September 30th

Tales from the Darkside 1.16: "The Tear Collector" (1985) directed by John Drimmer
Weird episode.  Suspiria's Jessica Harper stars as a woman who is so emotionally sensitive, she cries all of the time for no particular reason.  She runs into a man on the streets of New York City who offers to help.  Though this stranger invites her to his apartment, he is a gentlemen in all respects.  There, he merely collects her tears into a beautiful swan-shaped vial, explaining that such free-flowing tears contain special properties.  We never really learn what they do, nor do we learn more about the man's mission.  He has a large room full of tear vials both new and old and seems to want to truly help his clients.  More, we can't really say.  I like the mystery, even if this was not remotely a dark episode.


Dracula (2012) directed by Dario Argento

Seeing Jessica Harper reminded me that I had a new Argento movie I hadn't watched yet.  Unlike most folks, I'm an apologist for late era Argento.  I actually like Giallo, think Mother of Tears has some good moments (especially if you forget it's related to Suspiria and Inferno), and found The Card Player to be pretty intense.  I won't deny the guy's output quality has diminished over the years, but I still think he can create some interesting films.

I may have misjudged the man.  Argento's Dracula is a truly horrible film.  It's embarrassingly bad.  It's every bit as bad as The Phantom of the Opera, Argento's other abysmal film.  My mouth was literally, in real life, hanging open during some scenes, completely bewildered at how stupid the movie could get.  Here, here is a shot from one of the scenes I could not believe was put into an otherwise serious Dracula movie:

Yes, of course Dracula turns into a giant praying mantis and bites a guy's head off.

The story is a mess.  It lifts some characters and situations from the Stoker novel, but it is only interested in the superficial aspects of the original story.  Harker disappears halfway through the story, only to reappear for a few seconds at the end to be staked.  He could be cut from the story without affecting anything at all.  The same could be said for Renfield, who does nothing important and appears to only be in the film because Dwight Frye made such an impression with the character in the 1930s.  Dracula's motivations make no sense.  The climax is weak.  Nothing works in the story.

Unforgivably, during the last 20 minutes of the film, this film suddenly decides to rip-off Coppola's version as well.  Without any build up at all, Mina is revealed to be the reincarnation of Dracula's dead wife.  Upon learning this, she instantly falls in love with the vampire.  What?  She has traveled to town to meet her husband, who has gone missing.  The last person to see him is the vampire she's allowing to gnaw on her neck.  Why?  It's the laziest storytelling I've seen in quite a while.

Even things that used to be consistently great in Argento movies are failures in this film.  Claudio Simonetti did the score and, for reasons I cannot fathom, decided the theramin was the perfect instrument to complement a supposedly serious horror film set in the 19th century.  Every time he broke out those warbly theramin sounds, I expected to see a rubber-suited monster step out of a flying saucer.  It was completely the wrong way to go, unless Argento had originally planned to make a much, much sillier picture (and considering the giant mantis, maybe he did).

The lighting was similarly a mess.  Classic Argento was a master of lighting and composition in his films.  You can watch Suspiria with the sound off and still be amazed.  In Dracula, there are rare and fleeting moments of beauty, like this shot:

The only moment of beauty in the film.

But, mostly, everything is framed without any thought and flatly lit with, what I imagine to be, giant spotlights just off screen, like this:

This scene is supposed to take place at night before the invention of electric lights.

Or this:

A too-bright, colorless, dully composed meeting of the town's bad guys.

The acting is terrible throughout.  I was looking forward to seeing Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing.  I thought he was a perfect casting choice: he's actually Dutch!  Hauer sleepwalks through the roll, seemingly completely drained of all energy.  The man doesn't even chew the scenery to give us some camp to latch onto.  Not that I blame him, considering the film's script.

Argento's daughter Asia plays Lucy.  Forget about the unnecessary nude bathing scene.  We all know the two have a weird relationship.  I was shocked at how horrible Asia's acting was.  She has the ability to do good work, but here... yeesh.  Check this out.  Awful vampire, or the worst vampire ever committed to the screen?

This film might've been the straw that broke the camel's back for me.  I was happy to give Argento the benefit of the doubt for years.  Now, I'm seriously worried he has a brain tumor or is suffering from dementia.  Dario: please, find a good giallo script, vow to not use any CGI, and give the actors some energy drinks before each scene.  You can't let this be your final film.

Watched: blu-ray from Sony.

October 13th

Brotherhood of Blood (2007) directed by Michael Roesch & Peter Scheerer
The first of 8 Ghost House Underground movies released in 2008.  Oh man, I hope this one isn't representative of the others.  Brotherhood of Blood was crafted with the same care and quality that one would typically find in a Skinemax flick.  Wretched acting, inept storytelling, a predictable twist, horrible vampire makeup and nauseating editing (do we really need 300 cuts per action scene?) come together to form an unholy stinker of a film.  Let's put it this way: the very first person thanked in the credits at the end is Uwe Boll.  'Nuff said. (3/10)




Inferno (1980) directed by Dario Argento
What a disappointing sequel to Suspiria.  Inferno retcons Helena Marcos from that prior film into being only one of three witches who somehow rule the world from New York, Rome and Freiberg, Germany. Inferno pursues the witch living in New York, the so-called Mother of Darkness.  I think my main problem with Inferno is that there's not much of a story here.  Suspiria's easily described as the story of young woman discovering evil things going on at her school.  Inferno lacks that easy kind of hook.  It's about a young man traveling to New York to investigate his sister's disappearance, but that's really only the last half of the film.  Surrounding that, there's stuff going on with the other witch in Rome -- which doesn't even belong in this film, really -- a man being ridiculously attacked by cats (and killed by a hot dog vendor!), a woman swimming in a flooded basement and people being killed for reading the wrong book.  Honestly, if the the book The Three Mothers is so dangerous to the the Three Mothers' cause, why did they wait so long to yank copies of it off the shelves?  And, how are the Three Mothers controlling the world when they're so damned easy to kill?  The first one is stabbed by a freakin' ballerina and the second one accidentally sets her own house on fire.

I was not surprised, after reading the IMDb trivia, to discover Argento was sick during the filming of this movie.  His style is severely muted in this film, even compared to Deep Red.  The murders are boring and not as graphic.  The colors aren't as intense.  There are fewer fancy shots.  Goblin isn't doing the music.  The whole movie feels like he just didn't have the energy for it. (6/10)

October 11th

Suspiria (1977) directed by Dario Argento
What were the witches doing at the dance academy?  Outside of desperately killing off anyone who knew anything about them, they weren't seen to be up to much witchery.  Perhaps witchery isn't very profitable and they need a money-making venture to support their evil magic?  But, why hang out in the academy, doing secret witch stuff in the same place where the students live, if discovery is such a huge issue?

It doesn't matter one bit.  Logic doesn't matter to this movie.  This is Argento determined to paint every frame with as much visual stimulation as possible while Goblin tries to do the same to your ears.  It almost seems like Argento took what he liked doing in his previous giallo movies -- playing with the camera, the color schemes, the violence -- and threw out all of the stuff that wasn't so fun.  There's a mystery and a killer in this film, like in a typical giallo, but they really only exist to motivate Suzy to walk down certain hallways or to generate colorful murders.  The pretense of making a serious mystery is completely gone now.  I much prefer it that way.

Jaded though I am, the murder at the beginning I found surprisingly intense.  And, after buying the latest Rue Morgue, it occurred to me that it can be see as a remake or response to the shower scene from Psycho.  It has most of the parts of the shower murder in it, but amped up a hundred times.  Instead of a shadow approaching a curtain, we see the filthy hands of a maniac reaching for the woman.  Instead merely implying the knife slicing into the victim, we're forced to see every single cut in perfect detail (including her exposed heart (!) being stabbed).  Of course, the gray tones of Hitch's black and white photography have been replaced with the screaming color of Argento's.  And, finally, instead of a woman dying and falling into a curtain, we see a woman dying , falling through a stained glass window and being hung by a wire.  Brutal. (8/10)

October 6th

Deep Red (1975) directed by Dario Argento
After a post-Four Flies non-giallo failure, Argento comes back to the genre with a force.  Actually, it seems like he went back to his first film, figured out what worked and then amped it up a little.  Deep Red is very similar to Crystal Plumage: both have foreigners witnessing a murder who feel compelled to solve the case, the foreigner becoming a target of the murderer, and the murderers turn out to be women.

Improved since Crystal Plumage is just about everything.  Argento's distinctive style -- the POVs, the weird tracking shots, the close-ups, the colors -- are even more intense now.  As is the violence.  The murders in Deep Red are brutal.  They make any of the American slasher films from the era look like My Little Pony.  And, of course, this is the first Argento movie with a score by Goblin.  Morricone is excellent, but Goblin's organ-infused rock just seems to work perfectly with these films.

My only issue with the movie is that it gets very draggy in parts. it felt like Marcus spent an hour and a half exploring the old house for clues.  And his odd girlfriend Gianna seems to disappear for about half the movie, as well.  Other than that, great stuff. (7/10)

September 30th

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) directed by Dario Argento
I thought Four Flies was just as a good as Crystal Plumage and it's probably my favorite of Argento's so-called "animal trilogy."  The stylish shots and bright colors from Crystal Plumage are back, but Argento is better at eliciting fear in this film.  One of my favorite sequences was when the killer chases Roberto's maid.  We start out in a bright park with several families playing.  Time passes, the people leave and the maid begins to get nervous.  Darkness falls and the maid is completely frightened.  Fleeing, she takes a turn into a very narrow alley, brick walls pressed against both her back and breasts as the killer peruses her.  Great stuff.

Maybe Argento goes a bit overboard with the POV shots this time, I'm not sure.  There's one POV shot of Roberto carrying a letter into his house that seems to have no point.  The POV shots of the camera going through a series of red curtains was fun, though.  And, of course, the POV shots of a masked killer (though we don't see eye holes over the camera lens) predate Black Christmas and Halloween by several years.

The final explanation for the killer's motive is a bit wonky.  Turns out Roberto's wife only married him in some overly complex plan to murder someone who looks like her father.  First, however, she wants make him crazy by tricking him into thinking he's killed a man who's been following him and then blackmailing him about this.  Sure, she's crazy, but jesus that's a weird plan.  The revelation that she's the killer isn't much of a surprise, either.  We knew by the middle of movie that the killer was someone hanging out in Roberto's house and, since the movie never really focuses on any of the friends that visit him there, there aren't really any other likely suspects.

I think I'm beginning to dig these giallos. (7/10)




Fear Itself: "New Years Day" (2008) directed by Darren Lynn Bousman
You know, it wasn't bad.  Maybe I'm just a sucker for apocalyptic zombie stories, but it felt like this episode was a notch above the others I've seen so far.  A girl wakes up early in the morning New Year's Day and hears all kinds of commotion outside.  Zombies, of course.  She fights her way to her friend's apartment while recalling the events of the previous night.  Those events she recalls are about her best friend stealing her boyfriend, which was certainly the weakest part of the episode.  It's pretty hard to care about a silly love triangle when their are zombies eating people.  Outside of this annoying subplot and frustrating shaky-cam shots, this episode had some pretty good zombie action for a network TV show and a decent twist ending.  Probably my favorite one so far.

September 28th

A masked invader in my home.

Fear Itself: "Something with Bite" (2008) directed by Ernest Dickerson
About as good as Dickerson's Masters of Horror episode, which was not really that great.  A giant animal is hit by a car and brought to a vet's office.  Naturally, this being a horror show, the giant animal is a werewolf and it bites the doc.  He starts forgetting what he does at night, has dirty feet in the morning, yadda-yadda-yadda.  It's absolutely no surprise that this was written by John Landis' son, as the episode plays out like a combination of An American Werewolf in London and Teen Wolf.  I did enjoy Wendell Pierce as the vet-wolf, though.  He handles his transformation from weak boss/father/husband to an animal-powered take-charge guy with the right level of humor.


Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) directed by Dario Argento
A step down from Crystal Plumage, I think.  It's hard to tell, though, since the presentations of the two movies were so different.  Crystal Plumage I watched on Blue Underground's excellent Blu-ray.  Netflix's DVD of Nine Tails appears to be some kind of bootleg.  It's pan-and-scanned, missing over twenty minutes of footage and the A/V quality is on par with a VHS tape.  I suspect this crappy DVD deadened the impact of the movie for me.  It also made it harder to follow, what with 20% of the movie gone.  Grrr.

I enjoyed stars James Franciscus and Karl Malden in this film.  I got a big kick out of Malden's Mr. Magoo shtick, though, at least in the cut I watched, he's almost not necessary to the story outside of the finale.  Storywise, the movie runs with the now-discredited idea that boys born with an extra Y chromosome are more prone to violence.  Guess which genetic abnormality the killer in the film has?  Poor guy just happened to be working for a lab researching this and just wants to keep his genetic test a secret.  Killing people to do so probably doesn't help his cause, but what are you gonna do?

Also: best "killed by a train" shot in movie history. (6/10)




Tales from the Darkside: "Pain Killer" (1984) directed by Armand Mastroianni
I know I'm not very far into season 1, but I'm still disappointed that there has yet not been been serious piece of horror that can match the awesome credit sequence.  This one's another deal with the devil story involving a strange doctor and a man with severe back pain.  Seems that the man's back pain is psychosomatic, caused by his nagging wife.  The doctor arranges for the wife's death, which cures the man's pain, but he wants something in return...  Due to Lou Jacobi's affable face and manner, it's a little hard to take the episode seriously.  He seems to be sort of OK with whatever happens to him.

The episode was enhanced a little bit by the strange noises coming from the garage behind my TV.  I got to do a classic horror movie-style investigation: I got out my flashlight and crept into the dark garage to investigate the strange sounds.  Rather than a maniac, though, I fortunately only discovered the masked bandit pictured above.  Damned thing pooped in my garage!

September 23rd

Night of the Demons (1988) directed by Kevin Tenney
Ahhh, horror comfort food.  Watching an '80s bodycount film, I find, is relaxing.  You kinda know what's going to happen and all of the characters act in predictable ways, but that's why it's like putting a sweater on on a chilly day.  I have no idea how I missed out on this film for all of these years; I just randomly picked it on Hulu as something to watch at work.  What a treat to accidentally discover an '80s horror gem I haven't seen.

Loved Stooge.  "Eat a bowl of fuck! I'm here to party!"  Great character.  I was completely bummed when he got his tongue bit out, because I wanted more bon mots from him.  Linnea Quigley shoves a lipstick through her nipple and into her breast.  I don't know why she did that (other than the whole demon-possession thing), but it was awesome.  There was surprisingly more gore in this movie, considering its era, than I expected.  Eyes were gouged out, arms chopped off by coffins lids, hands melted in fireplaces and razors burst out of throats.  The effects were pretty well done, though the demon faces the possessed people wear are a little generic. All this an a Bauhaus song, too.  This movie was as fun as hell and can't wait to watch it again next year. (7/10)




The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) directed by Dario Argento
He got me.  I wasn't able to guess who the killer was before the end of the movie.  Are we supposed to?  Is the mystery solvable in a giallo movie like in a Murder, She Wrote episode or Agatha Christie novel?  Or is the mystery part just supposed to be a driver of the imagery, violence and psychological explorations in these movies?  Next time I watch this, I'll have to pay attention to the attack on Monica.  Is she holding the knife when we first see it?  Or was that a new shot for the end of the film when she's revealed to be the killer?

A fine first film for Argento.  It's confidently crafted and beautifully shot and, as I've said, the mystery is a puzzler.  The colors aren't as whacked out as they'll be in Suspiria, but they're still eye-popping: the chartreuse of the boxing club jackets, the red velvet cloth the killer keeps her knives on, the shiny black of the killer's coat, the bright white of the art gallery.

Speaking of the art gallery, wow, the first scene set there was brilliant.  Sam getting trapped between panes of glass, forced to watch an unknown woman struggle with an attack and then writhe in pain, bleeding on the floor...  Argento seems to be saying: "yeah, it's my first solo directing gig, but I do know what the hell I'm doing, dammit." (7/10)

SWH: 2005 (5)

Color Me Blood Red (1965)
Some surprising gore for 1965, but otherwise dull. (5/10)

Codename: Kids Next Door: "Operation T.R.I.C.K.Y." (2004)
Non-special Cartoon Network cartoon. (5/10)

Aqua Teen Hunger Force: "Bus of the Undead" (2001)
"The D is for DraCOOla." (8/10)
[watched with C]

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
Has some unique stuff but was executed a little sloppily. (7/10)
[watched with C]

Tales from the Crypt: "And All Through the House" (1989)
Nothing like a good killer Santa story. (8/10)
[watched with C]

The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Near-perfect horror-comedy. (9/10)
[watched with C]