Film Freak Central

The Amityville Horror (2005) - Blu-ray Disc

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras F
starring Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jesse James, Jimmy Bennett
screenplay by Scott Kosar, based on the novel by Jay Anson and the screenplay by Sandy Stern
directed by Andrew Douglas

by Walter Chaw When filmmakers leave nothing to the imagination, you're left with the product of their imaginations, which almost without exception is an arid thing born of equal parts imitation and an eye to the bottom line. Innovation is frowned upon when it comes to big-budget horror (terms that mix together uneasily at best), leaving whatever was subversive about the premise to get blunted by this need to rake in a lot of money from a timid public looking for a rollercoaster instead of sociology. So it is with the latest instalment in the worst horror franchise in history, a remake of The Amityville Horror directed by commercial hack Andrew Douglas (who at least seems self-aware in interviews) that professes to be "truer" to the "true"* source material--meaning, essentially, that no one is going to die and that it's going to be poorly written. (I snuck a peak at the 1979 film when I was in the care of a horrible babysitter, only to experience one of my earliest instances of realizing that something sucked.) It tacks on some crap about the house in question being built on the site of an old Indian mental hospital/Abu Ghraib, replacing the innocuous little red room of the original film with a chamber of flash-edited horrors à la Thir13en Ghosts. In so doing, it introduces a little flaccid White Man's Guilt subtext into this Wonder Bread wonderland that it studiously refuses to examine.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo
***½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B
BD - Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Eva Renzi, Enrico Maria Salerno
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Dario Argento's uncredited adaptation of Fredric Brown's The Screaming Mimi (brought to the screen once before in 1958 by Gerd Oswald), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage marks the "Italian Hitchcock"'s directorial debut as well as the moment at which the Italian giallo genre gained international currency. Though the genre's invention (named after the yellow/giallo covers of Italian penny dreadfuls) is credited to compatriot Mario Bava (see, especially, his astonishing Blood and Black Lace), Argento's scary polish and cunning for film language bridged the cultural, mainstream/arthouse gap with agility and audacity. He's not just borrowing from Hitchcock, he's filtering the Master's work through his own sensibilities. Argento did for the slasher genre with his "supernatural" pictures like Suspiria and Inferno what Sergio Leone did for the Western, making them dirtier, sexier, rhythmic, and more acceptable to the literati; and he does here for the police procedural/neo-noir a similar kind of post-modern hipster reinvention. But it's not merely an intellectual exercise (in fact, the obscurity of the clues (its title at once revealing the identity of the killer and referring obliquely to the red herring of The Maltese Falcon) makes deciphering the procedural improbable at best)--rather, it's the visceral nature of the exercise that delights. It's Argento's revelry in one part in the unrelieved nihilism and delicious confusion that would characterize the best of the '70s' paranoia cinema--and in the other part, in the joy of great genre filmmaking.

The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Il gatto a nove code
**½/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
BD - Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring James Franciscus, Karl Malden, Catherine Spaak, Pier Paolo Capponi 
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Nicknamed "The Italian Hitchcock," Dario Argento is more aptly classified "The Italian DePalma": a director with his own set of stylistic excesses who, especially early in his career, borrowed many tropes from the Master of Suspense en route to crafting his own distinctive thrillers. Again like DePalma, Argento of late has fallen on hard times, creating a series of clunkers that have blundered from the brilliant homage of his nascence to the tired and derivative garbage of his twilight. Indicated by somewhat straightforward mystery plots that elaborate death scenes and gory climaxes serve to punctuate, the giallo (so named for the colour of the covers--yellow--that enshrouded Italian penny dreadfuls) genre of thriller reached its stylistic apex with Argento's 1975 Deep Red, just prior to the director experimenting in the "supernatural" sub-genre of Italian horror with his masterpiece, Suspiria. Argento's first three films, the so-called "animal trilogy" (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) deepened the giallo as introduced to cinema by the late, great Mario Bava.

Suspiria (1977) - DVD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D+
starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé
screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw At their best, Dario Argento's films are lurid splashes of Hitchcockian reinvention that bristle with audacity and a pornographer's sensibility. He deconstructs the male gaze in the mutilation of beautiful women, taking a moment (as he does in Tenebre, Opera, and Suspiria) to make guerrilla art of their extravagant suffering. Argento's films are generally split between two sub-genres of the slasher flick, each defined to a large extent by his contributions. The first is the giallo, films indicated by their impossibly convoluted mystery plots and elaborate set-piece murders; the second, of which Suspiria is one, is the "supernatural," distinguished by their surreality and lack of a traditional narrative. Known as "The Italian Hitchcock," Argento, as I've said before, is more accurately "The Italian DePalma," in that Argento's imitating reads as homage. And though he occasionally selects sources to ape badly (i.e. attempting to adapt Jeunet and Caro to "Phantom of the Opera"), when he finds the perfect source material to serve as foundation for his redux perversions (Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and Rebecca for Suspiria), the end result can be as original as it is discomfiting.

Deep Red (1975) + Inferno (1980) - Blu-ray Discs

Profondo rosso
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Clara Calamai
screenplay by Dario Argento and Bernardino Zapponi
directed by Dario Argento

INFERNO
***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras D
starring Eleonora Giorgi, Gabriele Lavia, Veronica Lazar, Leopoldo Mastelloni
written and directed by Dario Argento

DEEP RED

by Walter Chaw Deep Red is a transitional film from the middle of Dario Argento's most creative period, one that sees the Italian Hitchcock (better: the Italian De Palma) building surreal temples on Hitchcock's meticulous foundations before abandoning them--disastrously and without explanation--following the release of 1982's Tenebre. With little scholarship on Argento that's current and/or comprehensive, and with the director himself seldom asked about his steep decline, what's left is this notion that Argento wanted to escape the Hitchcock-derivative label (only to return to it after the spark had fled or, more likely, proved illusory all along), or that he wanted a psychic divorce from De Palma, whose career Argento's paralleled for a while in theme and execution. Whatever happened eventually, Argento in 1975 seemed to be casting about for a new direction. He'd just completed his "animal" trilogy of gialli (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat O' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and nursed a belief that the genre had, if not run its course entirely, at least run its course for him. He dabbled in a failed period piece (Five Days in Milan), the function of which appears to be to demonstrate that Argento is no Sergio Leone (though to be fair, almost no one is Sergio Leone), and he contributed to a portmanteau for Italian television--a format to which he'd one day return with buddy George Romero and Two Evil Eyes.

Opera (1987) - DVD

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Cristina Marsillach, Ian Charleson, Urbano Barberini, Daria Nicolodi
screenplay by Dario Argento, Franco Ferreni
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw The best of Dario Argento's films rework themes and images from Alfred Hitchcock with a level of flamboyance and twisted creativity that transform would-be genre knock-offs into something truly rare and valuable. Argento utilizes the constructions of Hitchcock as a framework for lurid, colour-drenched images and wickedly inventive death sequences that are among the most shocking and agonizing in the history of cinema. Often called "The Italian Hitchcock," I find the term "The Italian De Palma" to be closer to the mark, for their obsessions, for their mastery of highly technical mimicries, and, extra-textually, for both auteurs' decades-long slides into mere imitation and schlock. (Despite their similarities, Argento and De Palma to this day hate each other with a white-hot passion.)

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

La sindrome di Stendhal
**½/****
DVD - Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Asia Argento, Thomas Kretschmann, Marco Leonardi
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to reconcile the Dario Argento of the Seventies through to 1982's Tenebre with the Dario Argento ever after (at least until what I've heard is a remarkable comeback, the upcoming completion of his Three Mothers trilogy). The inventor almost by himself of two distinct genres of film in Italy (and just the concept of the arthouse slasher in the world), a co-writer of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, and a revolutionizer of horror-movie music became this guy who stopped aping Hitchcock and started aping...Jeunet? Himself? Even with Max Von Sydow in the fold (Non ho sonno), the pictures post-Tenebre are cheap auto-knockoffs devoid of innovation and lacking the amazingly imaginative gore that marked Argento's early gialli, the archetypal resonance of his supernaturals, or the transcendent, sometimes sublime lawlessness of his hybrids (like Suspiria, for instance, still a towering achievement). They're almost to a one these gaudy, derivative, exhausted pieces of shit.

Sleepless (2001) - DVD

Non ho sonno
*/**** Image D Sound D
starring Max von Sydow, Stefano Dionisi, Chiara Caselli, Gabriele Lavia
screenplay by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini, Carlo Lucarelli
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Italian horror master Dario Argento's desperation for a critical or popular success is starting to manifest itself in self-imitation and sloppiness. Fourteen years removed from his last good movie (Opera), his latest film Sleepless (a.k.a. Non ho sonno), starring the inimitable Max Von Sydow and heralded as a return to Argento's roots in the giallo genre, hits North American shores months after bootleg copies of it have already circulated amongst the ranks of disappointed fanboys. Sleepless lacks the savant-level spark of invention that elevates Argento's best films (Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre) and the flashes of brilliance that indicate his second-tier of work (Phenomena, Opera, Inferno). It is listless and painful, with fakey gore and dialogue that reaches nadir even for an auteur never known for his pen.

Trauma (1993) + The Card Player (2004) - DVDs

Dario Argento's Trauma
**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Christopher Rydell, Asia Argento, Laura Johnson, Piper Laurie
screenplay by Dario Argento & T.E.D. Klein
directed by Dario Argento

Il cartaio
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Silvio Muccino, Claudio Santamaria
screenplay by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw Listening to Dario Argento himself call Trauma "classic Argento" shakes the validity of author intentionality. The man's a legend, but he has no idea about the qualities that used to shine in his own work, and what comes clear for a fan of the "Italian Hitchcock" after a screening of Trauma is that the thrill is gone. It's one of those George Lucas situations where if it were anyone else shitting all over the legacy, there'd be a violent hue and cry instead of this collective embarrassed averting of gaze--a cheap ripper that steals scenes whole from better Argento flicks without a commensurate level of understanding of how to use them. Was a time that Argento redefined the slasher flick in the same way that countryman Sergio Leone redefined the Western; that Argento (like American rival and doppelgänger Brian DePalma) was appropriating bits and pieces from Alfred Hitchcock and rejuvenating them in films exhilarating for their willingness to do absolutely anything to anyone at any moment. Once lawless, Argento's pictures feel inconsequential now. Light and aimless.

TIFF '07: Mother of Tears: The Third Mother

La terza madre
***/****
directed by Dario Argento

by Bill Chambers Sanity and fatigue are ineluctable corrupting influences on an aging filmmaker, but it brings me great pleasure and no small relief to be able to report that while Mother of Tears: The Third Mother--Dario Argento's long-gestating conclusion to his "Three Sisters" trilogy--is neither as artful as Suspiria nor as dreamlike as Inferno, it nevertheless surpasses expectations fostered by Argento's recent work to emerge as his best movie in decades. Fitting that Argento should choose to tell the Rome-set story of Mater Lacrimarum last, marking this as a homecoming in more ways than one.