Demons

Screening Doom

Demons
aka Dèmoni
Italy 1985
Directed by Lamberto Bava
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Mild spoilers I guess... but it’s not that kind of film.

It’s been a while since I first saw Demons, which was one of the first Italian horror movies I saw when I was catching up on Dario Argento’s gialli (and his very occasional foray into horror with films like Suspiria, reviewed here and Inferno, reviewed here). I remember I purchased this when all the international barriers were dropped at the dawn of the ‘DVD age’, and acquiring it bundled together with the sequel along with two other Argento double features on the US Region Anchor Bay releases. Not that this film is directed by Argento but, he did produce it in a very ‘hands on’ fashion (from what I’ve been able to find out) and also co-wrote the final screenplay version. The film was partially shot in Berlin but it’s interesting that, in Germany the films were released back to front... so Demons 2 was released as Demons and it was followed by this first movie, released over there as Demons 2. Which is strange but I remember loving this one a couple of decades ago and thought I’d revisit it on the latest of Arrow’s double bill Blu Ray releases of the movie, which has even more extras on it than their previous release.

The film is actually directed by Lamberto Bava, whose father was the great Mario Bava and, while you may say that the bright, coloured stylistic lightning could be seen as an Argento signature on the production, it’s more than likely inherited from the very strong lighting schemes used by Lamberto’s father, who Argento was also heavily influenced by.

The film starts off with Claudio Simonetti’s addictive Demons theme, which also incorporates elements of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue and D Minor (if I’m not mistaken) and Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King as part of the driven synthesiser melody, playing on the soundtrack as one of the lead characters, Cheryl (Natasha Hovey), is given a couple of free cinema preview tickets after a train ride, before meeting up with her friend Cathy (Paola Cozzo). There’s a nice replica of said ‘golden ticket’ in the latest Arrow box. Incidentally, the guy in the mask who gives her the ticket is played by future director Michelle Soavi and, there are actually three masks in this film which help drive the plot. One on his face, the one in the Metropol cinema where Cheryl, Cathy and a load of other customers converge to see the new horror film preview (and which, importantly, one of the customers cuts her cheek on) and the one in the ‘movie within a movie), where one of the characters on screen also cuts their face on a mask and subsequently turns into a demon. Something which also happens to the audience member who cut her cheek, as she’s examining the cut in the bathroom. Then, we find that the scratches and bites of the demon infects other people and turns them into demons (much like the bite of a zombie in a zombie movie, which the demons in this film are just another iteration of really, except they obviously move a heck of a lot faster).

When the second victim, trying to tend to the scratches on her neck from her friend, stumbles behind the screen, a sequence is playing in the movie where a demon is trying to cut through a white sheet and, of course, victim number two promptly rips and stumbles through from the other side of the screen at the precise moment the on screen demon tears through. Panic soon ensues as the surviving customers, who aren’t able to get out of the cinema which has bizarrely walled itself up (at least, that’s the way it appears from the inside) attempt to fight off the demons and then attempt to escape the auditorium somehow. It’s a simple enough plot and the film did huge business when it was released, prompting one true sequel and a fair few others which were retitled as Demons sequels in various territories (and which were not actually connected to the Demons films in any way... although I heard very recently that the original director is currently working on some kind of reboot of this one).

And there’s lots of things worth noting about the film. Such as a whole host of posters in the cinema lobby, for films like the Giorgio Moroder recut of Metropolis (if I’m remembering it right, the timing would be around then for that version of the film), the Werner Herzog version of Nosferatu and even one of Dario Argento’s classics, Four Flies On Grey Velvet (which I reviewed here). Also in this and a fair few other scenes, we have the smartly dressed cinema usher played by none other than Nicoletta Elmi, who played the nasty little girl in Argento’s Deep Red (reviewed here) as well as child appearances in other famous gialli like A Bay Of Blood and Who Saw Her Die? The film also features one of Argento’s daughters, Fiore, in a small role (his other very young daughter, Asia, would have a lead child role in the sequel).

Another nice little joke is that there is a gang of thugs driving around outside in the city and one of them is sniffing cocaine through a straw from a Coca Cola can. So it’s definitely ‘the real thing’ but I can’t imagine Coca Cola being that happy with that particular piece of product placement.

Demons is a nice enough, entertaining film and it has some cool photography plus a certain ‘teen horror’ vibe to it. However, now I look back at it, I can’t help but feel that the photography is harmed quite a lot by the rapidity of the editing. It feels really choppy and some of the cuts back and forth are quite jarring now, it seems to me. Also, this time around, I was noticing a lot of the long shots and closer takes just weren’t matching all that well.

The choppiness isn’t helped much by the gang of thugs riding around the city who do finally make their way in to the cinema but, well, they needn’t have bothered, it seems to me. Their only real purpose in the narrrative seems to be to drive around in the car so we can cut back to them with a different pop song by the likes of Billy Idol or Motley Crue playing on the soundtrack, so the record company can make a killing on the tie in album. But the songs sound atrocious most of the time and don’t help the film. I’ve had at least two versions of the soundtrack over the years but none of the ones I own have ever featured the songs... just Claudio Simonetti’s brilliant score.

Bits of the film work but bits really don’t, such as Urbano Barberini ridiculously riding a motorbike over the cinema seat backs and somehow still staying upright (they must have built a hidden ramp to do this... which is a cheat as far as I’m concerned because there’s no way, surely, you could do this in real life) and the bizarre non-sequiter of a helicopter crashing through the roof of the cinema and providing a convenient escape route for the two surviving (up to that point) characters.

So, yeah, mixed feeling on this one. Demons is not quite the film I remember but it does have a certain something in that the gore effects are all practical effects and the photography is great. I’d still recommend it to certain ‘horror friends’ but I had less of a good time with it now than I did 20 odd years ago. It will be interesting visiting the sequel soon as I remember being very disappointed in that one from the outset... what’s the betting that I like it more than the first one now? I shall soon see, I guess.

Scored to Death 1 and 2

Scorey Movies

Scored To Death
Conversations With Some Of
Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247142

Scored To Death 2
More Conversations With Some
Of Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247234

Just a quick shout out of two books my friend Dr. Rob gifted me for both Christmas and my birthday recently. Anyone who has been reading any of my reviews with any regularity over the years has probably picked up on the fact by now that I love movie scores. I listen to them all the time and, funnily enough, the guy who gave me these two tomes is the only person I know in real life, who has the same kind of passion and dedication to them as I do although, curiously, he doesn’t listen to a lot of horror scores, it has to be said. Which is the subject of these two tremendous tomes by J. Blake Fichera...

Basically, what Fichera’s done here (and also apparently on some podcasts of the same title, which I really need to catch up with some day when time is not my enemy) is to take some key film score composers who are still with us (or were when he started out on each of these two projects) and interview them with a special emphasis, for the most part, on their contributions to the horror genre.

The first volume collects interviews with Nathan Barr, Charles Bernstein, Joseph Bishara, Simon Boswell, John Carpenter, Jay Chattaway, Fabio Frizzi, Jeff Grace, Mairizio Guarini, Tom Hajdu (of Tomandandy), Alan Howarth, Harry Manfredini, Claudio Simonetti and Christopher Young. The second volume comprises interviews with Michael Abels, Richard Band, Holly Amber Church, Charles Clouser, Robert Cobert, Disasterpeace, Koji Endo, Brad Fiedel, John Harrison, Kenji Kawai, Joseph LoDuca, John Massari, Bear McCreary, Rob, Donald Rubenstein and Craig Safan. Of those two lists, I have at least one score from the majority of them listed (some of them, many shiny discs... I’ve even been to concerts by some of the guys) so there’s a lot of familiarity with their work and styles for the most part but, even when the interview was with a composer I hadn’t experienced myself, I found the answers they gave to Fichera’s questions very interesting and I especially liked the back story provided by many of the composers about how they came to find their calling of writing music and how the film scoring side started for them.

Even certain questions which were duplicated, more or less, through various chapters, were interesting because you get to get a feel for how each different composer (of very different ages in some cases) correlate with their answers or, indeed, contradict each other as their processes differ. Some of them, for example, find the script a helpful start but many of them would rather not read the script and compose from what the director actually managed to get worked up into the rough cut. Although many composers, as I expected, hated the more common practice these days of providing a temp track with the cut (where a film would be cut to found music from other sources which, because of using these tracks to support the rough cut, brings the danger of the director loving the temp score... perhaps the most famous example of this would be Stanley Kubrick rejecting Alex North’s score for 2001 - A Space Odyssey and licencing the music on the temp instead), there are actually a couple of people in these books who welcome the inclusion of the temp track as an aid to a communication of the emotional feel of the pieces they need to compose. Of course, the worst thing I hear sometimes when I listen to a score is actually hearing the temp track kinda bleeding through into the composer's own music, because you can recognise the structure of the cue and realise straight away what track from another film was probably there in its place when the rough cut was assembled. You can often tell when a composer has been asked to imitate something fairly well known.

And of course, the composers won’t always jell with various readers. A couple of composers came across as a little naive to me, for example and another one or two came over, it seemed to me at least, at just the wrong side of pretentious. I suspect that all comes down to the baggage and life experiences a reader brings with them as much as anything actually on the printed pages here though and it really is to be expected. Sometimes they get it a little wrong too. Without naming names, for example, one composer quoted a very famous film composer saying that they weren’t, because of their period, as experimental as he and always did things with a big orchestra when in fact, the composer he was referencing was as much known for his smaller, unusual groupings of instruments and spirit of experimentation as the composer pointing the finger here (probably more so).

It’s not a surprise that my favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, comes up a lot on almost everyone’s favourites or most influential, although I wish people wouldn’t keep thinking that movies like Psycho are horror films (nor William’s Jaws, nor Shore’s Silence Of The Lambs for that matter)... it’s like one day, everybody in movie appreciation land just woke up and forgot the genre of thriller ever existed.

Overall though, these two tomes are both entertaining and illuminating and it’s great hearing about experimental instruments, the odd score I’ve not heard and the odd film I’ve not seen (I watched the phenomenal Under The Silver Lake, reviewed here and grabbed Disasterpeace’s score for said film on CD as soon as I found out about them from this book... um... yeah, actually this book is another one of those which is turning out to have an expensive afterlife affair with my wallet). It’s good that the almighty Ligeti was referenced as one of those composers who, inadvertently because it certainly wasn’t his intent, invented and influenced the vocabulary of horror film scoring and is still regarded highly by many composers today (who also list Penderecki, obviously, as an influence on the genre). I was also delighted and bemused to find that composer Kenji Kawai, who wrote the scores for the original Ringu and some of its sequels and spin offs, lists Burt Bacharach as one of his primary influences.

Probably the worst part of the second volume, for me, was when one of my absolute favourite contemporary score composers, I won’t name him here, talked about a certain common practice as to how modern film and TV composers write scores these days and his approach seemed to me to be very disheartening and disappointing. In fact, I could almost picture Herrmann and Morricone spinning in their graves about what he said here. That was a real eye opener.

All in all, though, if you are someone who has an active interest in either horror films, film scores or that wonderful place where both those things come together to make art, then Scored To Death Volumes 1 and 2 by J. Blake Fichera are definitely worth your time and money. And, of course, if you have the scores, then you can play one or two of them after reading each chapter, which is a nice thing to do of an evening, for sure. Definitely pick these two up.

Goblin - Seven Notes In Red

Steep Bread

Goblin - Seven Notes In Red
by Fabio Capuzzo
Ajna Bound ISBN: 9780972182096

Goblin - Seven Notes In Red was a very expensive book to import over from the United States and I’d just about given up trying to find a copy which didn’t have an unbelievably hefty post and packing charge. However, that’s when I found Norman Records in Leeds, who were shipping the book at a fraction of the postage and, although it admittedly took them around 6 months or more to get it, I am very grateful to them for managing to obtain this relatively rare (at least in the UK) edition of what is, pretty much, the only book about the famous band Goblin that is available and translated into the English language.

Okay so, it has to be said... grateful as I was to have finally acquired a copy, I was less than enthusiastic about the contents. I actually started reading this, admittedly weighty, tome last year and got to a point where I was so fatigued by the writing style that I actually took a break from it and returned to it this year. I don’t usually leave any book I start unfinished but, I have to admit, that’s the first time I’ve ever felt the need to take a break. So, yeah, it’s probably the most boring book on music I’ve ever had to read (so far) and that’s a shame because the band Goblin, known best for their scores for Italian genre films such as their work for Dario Argento on Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), Suspiria and, okay I’m going to call it even though they weren’t allowed to call themselves Goblin for this recording, Tenebrae.

Now, I don’t want to knock Fabio Capuzzo, the writer of this impressively thorough tome because, frankly, the amount of research that has gone into this book is incredible. Also, although I found his writing style incredibly dull, this might not actually be his fault because it was originally an Italian book and it’s clearly been translated into English. Now, I’ve had a lot of problems with things translated from Italian in the past... usually soundtrack CD liner notes... but this book doesn’t read much better than some of the slaughtered sentences one finds on a lot of those, it has to be said. There are a heck of a lot of ‘list sentences’ in the book where the author will reel off a list of things which a particular person or band has worked on and some of these, believe it or not, go on for over a page. And that’s just for a single sentence! This is coupled with the fact that the large majority of these are listing titles or films or albums or song titles in Italian... and the amount of unwieldy, long Italian names, really isn’t a good thing to get too bogged down with if you want the reader to continue the journey of the book, methinks.

Okay so, despite a writing style that makes you want to throw your hands up in despair (and drop the book and lose your place when you are doing so)... it’s actually a very, very detailed, at least in terms of facts about band line ups and collaborations, look at the band’s quite convoluted history. Goblin over the years is... very complicated. The figurehead I always have in my mind for Goblin is maestro Claudio Simonetti but he hasn’t always been part of the group, coming and going as much of the rest of the line up, which seems to have been in an almost constant fluid state since the band’s beginnings as Oliver and then Cherry Five. These personalities were constantly clashing and the friction between the band members saw a lot of moving to and from other bands in the crazy Goblin timeline. Put it this way, I thought there were now two separate versions of the band Goblin in rivalry with each other producing albums at the moment. I was wrong... there are currently four (at the time this book was updated and translated into English over a year ago) incarnations of the band out there at present... and I don’t think that includes Simonetti’s wonderful tribute band Daemonia or the ‘resurrected with a different line up’ group who have inherited the name Cherry Five. It’s confusing to say the least.

Fans of Argento and other Italian directors will find a little to get their teeth into here but there’s not so many of the kind of entertaining anecdotes about the directors or working on the scores to these things as you might expect. This book is more or less focused just on the music and each Goblin album mentioned includes a track by track critical take of the contents, followed by critical responses to any bonus tracks or remasters added by various record companies (more often than not, Cinevox) over the years. There’s also a fair but of criticism for Cinevox actually, which I wasn’t expecting since I’ve always thought they were quite good with getting Goblin albums out there. These track by track critiques can also be quite wearing, however... one wonders how many times one can read about a ‘slicing guitar’ before one gives up on the text for a while (well, not long as it turned out in my case... I had a long rest between starting and finishing this tome).

However, if you are heavily into Goblin, you will almost certainly find this an invaluable reference work and it also has a full, long and very detailed discography at the back of the book where every conceivable release from these band members is faithfully highlighted. The design of the book is fine with a lovely cover of various versions of the logos and a fair amount of pictures used to slice up sections of the text at various points on the interior of the book. I did catch one sentence where the leading had split the lines by being much greater but one case of a forgotten ‘soft return’ is not that big in the scheme of things and so this element of the book, at least, is well in order. As for the title... why is it that people who write about a specific subsection of Italian cinema seem to title their work with something which is very specifically from a completely different work. For example, Tim Lucas’ truly excellent tome on Mario Bava is called All The Colours Of The Dark... except All The Colours Of The Dark was a famous giallo directed by Sergio Martino, not Mario Bava. Similarly, I can only assume the title of this book, Seven Notes In Red, is a satire of the Lucio Fulci film title Seven Notes in Noir (or Seven Notes In Black aka The Psychic)... which didn’t have a soundtrack by Goblin at all so... you know... go figure.

At the end of the day, Goblin - Seven Notes In Red is pretty much a book for die hard Goblin fans only but, being as it’s the only game in town as far as book bound information about this group goes, you might want to keep this one handy on the shelf until any other works on the band come along.

Phenomena

Doo Doooo, Be Doo Doo

Phenomena
Italy 1985 Directed by Dario Argento
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

“I chose Switzerland as it's somewhere nothing much happens.”
Dario Argento

Back in the misty days known as the ‘Dawn of DVD’, a new chapter of European cinema of all shapes and sizes was opened up to me. I’d always been a big watcher of movies at home but VHS tapes were not releasing enough stuff in the correct aspect ratio and I refused, and still do to this day, to watch things in anything other than the ratio it was meant for... except in very rare cases where the original prints are no longer in existence and have never been made commercially available. Not only that... loads of the films available over here in the UK were shamefully censored by the BBFC, who even to this day are somehow allowed to be perpetrators of one of the most inexcusable crimes against filmanity ever... censorship.

So my ‘video junkie’ habit kinda slowed down to a ‘not quite stand still’ after a while. Then, however, DVDs were upon us and with them came the relative ease of ‘multiregion players’. You could literally walk into your local TESCO, buy a player and then look up the appropriate remote control button combination hack for the player you bought to make it ‘region free’. It’s not quite so easy with Blu Ray these days but it’s still not that hard to get a proper multizone player... thank goodness. Otherwise cineastes in Britain would be suffering even more due to the greed of the companies who want to jack up the prices to foreign countries. Not to mention the censorship and ‘time of release’ issues. Back in the day, you could buy the US edition of the DVD months ahead of the UK theatrical release for cheaper than the price of a cinema ticket and then, if you liked it, wait for it to come out on general release in the cinema in the UK and watch it like that too.

Long story short... not only were most of the DVDs finally being put out in the correct aspect ratio but you could get away from the drag of Victorian era censorship practices by just buying the uncut version from whatever country that was putting them out. There were even a load of shops selling the foreign discs in London, if you were worried about making transactions on the internet, at that time (pretty much all gone now).

And so, with the easy bypassing of censorship laws coupled with the quality transfer of the print (in most cases... don’t get me started on companies like ArtsMagic) and the correct frame size, a whole new vein of cinematic treasure was opened up to me which I’d previously ignored because I knew certain director’s films would be snipped by the censors in the UK editions (and still are, in many cases). So, of course, one of the first director’s films I went to take a proper look at... along with the likes of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin and Mario Bava... was the great Dario Argento. After years of admiring the soundtrack ads on the back of American magazines like Starlog.

This film, Phenomena, which has just come out in a ‘most but not quite all of the bells and whistles’ limited edition from Arrow, was the first Argento that, on my first watch, left me a little disappointed. I’d recently seen The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Deep Red (reviewed here), Suspiria, Tenebre (reviewed here) and Inferno (films like Four Flies On Grey Velvet were still not readily available on DVD in any other way than poor bootlegs still, at that time... now I have something like six different prints of that one) so I was being really spoiled with quality Argento. Phenomena, while still pretty good, has quite a different feel, in some ways, to those classic Argento films I just mentioned.

A fair amount of people seem to somehow, class this as a horror picture but, although there’s a strong supernatural presence in the film, this isn’t something the villain(s) of the piece, such as they are, can access and it really is another one of Argento’s trademark pictures... the Italian giallo. The supernatural element is similarly discounted in favour of true giallo leanings in such films as his aforementioned Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) and the modern giallo Tulpa (aka Perdizioni Mortali - reviewed here). When I first watched this one years ago (on the old Anchor Bay Region 1 double bill DVD with Argento’s Inferno) I remember thinking that, of all the Argento films I’d managed to see by that point, it was a bit of a dud. However, I’ve began to warm up to the unconventional feeling generated by the movie (it’s not really a whodunnit style giallo  in that there aren’t a gazillion suspects and one of the main killers is not introduced properly into the text of this film until he is more or less revealed) and since then, I’ve seen a fewArgento movies which, believe me, are far worse than this one (Phantom Of The Opera, anybody?). Although, it has to be said, I’m much more tolerant of his later stuff than a lot of his fan base seem to be these days. So yeah, watching this in the new Blu Ray transfer from Arrow was a pretty good experience (and also had its downsides... which I’ll get to in a while).

Set in Switzerland, the film follows a teenage girl played by Jennifer Connolly (called Jennifer) who has a psychic link with insects and an affliction where she sleepwalks (sometimes with an insect’s eyes’ view of a killing being committed). She befriends a wheelchair bound, Scottish forensic entomologist played by the late, great Donald Pleasance who, naturally, has a trained chimpanzee to help him get stuff done. Actually, the chimpanzee is used at one point as almost Argento’s only concession to the whodunnit style of the traditional giallo in this, when he uses the creature holding a razor blade early on in the film to put the idea in the viewers mind that, just maybe, the monkey is going to turn out to be the killer!

Monkey magic aside, though, he film is actually full of those beautiful compositions and swooping camera shots which are a bit of an Argento trademark but some viewers (myself included, first time around... about 17 years ago) may miss them because of the muted tones employed... cold whites, grays and blues... but not used as starkly contrasting against strong blacks or textures as those kinds of tones are in the director’s amazing movie Tenebrae (aka Tenebre), where they absolutely pop. Actually, there is one moment which stands in stark contrast to the rest of the movie towards the end of the film, where we cut to a shot of an airport, which is all the acidic, primary colours reminiscent of Argento’s more usual palette (which is a colour palette Bavaesque in style, to say the least). This scene is completely at odds with the visual tone of the rest of the movie, as far as I'm concerned. If you want to find out more about the whites, greys and blues and the way they are manifested then read Rachael Nisbet’s excellent essay on the fashions of the film which is the absolute highlight of the printed booklet in this limited edition set (and check out her blog too if you like excellent writing on Italian exploitation cinema... just click here).

Regardless of the visual style, the film is, however, a visual feast of strong composition and the movement through those compositions.

For example, there’s a beautiful shot through an elliptical glass window taking up approximately the left hand two thirds of a shot with Jennifer making a phone call in one half of the window which is artifically split in half by the back of the booth behind her, framing two other characters in the near distance in the right hand half of the split outside the booth. Then the camera pans slightly right as these two go to what was, until now, the last third of the frame and stops with the dead, right hand half of the window split in the now remaining first third of the screen. We cut to a quick insert of Jennifer in the booth reacting to their comments before we cut back to that same, original master shot. Then Jennifer leaves via that half split of the window and the other two girls leave as the camera follows Jennifer into the next part of the shot... as the window goes out of frame. Beautiful stuff.

Another interesting moment comes after a bus drops Jeniffer off while she's busy being the film’s Nancy Drew character. The camera movements directly after the bus unloads Jennifer kind of swoop into framing her at the same kind of speed and movement it used with the filming of the departing bus and everything kind of follows through in the same kind of motion. It’s moments like this which make Argento one of the great directors, as far as I’m concerned.

I also noticed, this time around, a kind of visual obsession (probably in this one film only but I’ll be on the lookout for it more now) of downward movement as objects are dropped, falling to the bottom of the screen. Argento does this at least three times here... once in the opening of the first murder of a girl played by his own daughter, Fiore Argento, when we get a beautiful detail shot of a pair of scissors dropping and sticking into the floor, accompanied by a nice audible clamor. These scissors will soon find themselves embedded in the girls hand. The second use of this strange dropping motif is of the girl’s head itself. As she is pushed back through a window, a little reminiscent of violence found in both Argento’s Suspiria and Tenebrae, we cut to the other side of the window above a waterfall as Fiore is decapitated by the glass and the camera follows the course of her head as it drops into the swirling, white waters below.

A third ‘drop’ shot takes place during a suspense scene in the last fifth of the movie, where Jennifer is trying to disentangle herself from an intravenous drip and leave a room before her guarding nurse wakes up and catches her. The nurse has fallen asleep while she is knitting and at one point, while Jennifer is making her escape, the kitting needle drops to the floor and we fear the sound of it may wake the nurse. However, instead of clanging to the ground, the needle drops perfectly into a waiting ball of wool in a shot very reminiscent, at least to these eyes, of the shot much earlier in the film of the dropping scissors. So I need to be revisiting all his work again now to see if he used this kind of visual echo in any of his other films (like I needed an excuse to revisit Argento with all these nice Blu Ray editions coming out).

One of the things about the movie which is kinda all over the place is the music. There were a lot of different composers working on this one, including Goblin’s former head honcho Claudio Simonetti and British composer Simon Boswell. The music is mostly pretty fantastic and a lot of it is included in a new, remastered CD presentation which has a few more tracks than previous editions, as a fourth disc in this Arrow limited edition set (alas, it still doesn’t contain Bill Wyman’s lovely, atmospheric track The Valley on the CD but, well, you can’t have everything I guess). Simonetti’s stuff is absolutely brilliant but, like a lot of the music in the film, quite often seems inappropriate to the imagery. There are some nice tranquil shots going on in a movie comprising, mostly, a laid back sense of pacing but, for the most part, the music is speeding along and doing its own thing for a lot of the time. It seems to me it works much more successfully as a stand alone listen but I know a lot of both Italian horror movies and gialli were being scored in this manner then so, you know, sign of the times and all that. It doesn’t deter from the beautiful visuals too much and it’s still a great score (I’ll admit, the remastered CD was the primary reason I pre-ordered this set).

The film marks the last shoot that Argento and Daria Nicolodi (mother of Asia Argento) worked on while they were still together as a couple (although not the last film they both worked on). Here we have Nicolodi killed in a hideous manner and also Argento’s other daughter Fiore meets an equally terrible fate. Daria is killed in an even more spectacular manner in the director’s excellent movie Opera, two years later and, one wonders whether that says anything about Argento’s character and attitude to his partner at the time. Probably not but I did find the interviews with him on the Arrow documentary a lot scarier and less benign than the usual ones.

It’s a pretty good documentary too... where I learned things such as the front view of a scene set in a car was shot in Italy while Daria Nicolodi and Jennifer Connelly’s part of the same scene involving a bee in the back of the car was shot in Switzerland. And I honesty would probably never had noticed it if it hadn’t been for this documentary but, now that I know it, I can see that the background whizzing by past the windows of the car doesn’t really match when the camera is pointing at either the front or back. So... don’t think I knew that before so much appreciation there to Arrow as they have commissioned quite a good documentary from the guys at www.freakorama.org. It’s interesting that nobody mentions the fact that Jennifer Connelly got the top of her finger bitten off by the chimpanzee and it had to be reattached in hospital, though. A bite is mentioned but it's somewhat downplayed here. However, there are a few things about this top notch Blu Ray that left me a little disappointed, to be honest.

First up, there’s the case of the elusive footage from the Japanese laserdisc version of the movie. The film is presented three times in this set... one in the International cut, one in the horrible US release Creepers cut and the obvious winner here, a hybrid version which is the longest to date and includes the extra footage from the Italian cut. However, the footage from the Japanese laserdisc, where Jennifer apparently levitates above the other children, doesn’t seem to be present. What’s more, nobody seems to be saying anything about it either. I asked Arrow directly a few times on Twitter if they were going to include the scene in their new cut but they seemed reluctant to even reply to me on this issue. What’s more, although the documentary doesn’t mention this footage, there’s plainly a sequence of archival footage in this very same extra which shows Argento and his crew shooting that missing scene. Talk about winding up the fans! It’s a shame that, if this footage couldn’t be found in something the producers of this disc thought salvageable for a high quality Blu Ray presentation, even as an extra, they didn’t at least acknowledge its existence. Oh well.

Also, for a package with an abundance of extras on every disc, why couldn’t they get the clearance for some of the old Anchor Bay bonuses to be included too? The Bill Wyman video of his musical contribution to the film, The Valley, is not on this one (and neither, as I mentioned above, is it on the CD soundtrack) and it’s a shame because, although it’s a bit of a slow burn the very first time you hear it, it’s actually quite a nice bit of scoring.

Another thing which annoyed me intensely was the fact that this disc is region locked and, not only region locked but it doesn’t have a screen to tell you about it. Now my Blu Ray player often defaults back to Zone A after it’s been on stand by for a while and so, when I put the first disc in, the machine tried to read it and then it just went black. It took me a few tries because Arrow didn’t see fit to include an apology screen for this horrible practice, before I realised I had to reset my machine to Zone B to be able to play it rather than send the thing back to Arrow as a faulty disc. I got there in the end but, honestly, for a company who are such a boon the UK home video market like Arrow are at the moment, you would expect at least the courtesy of a screen clarifying that you are trying to play it on the wrong region setting. This is something that companies like, for example, Shameless, do really well with.

Other than those few of points though... it’s well done again to Arrow for giving us a great package and especially for including the remastered score on CD. This is probably the absolute best version you could possibly get of Phenomena anywhere in the world, as far as I know (to date). If you are a fan of Argento’s work you will seriously want to make sure you have this new Blu Ray version of the film and, if you aren’t, make sure that if this is the first time you see this film that this is the version you watch. It's a movie which has grown on me over the years and it’s certainly a film like no other Argento’s done... quite unique in its atmosphere and flawless in its visual execution, at the very least. Watching this movie reminds me that I’d really like to retire to Switzerland some day. Who knows? One day that might even come to pass.

Tenebre (aka Tenebrae)

Giallo Dolly

Tenebre (aka Tenebrae)
Italy 1982 Directed by Dario Argento
Synapse Dual Blu Ray DVD Zone A/Region 1 Steelbook

1982 was a really great year for movies. We got Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan (reviewed here), John Milius’ original Conan The Barbarian, John Carpenter’s The Thing adaptation and, my personal all-time favourite, Blade Runner (reviewed here). We also got what I think is one of director Dario Argento’s absolutely best movies... Tenebre (aka Tenebrae).

It’s been a while since I’ve watched the movie but it’s one of the two Argento films I saw back to back on TV a couple of decades ago and, notably, Tenebrae was still stupidly censored in our country. I’ll get to the ridiculousness of that particular cut a little later on but what it did, of course, was made me pursue all of Argento’s films on DVD, with the release of various uncut, good quality releases in their correct aspect ratios available in different countries and easily playable once I was armed with a low priced multi-region player from my local Tesco (the fact that you could also buy the original Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials on US DVD at the time was another big incentive to get myself multi-regioned up).

Now, with the appearance of Blu Ray, I can’t really re-buy all the 3000 plus movies I have on DVD again... especially when there are so many other previously unreleased movies still being unearthed around the globe. Argento, however, is one of the directors whose films I would at least be happy to upgrade ten or more of. So I leapt at the chance when I heard of this new US Synapse three disc dual format version of one of my favourites... primarily because the third disc is a remastered edition of Goblin’s classic score for the movie. That being said, they’re not allowed to be credited as Goblin on this film because the line up had slightly changed and there were some legal issues, I believe... so, to this day, the music is still credited to Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli. It’s one of their greatest, however, and if you want to know what a “disco slasher” sounds like... this score is it. I’ll always remember those old vinyl soundtrack adverts on the back of Starlog magazine as a kid in the 1980s, with the lurid Tenebre cover of the girl’s head hanging down and the broken glass panel going through the back of her neck. It pretty much became an iconic image... once seen, never forgotten.

The film starts off with the fictional thriller novel of the title being read from (by Argento himself, if you choose to watch it with the Italian language track on) and the book is then thrown on a fire to be devoured by flames as Goblin’s (sorry... pseudo Goblin’s) score kicks in. We then follow a shoplifter played by Ania Pieroni, who had made an unforgettable appearance in a cameo as the third mother (The Mother Of Tears) in Argento’s previous film, the Suspiria sequel Inferno. Here she is pursued by her killer, represented voyeuristically with a following camera eye which is, possibly, overused as a visual prop in this movie but, frankly, is so stylishly done that I really don’t mind it here. There’s some absolutely beautiful moments in this early sequence with the camera stalking her with Argento’s keen eye watching her from behind a rack of goods in a shop, stopping and starting the movement in time as she is framed perfectly at every stop by a gap in the display shelf packaging. It’s just these kinds of sequences which keep me interested in Argento and the giallo format in general.

After getting herself into various bits of trouble with antagonistic forces of one kind or another, Pieroni is attacked by the black gloved killer, force fed pages of the fictional book Tenebrae (written by the lead character, Peter Neal) and then slashed to death with a straight razor. When we finally meet Peter Neal, played by Anthony Franciosa, who is visiting Italy to do a tour for his book, he is already being included in the investigation of this and other similar murders. Heading up the investigation is Detective Germani, played by the extraordinary Spaghetti Western star Giuliano Gemma and, in typical giallo fashion, he checks back in with the main protagonist, in this case Neal, who starts to get involved with his own investigation. As you would expect from this genre, the bodies start piling up and it’s not long before everyone you expected to be the killer is gradually murdered, leaving us with few people left in the cast who the antagonist could be.

Tenebre is somewhat overshadowed, I think, by the Bava drenched colours of the two Argento films that came before this one (Suspiria and Inferno) but I think it’s a much maligned movie in that respect, in that it’s easily one of the greatest of the gialli ever committed to celluloid. Contrary to the title of the piece, the film is all bright light with shiny, reflective surfaces and architectural details. Although the big city landscapes are quite blatantly modernistic, I think it’s often forgotten, or mostly completely overlooked, that the film was intended to be set in the near future. But whether people take that away from this or not... one thing for sure is that it’s one of the most hyper-real and typically outstanding giallo movies that Argento ever made.

For example, on a visual level, similar to the sequence I described with the tracking camera in the shop, Argento uses a lot of vertical lines to split up and separate different people into specific, multi-layered spaces... challenging or creating perspective as he captures his performers doing their thing. There’s a brilliant shot, for example, towards the end of the movie with Anthony Franciosa and Argento’s early muse Daria Nicolodi (the mother of their daughter, the actress and director Asia Argento) standing back to back, with Nicolodi in the foreground and Franciosa a little further away, where the two planes are artificially split by the vertical of the middle of the frame of a set of windows they are standing in front of. Absolutely incredible stuff.

Another celebrated shot is the one which starts off outside the window of a lady's apartment looking in, travels in close up around the building a bit, enters her lover’s room upstairs through another window, comes back out again and goes “around the houses”, so to speak, before ending up back down in the original woman’s room. This is a prelude to a brilliant double murder, committed against the two lesbian lovers, with some breathtaking shots including a razor blade slicing a big hole in a t-shirt to reveal the face of the girl who is in the process of putting it on... and the celebrated ‘head through the glass panel’ shot I mentioned from the old vinyl album cover earlier on. And there’s an exceptional shot of a straight razor striking the side of a lightbulb to shatter and extinguish it which really does stick in your mind long after the film is over.

There's a truly great visual flourish at the end of the movie which certainly shows Argento's influence on his contemporaries and the rich visual legacy the next generation of film-makers have in their arsenal. A character in the centre of the shot bends down to inspect a possible clue and the killer is revealed behind him taking up the exact same visual space. When the character stands up again, his head replaces the head of the kiler in the shot exactly, once more. I think you'll find that this exact same shot set up is recreated by Brian De Palma in, I think, Raising Cain, if my memory is working properly.  So clearly an influential director... of that there can be no doubt.

In typical genre fashion, any number of characters are built up as possibly being the murderer but, like all good gialli, your suspicions are shifted constantly the more you watch (and, as I said before, the more your suspects end up as just another gory death for the killer’s roving, camera eye). However, Argento also does something quite clever in terms of the final solution of the puzzle of just who the killer is in this one but... I really don’t want to spoil the chance that you might figure it out for yourself, if you’ve never seen this movie before. But, yeah, it’s a typical example of the genre in that Argento manages to subtly, and often not so subtly, set up pretty much almost everyone in the film to possibly be the killer.

It’s also a film where Argento gets to poke fun at his critics too, which is kinda nice. He took a lot of flack in the 70s and 80s for being a misogynistic director but the arguments for that have always seemed quite false to me. For instance, there are almost as many men being killed off in imaginatively gory ways in his films as their are women. Also, giallo movies are abundant with both female killers and strong women who survive to the end of the movie as the ‘final girl’ trope of many horror movies. I don’t think you can call that particularly disempowering or hateful, to be honest.

This also has, as far as I’m concerned, the best script of any of Argento’s movies in terms of credible dialogue and Argento uses it quite well in one particular line, where he argues exactly in opposition to the myth that somebody who makes violent art is a violent person. The line comes from the Peter Neal character in the movie, whose books are being used by the killer as a justification for his own actions... at least in the first half of the film. Frankly, we are all living in a real life world where a notorious serial killer was inspired in his killing by the George Lucas movie Star Wars Episode VI - Return Of The Jedi... so any argument that giallo or horror films are a catalyst due to their content dies with that reality, as far as I’m concerned. The line itself, spoken to the police inspector is “If you find someone killed with a Smith and Wesson revolver, do you go and interview the president of Smith and Wesson?” This is a fair point, I think, and definitely raises the question of whether the manufacturer, or the artist in this analogy, should be held responsible for the way people choose to respond or react to their product or art.

There’s also a particularly comical moment in this one where John Saxon, who has hilariously demonstrated in an earlier scene that his new hat doesn’t fall off, finally gets caught up in a particular incident where his headwear heads to the floor and this involves the death of one of the male characters (I’m being cagey here about the identity of that character because I really don’t want to give anything away to people who haven’t seen this movie yet). But these kinds of little details and clues in the script are what help make Tenebre one of the absolutely greatest and credible of the films made in the giallo genre and for me. It stands the test of time with other classic Argento gialli such as Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso, reviewed here), The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Four Flies On Grey Velvet.

The film is presented uncut and the UK version is also uncut, nowadays. This main censored scene in previous UK versions featured the actress Veronica Lario, who went on to notoriously marry Silvio Berlusconi at one point in her life. Here, she is waiting with a gun in her hand when an axe comes through the window and severs her arm halfway up, above the wrist. She then gets up and paints the clinically white walls red with the arterial spray of her blood. The comical thing about some of the previous, censored versions, is that the BBFC in our country (for example) decided that the actual axe going down into the arm, which is relatively tame compared to the aftermath, was excised from prints but... the truly ostentatious goriness of the moments following, were always left completely in tact. How insane is that? Just another odd thing to show that censors were really bizarre when it came to doing what they saw as their job.

The disc itself sports a lovely transfer of the film and includes several extras including a feature length documentary on the history of the screen giallo, with maybe just a little over emphasis on Argento’s huge contribution towards popularising the format himself. The documentary includes comments from a number of genre experts (one of whom I wish wasn’t included in this film as an expert of this particular subject, for reasons I won’t go into here) and it’s great to see such brilliant testimony from such cool people as Alan Jones, Maitland McDonagh, Kim Newman and a variety of writers and directors of these kinds of films too. I do wish, though, that people would stop holding up Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up as an example of a giallo film in order to somehow legitimise the genre to people unfamiliar with it, to be honest. I really can’t see how Blow Up, wonderful as it is, could ever be considered a giallo, bearing in mind how many of the genres tropes and intents it fails to demonstrate. Also, the music that plays throughout the majority of the documentary is also from the main feature presented here. Not particularly surprising, given the expense of music rights, but still something which might have been better served with a decent mixture of Morricone and Cipriani mixed in with the Goblin, methinks. But this is a minor criticism of a great little US Blu Ray set of this film.

If you’ve never seen Tenebre and you are a fan of the genre then this is a near perfect giallo and, also, an absolutely brilliant jumping on point if you’ve never seen one of these movies before. An incredibly beautiful film to look at with traditionally clunky but ‘still much more credible dialogue than most gialli and with some just jaw droppingly stunning set pieces in places. Definitely something everyone into Italian film should see at some point. No wonder Dario Argento is still thought, rightly so, as the master of his craft.

Profondo Rosso (Deep Red)

Flats N’ Sharps

Profondo Rosso (Deep Red)
Italy 1973
Directed by Dario Argento
Special 40th Anniversary screening at the 
Barbican with live score accompaniment by Goblin

So this was yet another revisit to what was, for me, the third of Dario Argento’s movies that I saw all those years ago, after first seeing Suspiria and Tenebrae. Not one I was due to look at again anytime soon... not because it’s not a great movie (it’s fantastic) but because there are so many films I haven’t seen yet by so many people which get first priority. However, with the promise of a reformed Goblin providing their score live (they left the George Gaslini material on the soundtrack of the print they were using) headed up by the one and only Claudio Simonetti on keyboards, this was a screening I really didn’t want to miss out on.

Profondo Rosso is Argento’s fifth film as a director, although he did provide a few screenplays for films before his early classics and is perhaps notable for working with Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Donatti on the story for Leone’s epic Once Upon A Time In The West, seven years before he directed this film. It’s also the fourth giallo he made after taking a break from his animal trilogy of gialli (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Cat O’ Nine Tails and Four Flies On Grey Velvet) to work on Le Cinque Giornate. After the relative failure of that film at the box office, when compared to his phenomenally successful trilogy, Profondo Rosso was seen as very much a welcome return to the genre for the man who, right from the start of his directorial career, had become known as “the Italian Hitchcock”. And, of course, it was also another smash hit.

The film stars British actor David Hemmings and Dario’s then lover (and mother to his daughter, the famous Asia Argento) Daria Nicolodi as, respectively, the witness of a horrific murder and a reporter who wants to nail the story. The film starts off, after an off camera but bloody murder set to a lullaby style theme written by George Gaslini, with the presence of a supernatural element in the guise of a lady who becomes the film’s second victim (if you count that opening murder sequence). She is a psychic in a stage demonstration of her mysterious powers who picks up the presence of a killer and draws attention to the fact that there is a murderer in the theatre. This supernatural/psychic element of the story, along with talk of a house where ghosts dwell later in the movie, is really just a tool for Argento to get things moving. When the psychic lady drops out of the movie in a violent sequence near the start of the film, that unearthly element also drops out and so this is not, in fact, a horror movie like Argento’s next film, Suspiria, would be. Profondo Rosso stays well inside giallo territory throughout the running time and it’s important, I feel, not to get the two genres confused (as many do, for some reason).

The film continues as an investigation of the murder by David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi, as more bodies pile up and Hemmings wrestles with a mysterious puzzle piece in his mind of something he’s missing from when he rushed into the flat of the murdered woman at the start, who the killer left bloodily hanging out her smashed window. This, of course, ties it in thematically to Argento’s directorial debut The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, in that both films have a central protagonist who was both an eye witness to the opening key ‘event’ and who has to try and unlock the one thing that his brain is hiding from him to solve the mystery. Now Argento is quite bold in both The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Profondo Rosso because he actually does show the audience exactly what those protagonists see in those specific scenes. Now in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, I had no troubles at all in seeing the answer to the end of the movie within the first five minutes of the film while the character, played in that film by Tony Musante, saw it happening. In that film the clue comes in the way in which the eye witness and the audience perceive what they are seeing. This didn’t spoil the movie for me, it’s too well put together, but I did see the ending coming a mile off in that one.

Similarly, in Profondo Rosso we are shown the identity of the murderer in exactly the same way that David Hemmings is shown the information but, like him and almost guaranteed on the first time you watch the movie, you miss it because you perceive it as something else completely. Which is great because when the killer is finally revealed, and we suddenly wonder if we’ve been misled, we are fortunate enough now to be living in the age of the home video system and you can rewind to the original scene, once the trick of it has been revealed at the film’s denouement, and prove to yourself that Argento didn’t cheat his audience. Of course, back when this was released, this wasn’t possible as it pre-dated home video systems and I wonder just how much of the film’s large box office take was due to repeat performance attendances as people went back to the cinema to make sure the footage revealed at the end was indeed in the opening reel. It’s a great trick for bumping up box office, I suspect.

Another similarity between the two films is that the killer is, just before the final scenes, revealed to be a different character than who it actually is... and that someone is a) covering up for the real killer and b) violently killed while the main characters still believe that person is the culprit. When the real killer is revealed, there is also another link between the two films but... I really don’t want to tell you what that is because, if you’ve never seen either movie, then I really don’t want to spoil the pleasure you’ll get from the unravelling of the thread leading to the conclusion of each film.

Another commonality between the movies, which seems to be almost a stylistic trait for Argento at this point in time, is the fascination with the pondering and highlighting of flat surfaces. In The Bird With The Crystal Plumage we have the two glass doors which trap Tony Musante between them and hold him a captive audience for the first ‘incident’ and we have the constant pondering of the painting by an artist which gives a clue to the killer’s identity, and which Musante keeps coming back to. In Profondo Rosso we have the paintings on the walls again, we have the surface of the wall with the child’s drawing underneath the dried paint... not to mention the wall that Hemmings spends a lot of time bashing through to find the skeleton of the very first murder victim from the opening of the movie. We also have the scene where a lady who has pretty much had her face boiled off (possibly in tribute to the fate of the character played by Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat but in a more graphically revealing sequence) writes her name in the condensation on the side of a bath as she lays dying and another character’s realisation of the possible location of a message on the flat, reflective surface as he turns on the hot taps to reveal what has been written. So, yeah, there seems to be a prominent fixation on flat surfaces in certain early works in Argento’s oeuvre, it seems to me.

The film is one of the all time great giallo movies of Italian cinema of the period and it shares all the trademarks that you would expect from one of these. The gialli tended to have bad acting, bad scripts, beautiful photography and shot design that takes your breath away, fantastic editing, wonderful camera movement through the sets and absolutely killer music. Profondo Rosso is no different although the screenplay is a little better than one might expect. The acting by various cast members is pretty good too although, even with people of the calibre of David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi, there are moments when the acting seems a little over the top. However, I have a new theory about why that is, actually... and it’s all due to Luigi Cozzi’s later science fiction movie Star Crash...

In Star Crash (reviewed here) we have a groovy movie with one of my favourite actresses, Caroline Munro, playing the central character Stella Star. Now there’s a bit fairly early on in the movie where she is having a conversation with her companion in her star ship and she suddenly, in the final cut, yells the words “Go for hyperspace” in, frankly, a way that seems seriously too enthusiastic to fit in the scene at that point. It draws attention to itself in an unnecessary way and I always thought... well that’s a pretty bad slip up from Caroline on this one. However, as I found out years later... it wasn’t her fault at all, it’s the fault of the edit. To explain, when one of the last DVDs came out of Star Crash... I think it’s the beautiful one put out by Shout Factory in the US... there are a load of deleted scenes and also extended versions of scenes which were pared down in the final cut and the scene I just described is one of those included in a much longer version than it’s presented in the final movie. In the full version of the scene, there is a lot more dialogue between the two characters and Munro naturally reaches that point in her performance where her line “Go for hyperspace” makes much more sense in the way in which she delivers it. However, when Luigi Cozzi cut a load of that dialogue out in the finished version, he kills her performance in that scene and the line seems almost nonsensical in the context of the pared down cut. So, in a similar spirit, I think it’s quite possible that Argento might have done something similar with some of the scenes between Hemmings and Nicolodi (who have great chemistry together) in this one, and might be the root cause of the excess one might detect in certain sections of this movie (and seeing the longer cut with the Italian sections in helps with that too... but that’s another story and one of many I can’t take up space on in this review). But, obviously, that’s just a theory.

All the good stuff you expect from this genre niche is present and correct, though. The mise en scene is bloody fantastic... as well as being fantastically bloody in one or two places, and the music, by both George Gaslini and Goblin, is phenomenal, of course. Now I don’t want to go into too much detail about why both Gaslini and Goblin ended up supplying music for this film... but I do seem to remember that it was Nicolodi who introduced Argento to Goblin and the rest, as they say, is Italian genre cinema history. I think Goblin had about three progressive rock albums out before working on Profondo Rosso, at least one of them under a different band name (Cherry Five) but this was their first go at writing and performing the score to a movie. It was, of course, phenomenally successful for them and they would do many more films for Argento and for other directors in their career.

I’ll spare you the explanations of possibly why there are so many incarnations of the band over the years and why it was important for me that the version of the band playing at the Barbican was headed up by the composer Claudio Simonetti on keyboards, but I will say that the sound that Goblin produced for this movie was hugely influential to giallo and, even more so, to horror films... both in their native Italy and in the US actually. For example, American horror maestro John Carpenter had made two amazing films, both with scores by him, before his breakout film Halloween (which were Dark Star and Assault On Precinct 13... both much more well known movies these days, of course). However, if you listen to his score for Halloween, and even certain sections of the music for his fantastic movie The Fog, and then go back and listen to what Goblin did for Profondo Rosso, it’s almost impossible to imagine the scores for those specific Carpenter movies existing without Simonetti’s group making popular the concept of playing through a sequence with a hard, progressive rock guitar or synthesiser line. For his previous three gialli, Argento had worked with the master of Italian film scoring Ennio Morricone, which gave him three jazzy and sometimes atonal, absolutely beautiful scores (Argento would return to Morricone for his awful version of Phantom Of The Opera and his brilliant movie The Stendhal Syndrome years later). After Goblin scored Profondo Rosso, the heavy beat fuelled, driven school of scoring became the norm for a while and I’m sure many composers were asked to produce Goblin-like scores after the impact of both this and Suspiria.

That being said, the live accompaniment at this special screening of Profondo Rosso felt a bit flat for the first hour. Not because of anything wrong with what Goblin were doing, they were brilliant. However, what I and probably a lot of audience members didn’t necessarily realise is that the movie is quite loosely ‘spotted’ during the first half. There are some small snatches of score at regular intervals but nothing really to get your teeth into for too long during the first half and then, presumably because the Barbican venue wanted to sell loads of beers in the intermission, they foolishly put a 20 minute interval halfway through the film. Which, to be honest, kind of killed things a bit, for a while. The lady I was with for the screening, who was almost as familiar, if not more so, with the film as I was, actually considered going home in the interval because she was so disappointed. However, I persuaded her to stay (silver tongued devil that I am) and I’m glad I did because the next hour of the movie has a lot more music in it and has some key and truly toe tapping cues which Goblin performed amazingly well. I found the way the drummer managed to keep hitting the symbols, Mickey Mousing David Hemming’s attacks on the wall as his hammer bashed through each time, absolutely mesmerising. This was good stuff.

And then, after the movie had finished, came the piece de resistance. Goblin then played through long versions of some of their classic Argento tunes in a kind of mini concert encore to the movie, starting off with two that Argento produced but didn’t direct himself which were Demoni (Demons) and Zombi (Dawn Of The Dead... and not the track that is usually covered from that film but one of the longer, main action cues). They then followed these up with full renditions of the themes from Suspiria, Phenomena and Tenebrae and, frankly, it was a real treat. I didnt get home until midnight that night but I had a really good time at the concert.

So, final verdict in terms of this mini review... yeah, if you’re not familiar with either Dario Argento or the giallo genre at all then Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red) is definitely one of the great ones to start with. Like most of these kinds of movies, especially Argento’s, it’s a tour de force of moving camera taking you to extraordinary shots and places and, for all the flaws that you often find in the genre, it’s an absolutely brilliant experience... more so on a big screen, of course. So definitely take a look at this one if you’ve never seen it and certainly, if you get the opportunity, catch Goblin’s 40th Anniversary tour of the movie with live musical accompaniment. It’s good to still see some of these guys going after all these years and, seriously, they rock!

Dario Argento's DRACULA

Tooth High To A Grasshopper

Dario Argento's Dracula
2012 USA
Directed by Dario Argento
Sony Italian BluRay Region A,B & C 

Dario Argento is a bit of a legend of a movie director these days... and rightly so, having stolen Mario Bava’s thunder somewhat when, in 1969, he repopularised (and how) the Italian giallo thriller single handedly with the first of many spectacular gialli which he made over the decades, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. The director is mostly a practitioner of this form of cinema although, since people often find themselves confused between movies depicting serial killers and movies depicting monsters, he is often misconceived as being primarily a director of horror films.

It’s true, of course, that Argento has directed both films and TV episodes which fall into the horror genre, including one of his most famous films, Suspiria. However, his horror direction is only a small body of work compared to his giallo output and should never, I believe, be considered his primary voice... although he is obviously inspired by both a sense of the gothic (instilled in him by some of the writers he used to read when he was ill in bed as a child, if memory serves) and the famous cinematic forays of the past which encapsulated that very atmosphere as their primary focus (with offerings from Universal, RKO, Hammer and the like).

I first got into Argento at the dawn of DVDs when, after about a year or two of the machines being on the market, I finally bit the bullet and bought a player primarily because I found out you could get American DVDs of the Flash Gordon serials. This was important stuff. Of course, owning a multi-region DVD player, like pretty much anybody who is serious about film in my country would, opened up a wealth of possibilities and suddenly more controversial directors who were either not allowed to have films released in my country or were heavily censored over here (which amounts to the same thing... who wants to see a censored version of a movie?) were now instantly accessible to people in the UK properly for the first time. Which is why, I think, genres such as the giallo, the spaghetti western, sexploitaiton, blaxploitation, nunsploitation and pretty much every other kind of interesting genre around have found a big resurgence in popularity... people now have relatively easy access to these kinds of movies.

Argento, it has to be said, has been producing films which have been less than popular with his fans of recent years, although I have no problem with most of them... my one caveat being his awful version of The Phantom Of The Opera (which isn’t a recent one, as it happens). I remember being in a packed Fright Fest screening of his previous film Giallo and the audience, in which there were undoubtedly a lot of Argento fans, was howling with collective laughter at some of the execution of the movie. Now I saw no real problem with, most, of it... but I’ve always thought of Argento as primarily a visual and aural stylist, which makes sense seeing as he comes from a background of churning out very successful gialli. These films are not about acting or their ludicrous scripts... they’re about visual style and great music. So I really don’t have the same kinds of issues as some people do with his later stuff (like The Card Player, for example, which I loved).

His version of Dracula, of course, is obviously a horror story but, although it has a certain sense of a thread of adaptation running through it, it changes things around sufficiently from both Stoker’s original novel and stage play versions (and, of course, the later stage adaptations which Universal studios culled their original version from) to be different enough for even the most jaded fans to find something fresh in the story. I suspect the location budget also had something to do with that (it’s all set in one village) but even so, there are some interesting things going on here. Carfax Abbey is mentioned as Carfax Sanitorium, for example, which was formerly run by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Dr. Seward is completely written out).

Does this make for a good movie then?

Well... yes and no. I think it’s all down to how much certain outrageous ingredients spoil the main course for you. There was one point about a quarter of an hour before the end, for example, when I started laughing out loud.

Now then, the acting by a lot of the cast is not up to scratch. You expect that from an Argento movie and it shouldn’t, in itself, be a problem if you are already used to this director’s work. However, surprisingly, there is also some pretty good acting in this one too. The director’s daughter, Asia Argento, can always be relied on to give a great performance (and on the strength of the one movie I saw that she directed, I suspect she might even be a better director than her old man... the talent runs in the family) but we also have Thomas Kretschmann giving a really great performance as Dracula and Rutger Hauer making a more than competent Van Helsing... although Dracula’s nemesis doesn’t actually turn up until the last part of the film.

Added to this you have Dario Argento’s trademark visual splendour and the shot design and camera motion through those shots is absolutely superb in this one. The striking use of Bavaesque colour is again pushed to the fore and the outrageously saturated pools of red and yellow light sharing the same frame and the greener than green forest in the moonlight are all things of beauty. If nothing else... this film is quite spectacular. There are also a few good doses of female nudity too, which is unusual for this director and, I think, is probably more on show here (albeit briefly) than all of his other movies combined. That, of course, adds its own kind of spectacle into the proceedings... especially lit and shot as well as it is.

That being said... there’s quite a lot of bad stuff here too. One of which is Argento’s fascination with style over substance. I remember, decades ago, Argento was asked in a documentary if, when faced with the insertion of a cool and beautiful shot in his movie as opposed to a shot which would be more appropriate and make total sense within a story, which he would choose. Argento said he would always take the cool shot over logic any day. Dracula is full of “the cool shot” which is a trademark of Argento, to be sure, including one where you see the course of a bullet as it travels from the base of a man’s jaw and up and out through the top of his head... not as audacious as the notorious “bullet scene” from Argento’s movie Opera but certainly an echo throughout the years. However, you also have one scene near the end, the one I started laughing at, where the movie totally “jumps-the-shark” as it were, in modern pop culture parlance...

Dracula, it seems, can transform himself into any kind of beast he wants. One would think he would be fairly subtle in his choice perhaps but, no, he decides to go and kidnap Mina Harker transformed as a giant sized, bright green CGI grasshopper which, while certainly giving the movie a sudden and fierce injection of 1950s B-movie atmosphere... seemed perhaps a fair bit inappropriate given the sombre tone of the rest of the movie and its leanings towards the gothic. This was a fairly unfortunate choice, it has to be said, but taken out of context it looks pretty cool, at least.

But there’s more.

The various “myths” of the vampire are neither adhered to faithfully nor ignored. One or the other or the popular tactic of establishing which of the various trappings are being used would have been a way to go. Set up your ground rules for the audience first. Here, it’s contradictory and, well... all over the shop to be honest. One minute, Jonathan Harker (very much tapping into the pretty boy Keanu Reeves vibe of Coppola’s version of the story) is bitten and is instantly allergic to deadly sunlight... the next we are introduced to the “Renfield” character stand-in, who is also obviously a vampire, but who has no problem with strolling around in sunlight at all. Similarly, Lucy (beautifully played by Asia) is committing her undead crimes at night and sleeping in her tomb by day (just as her master Dracula is sleeping in his protective coffin) but why then is it, when the count himself turns into another creature, he’s perfectly fine running around in the sunlight? None of this makes much sense and neither does the fact that a bitten Jonathan Harker needs to feel the sharp end of Van Helsing’s stake but the equally vamped up Mina Harker doesn’t. None of it makes much sense... which is a big shame, to be honest.

Also, there is a dreadful reliance on CGI blood effects for the trademark Argento gore in this movie and, to me, this just looks awful when compared to a plain, in camera, practical effect. Maybe Argento’s resorted to this finally because of something to do with the 3D process... I don’t know. However, it looks very fake and unsatisfying and I hope he doesn’t continue to go down this route.

However, I let none of this detract from my enjoyment of the film, to be sure. And there are some nice nods both to the original Stoker novel (Kretschmann crawling up the outside of the castle wall) and to Todd Browning’s 1931 version, with both a large spider’s web and the full Lugosi treatment as Kretschmann digs in to the well worn “children of the night" dialogue. And, of course, Rutger Hauer’s impromtu holy cross assembly will bring back fond memories of Peter Cushing’s more succesful attempt in the old Hammer version. So some nice stuff too, including the music...

After the problems Argento had convincing the studio to retain his regularly composer, and once figurehead of Goblin, Claudio Simonetti on the previous project (the final score to Giallo was by Marco Werba), Simonetti has returned to Argento’s side with a brilliant, theremin tinged score which is quite remarkable in tone, although one of the sub-themes did remind me a little of the theme which the group Toto allegedly pilfered for their score for Dune, namely Ronald Stein’s score for Roger Corman’s Haunted Palace. That minor gripe aside though, I’ve been enjoying the score for a year or so now on CD and am pleased to finally be able to hear it in the context of the movie for which it was written. This includes the end title song which is performed by Simonetti’s current progressive rock group Daemonia.

Dario Argento’s Dracula, when all is said and done, is a film which I am more than happy to have in my possession and will definitely get a few spins as the years go by. Perhaps it may be a bit anticlimactic for some to realise that such a legendary director tackling such a legendary story is not without its problems but I, for one, am happy with the result (grasshopper aside) and, to be honest, it’s a lot better than I’d hoped it would be after the feedback I got from some. It looks, like usual for this country, I won’t get a chance to see it in any kind of cinema release over here in its 3D version but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed.

Oh yeah. About the 3D. If you are buying the Italian Blu Ray of the film (which is shot and presented in the English language anyway, by the way) then you will be shelling out a lot more for the 3D version of the movie than the 2D version, if you have a 3D player. Not to worry though... as the stall holder who I bought this from pointed out to me, the 3D print of the movie is also on the 2D disc, they’ve just repackaged the same disc for the more expensive version to get some extra cash. So if you buy the Blu Ray standard edition, at least on the version I have, you’ll get both versions. Watch out for those large, heaving bosoms in the 3D version though! You might get a wallop.