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Tenebrae

2024-06-21 by Steve

The last time I watched Tenebrae was in 1999, when it had just been released in as near to a complete, uncensored version as anyone up to that point had managed for the home entertainment market. I didn’t like it much. A “weird blood-bucket whodunit” was one line in my notes, which also mentioned its strange non-sequiturs, its jagged dramatic throughline and its disengaged acting. So I thought I’d give it another go, to see whether Arrow’s recent 4K remaster – every nanosecond of it now back as Dario Argento intended – improved on the Nouveaux version from the last century, which was on VHS. For those who’ve not seen it, the film … Read more

Phenomena

2024-08-252023-02-19 by Steve

The lesbian boarding school classic Mädchen in Uniform generally seems to be in the mix in Dario Argento films, and so it is with 1985’s Phenomena, another instance of a naive teenager at a girls school being monstered by staff, pupils and other forces. In this case it’s Jennifer (Jennifer Connelly), a new arrival at a school in Switzerland, getting a frosty reception from the stiff-faced headmistress (Dalila Di Lazzaro), a woman with a gravedigger’s haircut and by the other girls in the school. Everyone seems to be against her, in fact, apart from her nice roomie, Sofia (Federica Mastroianni, niece of Marcello). Out in the big wide world there’s a killer on … Read more

Vortex

2024-06-252022-08-25 by Steve

Grimly powerful and powerfully grim, Vortex is the story of a longtime married French couple on the final lap of the track. Elle and Lui, Gaspar Noé’s film calls them, Her and Him, universalising the particularity of what happens to the people played by Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento, a first lead role in front of the camera for the 80-ish-year-old director. It’s appropriate that Argento is known for horror because in its own domestic, downbeat beat way this is a horror film, the kind of one we’ll all one day have a leading role in, if we’re “lucky” enough to get that far. As in the recent Lux Aeterna, Noë does it … Read more

Suspiria

2024-04-282022-08-12 by Steve

Suspiria, the original 1977 one not the 2018 remake (a treat for another day), pulls a version of the same trick on its audience that Orson Welles pulled on his crew while making Citizen Kane. “It’s a dream sequence,” Welles would sometimes shout, when he ran into resistance against whatever novelty he was trying out on any given day. Park your timeserved-craftsman’s logical objections, in other words, and give it a try. Armed with his “dream sequence” rationale Welles was able to experiment away to his heart’s content. If Welles had a dream, Dario Argento has a nightmare to deliver and everything in his film is shaped by it. Park expectations about “good” … Read more

Once Upon a Time in the West

2023-10-312013-03-03 by Steve

By 1967, after countless Italian sword and sandal epics and three astonishingly successful spaghetti Westerns (A Fistful Of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly), director Sergio Leone was tired of men in period costume and was eager to try his hand at something more contemporary. It wasn’t to be. Paramount studios prevailed upon Leone to make one more western for them. In return they promised to fund his four-hour, four-decade overview of organised crime, Once Upon a Time in America. Leone’s fourth Western could easily have turned out to be a 90-minute contractual obligation, with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and whoever was available squinting hard into the … Read more