (he's the guy in the car with Daniela Doria when she's puking her guts out in Lucio Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and he's the cross-dressing killer in Lamberto Bava's A BLADE IN THE DARK), making his directing debut. Soavi had been getting on-set experience doing some production assistant and second unit work for Argento, Fulci, and others for several years and would briefly leave the Argento stock company in 1987 to make his breakthrough, the Filmirage-produced STAGEFRIGHT, a late-period giallo slasher that would find an unlikely fan in Terry Gilliam. The legendary Monty Python alum caught STAGEFRIGHT at a European film festival and reached out to Soavi, hiring him to handle second unit chores on his big-budget 1989 spectacle THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN. Argento produced and co-wrote Soavi's next two films, 1989's THE CHURCH and 1991's THE SECT, aka THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER. Soavi branched out on his own to direct 1994's arthouse zombie film DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, released in the US in 1996 as CEMETERY MAN. A critical success and cult smash all over the world, CEMETERY MAN, combined with Argento's slide into mediocrity, cemented Soavi's position as the new leading voice of Italian horror and he was likely going on to much bigger things, but it never panned out. While Italian genre fare was in a serious downward spiral at the time he was being hailed as its savior, Soavi's decision to walk away as worldwide notoriety beckoned was a personal one: he put his career on hold to care for his gravely ill son, who was born with a rare liver disease. When the Italian film industry continued to crater over the next several years, Soavi quietly resurfaced as a journeyman TV director in the early 2000s (most notably the terrific 2001 Michael Mann-esque cop thriller miniseries UNO BIANCA) after his son made a triumphant recovery. Now 59, Soavi is content to make his living as a top-shelf hired gun for Italian television, though he did enjoy a brief return to the big screen when MUNCHAUSEN mentor Gilliam would call on him once more to handle second unit duties on his 2005 film THE BROTHERS GRIMM.
Argento overseeing the rigging of the
severed arm effect in TENEBRAE.
It's easy to dismiss the significance of DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR now that we've had nearly two decades of uncut and uncensored Argento films on DVD and Blu-ray. For American Argento fans in the mid '80s, this documentary was the only way to see the complete versions of the legendary Louma crane shot and the "severed arm spray-painting the wall" murder in TENEBRAE. And it was the only way to see any footage at all from his obscure 1972 giallo FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, which wouldn't get a DVD release in the US until 2009. The bootleg market was a ways away, so for horror fans who voraciously devoured every Fangoria article on Argento, wondering if the day would ever come that they'd be able to watch SUSPIRIA, DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR was a pretty big deal. Narrated by dubbing luminaries Tony La Penna and Nick Alexander,it also showed Argento as a hands-on director involved in every aspect of the production, overseeing the studio work of Goblin and prog rock legend Keith Emerson on their respective SUSPIRIA and INFERNO scores, stressing over the special effects difficulties on PHENOMENA and expressing serious doubts that he'll be able to finish the movie, or being interviewed while seated on top of the crashed helicopter in the middle of the Metropol set during a break in shooting DEMONS. There's some priceless archival on-set footage from various Argento shoots, with a focus on PHENOMENA, where you can see a 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly smiling, laughing, and being a very good sport about swimming in a huge pool filled with water, wood shavings, yogurt, and chocolate all being employed to simulate rotting human remains and maggots.
Argento with William Friedkin
at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival
Thanks to all the DVD and Blu-ray interviews, additional documentaries (like Luigi Cozzi's DARIO ARGENTO: MASTER OF HORROR in 1991 and Leon Ferguson's DARIO ARGENTO: AN EYE FOR HORROR in 2001), and the articles and books written about Argento over the years, most notably Maitland McDonagh's absolutely essential Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, there's a plethora of information out there that those watching DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR for the first time will find redundant. They'll already know it's Argento's hands wearing the black gloves in the murder scenes, or that he isn't particularly fond of actors, especially Tony Musante, his BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE star with whom he didn't get along at all (though the mercurial and often difficult Musante, who died in 2013, mellowed significantly with age and would enthusiastically praise Argento years later), to the point where that one experience soured him on actors in general. And while it jumps around with little sense of narrative flow (for some reason, Soavi waits until near the end to reference Argento's earliest films, but he also includes a impressively-assembled montage of shots from various Argento movies that show recurring ideas and images that flow together beautifully), it's a time capsule work that vividly captures the state of Argento fandom at a specific time and place and for that reason, it remains significant, making its preservation on the new PHENOMENA Blu-ray release one of that set's unsung special features.
