Sunglasses at Night

I told a friend that Dario Argento's new film, Dark Glasses (2022) strikes me as what you might get if you fed his old film, Cat O' Nine Tails, into an AI filmmaking engine. It would be equally soulless, but maybe that's being unkind. Dark Glasses isn't the same kind of car wreck Argento was making when last we met. Whatever the new film's deficiencies, it is an absolute baller in comparison to his Dracula. Faint praise, I know. For a brief period at the start, I thought the Argento of the early 1970s was behind the camera. The opening sequence is creepier and more suggestive of a world out of joint than the entirety of the director's output this century. But it was not to be...

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Sleeping Like the Dead

Welcome to another installment of the annual October Horror Movie Challenge. The goal, as always, is to watch 31 horror movies before the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. At least half of those movies have to be films I haven't seen before.

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Film history hasn't been kind to Riccardo Freda. Arguably the father of Italian horror, his star has been eclipsed by his great contemporary, Mario Bava. It was Freda, not Bava, who directed the first Italian horror movie of the sound era, and only the second horror movie ever made in Italy. Bava, a cinematographer at the time, was Freda's main collaborator, and their first film, I Vampiri, was a failure in 1957. The stage had not yet been set for the revival of the Gothic horror film. They were a year too early, a year before Hammer films in England paved the way with the massive success of their Frankenstein and Dracula revivals. When Bava went back to the well with Black Sunday, it was a huge hit. Its time had come. Freda, who had lobbied hard to get a horror movie off the ground, was left behind. His next horror movie wouldn't appear until 1962, and it wouldn't make it abroad until two years later. That film was The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, starring Barbara Steele. Steele is also associated with Bava, but she only made one film for him. She was Freda's favorite collaborator, however, and it was Freda more than Bava who shaped her into a horror icon. In spite of all this, Freda is largely forgotten while the cult of Bava (justifiably) grows apace.

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Sighs and Whispers

The most instantly noticeable difference between Dario Argento's original Suspiria and Luca Guadagnino's 2018 cover version is the way each film chooses to decorate itself. Argento's film often seems intent on burning the viewers' retinas right out of their eyeballs. Many of its best effects are accomplished through abstractions: color, stained glass decor, the pulsing electronic Goblin score. Guadagnino's film, by contrast, is a grey, bleak affair, taking its cues from the dismal world of Fassbinder's 1970s Germany. Both films start with a woman seeking help in a driving rainstorm, but where Argento's opening orchestrates a world of peril and chaos, Guadagnino's opening is a portrait of misery and defeat. It wouldn't be right to claim, as some have, that Guadagnino's film is "artier" than Argento's, because Argento's films from the 1970s are all art objects to one degree or another, both as objects unto themselves and in their contents. Argento made films in which art is dangerous, in which art can be used as a weapon. It shares this theme with the new film. They just have different ideas about art.

Note: this is heavy on the spoilers.

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Food for Worms

I was in high school the last time I saw Lucio Fulci's Zombie (1979) in one sitting. I've seen bits of it in the years since. Its most outré sequences show up in the culture outside the context of the film. I mean, an ad for a satellite service borrowed the film's notorious "zombie vs. shark" sequence a few years back and nobody blinked. It's a sad comedown for one of the original video nasties.

In truth, I've never revisited it because back when I was a young whippersnapper, I didn't really like it even if it did tickle something in the gorehound I used to be. I admit that the version I watched with my friends all those years ago was less than ideal: it was a dub off of some fly by night TV channel. I don't remember its exact provenance. It wasn't a commercial dub because it was grainy and cropped and not even panned and scanned. It must have come off of cable because it had its nudity intact, to say nothing of its zombie cannibal feasts. It certainly delivered on the gore. THAT, at least, I remember with vivid clarity. The story? Well, that's another matter. Like many Italian horror films of similar vintage, I thought the stuff between the set pieces was boring.

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Dying By Design

The only way I can make sense of Dario Argento's 1980s output is if I consider it all as a merciless put-on. How else to approach a movie like Tenebre (1982), which has a title that translates as "Darkness" but which is brightly lit? It's a film in which the director's pet obsessions turn inward on the movie itself in a fireworks display of self-reference. It's self-serving, too, in so far as it offers a defense for Argento's peccadilloes where no defense is really needed. It is funny, though.

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Mix and Match

My friend, Roberta, teaches Italian film, so when she says I need to have more Italian films on my long Halloween slog, I'm inclined to listen to her. Her recommendations were Dellamorte Dellamore (which I've seen several times, including the uncut version she recommended) and Shadow (2009, directed by Federico Zampaglione), of which, I knew nothing. Fortunately, it's on Netflix so into the queue it went. It's been a while since Italy produced any important horror films--the golden age of Italian genre film ended when the government decided to quit funding "entertainments" in favor of more highbrow fare--so I was curious to see what a contemporary horror movie from Italy looks like.

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That Hellbound Train

I took a break from new viewings last night to watch an old favorite. Here's what I wrote about Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders (1975) a decade ago. I don't really have much to add to this.

Synopsis: Lisa and Margaret are on holiday from their school in Munich. They decide to take the train to Lisa's home in Italy. Unfortunately, the train is host to a pair of young hoodlums, Blackie and Curly, on the lam from roughing up Father Christmas in the street and looking for more trouble. Blackie has the swagger; Curly has an arm full of hop. Also on the train is an upper class woman. She looks prim and proper, but the predations of Blackie and Curly unleashes something within her and she is soon their partner in crime, slowly taking control of their activities. Unfortunately for Lisa and Margaret, the trio has fixed on them as their victims. At the upper class woman's behest, Margaret is raped by a passing peeping tom and Curly deflowers Lisa with his knife. The shock kills Lisa, while Margaret flees in terror, out the window of the bathroom and onto the rocks below. The killers stuff Lisa's body out the window of the train and get off at the soonest stop, where the woman seeks medical attention for a laceration she suffered in the commotion. Unbeknownst to them, the doctor is Lisa's father, who discovers exactly who he is treating...

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Break a Leg

Michele Soavi's Deliria (aka Stagefright, 1987) is of its time and place. It's a slasher, of course, but it's a slasher film that exists at the confluence of that subgenre and the Italian giallo. It's not exactly a giallo. It doesn't have the perverse investigative plot of most giallo films, but it borrows the giallo's style, in which massacre is lovingly mounted as slick entertainment. This is the descendent of Dario Argento, of course, for whom director Michele Soavi once worked as a second-unit director. Take out the director's credit, and you might mistake this for Argento's work. It's certainly cruel enough.

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