Shinwa

It's impossible to talk about this movie without mentioning the ending, so I've included one spoiler-free review for people who intend to see it. Do not read the second review if you are one of the latter category.

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

The less you know going into this movie, the better, but generally it deals with the complicated relationship between two adolescent sisters, one strikingly attractive and undergoing an initiation into adult sexuality via a persuasive and manipulative law student (but I repeat myself), the other overweight and cynical, observing her sister's experiences with alternating envy and contempt. It's pretty turgid going for the most part, and its treatment of sex leaves one a little queasy, but contains some memorable characterization and at least one very startling twist in the narrative that make it ultimately worthwhile. Rest assured you will be wide awake when you leave the theater.



SPOILERS GALORE

I was really very tired of this movie by the time the final sequence came around. I found the dialogue overwritten (and overabundant) and the characters undeveloped, and the whole thing dragged itself along at a maddeningly slow pace. The actors are brave, and they do the best they can under Breillat's incessantly voyeuristic gaze which, if nothing else, evoke the carnality and emotional maelstrom of adolescent sexuality quite well (despite the aforementioned leaden dialogue), but in such a clinical and dispassionate way that one feels bad for the actors not because of the explicit nudity and sexuality, but because the inertness of the presentation sucks up all of their emotions and makes you feel as if you're watching the characters through a cage. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's very uncomfortable to sit through.

THEN comes the final sequence, presaged only by a vaguely ominous long highway driving sequence that carries on for several minutes, perhaps so that the audience will sympathize with the characters and nod off. It has previously been established that the mother is not used to driving, and the trucks bearing down on her at top speed suggest that a car accident is in the cards. Instead, they pull of the highway, and the audience relaxes. And then comes as shocking an explosion of violence as I can recall seeing in any movie.

In the context of all that comes before, it feels like a cheat, and my first impression was to say, "What a gimmicky cop-out." But it can't help but stay with one, and I am hard pressed to find a film that reproduces as effectively the shocking suddenness of death, which often DOES come out of nowhere as it does here. It's a shattering, nightmarish and profoundly disturbing scene, which trivializes all that comes before it (although much of it seemed pretty trivial to begin with). The coda vitiates the impact somewhat (it's implausible and considering what came before, leaves a bad taste in one's mouth), but without this final sequence I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone I know. Breillat pulls it off with a flourish, but between her calculatedly callous treatment of the characters, her tedious dialogue and the fact that as effective as the ending is, it is still a gimmick, I have some reservations in extending more than modest praise.

This film made me miss Roger Corman movies. Utterly absurd and action-packed, you can see the machinery start to creak heavily about halfway through, but there are enough clever moments and quirky acting bits (my favorite is Keenan Wynn, as the Babbling Codger) to make this a completely enjoyable ride. The genetically engineered piranha which are released into a mountain river and terrorize the waters (they're cross-bred with salmon, apparently, and intend to spawn downstream) are much more frightening when they are not seen, as in the creepy opening skinny-dipping "Jaws homage", so once you start actually seeing them dashing towards their victims the broad humor aspect of the movie is played up, thanks in large part to Paul Bartel as the Authoritarian Summer Camp Director, Bradford Dillman as the Grizzled Mountain Man, Kevin McCarthy as the Good Mad Scientist, and, of course, Barbara Steele as the Evil Mad Scientist, whose huge, shifty eyes are a punchline in and of themselves.

The broad humor doesn't really sit well with a genuinely unpleasant attack on a bunching of swimming children or its bloody aftermath, and the following attack on a resort is anticlimactic (practically identical to the attack on the children), if in line with the film's politics (military experiment backlashes first against the nature lovers, then the children of the middle class, and finally the middle class itself, while the right-wing authoritarian and capitalist structure prevents the tragedy from being averted). But it's all done with palpable enthusiasm, and should certain push the right buttons in those of us who dread feeling our legs brush against foreign objects while underwater, especially when those foreign objects have little razor-sharp teeth and make whirring noises. Highlights include the scene where a piranha frenzy dismantles a raft and the climactic heroics from Dillman, whose character has supernatural lung capacity.

Well, you know it's going to be hokey. The slimiest, crawliest and scaliest of the marshland fauna revolt against Ray Milland, who apparently thinks he's doing one of Faulkner's lesser known characters, and his money-drunk clan, in retaliation for a long history of pollution and casual animal abuse. Fortunately, rugged salt-of-the-earth good sense is present in the form of manly, ecologically aware Sam Elliott, and after an hour and a half of not-so-Steadicam closeups of frogs and snakes, the greener of the house's guests manage to evade the critters while the decadent class gets what's coming to it. Unfortunately, everything is a little too random and way too cinematographically shoddy, and occasional squirm-inducing moments (an attack by alligators is particularly effective) do not disguise the fact that movie goes on for way too long, and works visibly to do so. If you want good acting, run.

I've always counted Brian De Palma movies as guilty pleasures, and none of his films lives up to that designation as much as DTK, a labored but gorgeous contribution to the straight-razor fetish school of cinema. It certainly isn't his best film (Carrie, for example, is far better in virtually every respect), and for those who want to seek out its flaws it wears them proudly on its sleeve, but I've always had a fondness for this one; I even have a fondness for the moments I wince at bad dialogue or cloyingly elaborate camera setups.

But to respond truthfully to this movie, I have to admit something: I'm not terribly fond of Hitchcock movies. Yes, they're technically masterful, but so often they're icy, mechanical and coy. If I were to go to a hypothetical video store and have to choose between DTK and Vertigo which one I want to see, I'll pick the ripoff; like a Dario Argento movie, you know that you're in the presence of somebody who lets their reach exceed their grasp, and it's kind of refreshing not to have to see so much control. And speaking of Argento, it's not unrealistic to believe that De Palma saw a couple of his movies before conceiving this one. I think it's safe to say that once one accepts that De Palma's plots and technique are not entirely unique, it is still possible to appreciate them on their own merits, and dismissing them out of hand as Hitchcock ripoffs is a copout.

DTK is fittingly dressed up. All of the main characters are bourgeois, outwardly civilized and fashionable, which plays off of the inherent sleaziness of the plot mechanics and visual excesses. Of course, there's also De Palma's trademark callousness (after her murder, Dickinson is more or less totally forgotten, except for a few fleeting references...in particular, the character of her son seems notably non-distraught) and a great deal of narrative contortions that do not stand up very well to inspection. But De Palma's self-indulgence is a harmless, fun kind of self-indulgence, a genre film fan making genre films for genre film fans. It's there in the long, LONG, but hilarious museum pursuit scene; in the subway chase (OK, how did the killer know she'd be there? Never mind.); in the curiously effective split-screen and split-split-screen shots which are almost unique to De Palma; in Nancy Allen's disarmingly unconflicted prostitute; in those yes-all-right-we-get-it-now shots of Michael Caine looking into mirrors; in the climactic shower stalking (that nurse must have had really big feet). And it looks bloody terrific the whole way through.

There's something scary about the thought of a deranged soldier coming after you, and that effective image gives this standard slasher film what kick it has. Nobody remembers this movie for its plot, which is just as well, because it has My Bloody Valentine's plot. It also has strong similarities to Friday the 13th, Part 2, especially in the final scenes (all three films came out the same year, so it's hard to tell who's ripping off who). What stands out in this film is a set of some of the most graphic murder scenes in the relatively short-lived slasher subgenre, every one of them giving long, lingering gazes at some of professional bloodletter Tom Savini's most piquant handiwork. Furthermore, they are protracted (at least in the uncut version) to extremely uncomfortable lengths, and brutal enough that it's almost masochistic to watch them.

Joseph Zito must have liked making movies about human exterminators; he would go on to make Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter and Missing in Action, and he knows how to make an adequate amount of suspense out of the setups. The movie goes to the well too many times with Final Girl Vicky Dawson fumbling with locks (every door in the building - and there are a lot - appears to be locked from the outside), but the sequence in the pool is genuinely unsettling and the finale (if one ignores the resemblance to every other slasher film's finale) is competently staged.

However, there is nothing resembling pace to be found (there is a lot of dead space, primarily due to the fact that they make the hero and heroine aware of the prowler's presence way too early in the movie). Those who look for this movie would probably be more interested in the carnage, and the murder scenes have a real charge to them. It's strong stuff; one scene in particular - a nude girl is run through with a pitchfork - has a very disturbing sense of misogyny and sexual violence to it. Not surprisingly, most of the longer, more drawn out murder sequences are directed against the female characters, who are portrayed as promiscuous and hedonistic (in an amusingly blatant early scene, one girl talks about her plans to have sex with her boyfriend and another girl comes in and asks for rolling papers - consecutively breaking the sex and drug laws of the genre within about five seconds and marking themselves for execution), set up to be reprimanded by the representation of socially acceptable male violence. The movie sets itself up as a mystery, but it's so obvious who the killer is that the idea of its being a mystery is almost insulting, and many extremely meaningless red herrings are introduced to pad out the already slim running time. Some scenes come out of nowhere and stop the movie dead (a motel clerk stalling the hero's attempts to notify the sheriff of the murder spree - this is played for laughs), while a buildup to the uncovering of a body in the graveyard becomes almost hysterically anticlimactic.

Basically, one's enjoyment of this movie is proportional to the amount of enjoyment one gets from watching relatively realistic murder scenes. Those with strong stomachs will find a proficient, if lazily plotted, old dark house slasher setup with extra Karo syrup.

The Gallic pseudo-sophistication runs pretty thick through this wafer-thin comedy, featuring Miou-Miou as a woman who decides to make a profession out of reading aloud to people. What transpires, of course, is that her sensuality and life-affirming giddiness enter into and transform the texts for her clients. It all has a certain well-measured charm, even if the whimsical wordplay gets overbearing quite often, and ultimately it loses this charm when it is decided that the character Marie is maintaining her dignity when refusing to read aloud pornographic material by de Sade for a geriatric judge and his friends, while finding no moral objection in allowing herself to be seduced by another client. At this point, the movie, which had been discreet in its treatment of sexuality, suddenly whacks the viewer in the face with closeups of the actress's naked crotch, and the whole exercise starts appearing more conspicuously misogynist: ultimately one gets the sense that neither the character nor the actress is in on the joke. This is not aided by the gratingly winsome yet flaccid performance by Miou-Miou, who does not thrive in this kind of role - there is really nothing to play here. There is really nothing to watch, either.

That most basic and archetypal setting for the horror film, the forest primeval, gets milked for every branch and twig in this culty slasher item. The ostensible setup is a New Yawk summer camp, where a startling counselor-to-kid ratio is visible, but one of whose charges unwittingly summons a hulking axe murderer to the premises. This allows for a series of increasingly longer and longer scenes where counselors go wandering through the forest. The almost ritualistic, blue-lit, vaguely dreamlike scenes in the woods feature virtually every character, doing exactly the same thing, with the gory payoff greater and greater each time. The odd thing is that it's somewhat successful; this film has much, much longer stalking scenes than most, and manages to sustain a great amount of suspense.

This film has, of course, two notably laughable scenes: a clumsily inserted soft-core hot tub interlude (which, much like the stalking scenes, goes on for an eternity) and a scene in which a victim hides in a refrigerator. Essentially, it's a clumsy frame for the oneiric forest sequences. In a similar vein, Sleepaway Camp and The Burning explored the terrority, tying the threat represented by the forest more closely to the emergence of adolescent sexuality, but did not log nearly as much screen time in the heart of the woods. Here, the characters are adults, although the specter of sexuality lingers heavily over the few perfunctory characterization scenes (in Sleepaway Camp, the murder scenes only serve to facilitate the deep sexual pathology at its center), only to cast the adult characters in the childlike position of innocent in the woods. If one is prone to identification with characters in this sort of film, it can be something of a test of endurance (Blair Witch Project understood that perfectly) to strand the characters in the forest, with a concrete menace aware to us but not to them, and simply let them wander. In the end, the result is the same (in this film, all of the main characters die), with the counselors hanging as trophies on the wall of the monster's forest cabin.

Madman does not have many of the "touches" that make slasher films distinct; more intense that most, but cut as close to the barebones plot as conceivable (there's really no time for anything else...the forest scenes are that long), it nevertheless has developed something of a reputation. Nowhere near as effective as Sleepaway Camp in the slasher-in-the-woods category, but it certainly does what it came to do.

Repellent, if surprisingly professionally made, and marketed slightly misleadingly as a slasher film (it certainly has more than its share of graphic violence, however), this oddity was apparently a labor of love for Joe Spinell, who wrote it and appears in every scene. However, Spinell's rather overwrought attempt at a serious portrait of a disturbed man is offset by the fetishistic, almost pornographic, display of nasty violence in excruciatingly realistic detail. Easy to dismiss (and this film has inspired visceral negative reactions in many viewers), but it's a capably made exercise, despite its questionable content.

Bava's last feature film is an incoherent but sporadically effective psychological study which lifts the back story of the haunted villa from Profondo Rosso (along with that movie's lead actress) and throws creepy, if random, manifestations of a malevolent force living in the house at its increasingly hysterical protagonist. It outstays its welcome, to be truthful, as although Bava's films have never been too heavy in the way of plot, they mostly have enough visual flair and inherent pathology to compensate, while this one flails along with a bare minimum of plot until its gory climax; all dressed up with sinister atmosphere, and ultimately nowhere to go. Daria Nicolodi is, as usual, very good, but by the end is given little to do besides scream.

Unimaginative slab of sexploitation horror has nubile (if slightly pudgy here) Linda Hayden as a disturbed woman who comes to work as secretary for pretentious writer Udo Kier. After a slow buildup, peppered with repeated scenes of Hayden masturbating, she gets to work on knocking off the supporting cast. Hayden's charisma goes a long way to making the film watchable, but it's all a very dry exercise, with little effort in either suspense or characterization making the whole thing seem rather pointless, and the final twist revelation making all of the antics that came before somewhat questionable in motivation. In a supporting role, Fiona Richmond occasionally wears clothes.

A thoughtful character study with supernatural tinges, misleading marketed as a straightforward horror film due to Romero's reputation, this film raises more questions than it can answer but is involving despite its leisurely pace. Certainly a more honest confrontation of suburban anomie than the likes of American Beauty, anyway, it boasts a well-modulated lead performance from Jan White, as well as arresting dream sequences and an overall well-sustained quiet tension throughout.

Envelope-pushing shock horror boasts a lot of energy at first, but ultimately burns itself out into repetitive gore effects and nonsensical plotting, to say nothing of utterly pointless and offensive rape sequences. This is a shame, because it's impressively filmed, if openly derivative, most of the time, and generates a genuine sense of claustrophobia along with isolated effective visuals. However, once the routine massacre of the supporting cast, with the aid of disturbing Sadean devices in the nooks and crannies of an eerily filmed deserted compound, is accomplished, fairly early on, the film then degenerates into monotonous chase scenes and cringing from lead actress Miyuki Ono, before finally lapsing into frenetic and stultifying camera movement and dreary clichés. It's easy to see why this film would be so popular, but it's ultimately a rather dubious venture.

Gorgeously filmed, totally insane Gothic pastiche from Riccardo Freda holds its marvelously overwrought tone through to the fiery climax. At the center of it is Barbara Steele's Cynthia, the neurotic second wife of the eponymous Dr. Hichcock, who, from the second she arrives in her husband's creaky and apparently haunted mansion, is picturesquely threatened by the hostile maid, by a mysterious figure in white, purported to be the maid's sister, and by her own increasingly mad husband, who was already predisposed to pseudo-necrophilia, but who really starts to tip over the brink as he begins to believe his first wife has come back from the grave. It's all both lavish and ludicrous, and profits from Steele's incredible screen presence and the weight of its own images. Spectacular use of color, as well. Essential viewing.

How best to summarize the fact that your film is a ripoff both of Dawn of the Dead (Zombi in Italy) and Cannibal Holocaust? Calling it Zombi Holocaust is a good start. Unpretentious and sincerely stupid spaghetti vomit bag movie is for the most part professionally made; you don't expect good acting, and you certainly don't get it. What you do get is gore, which, although more realistic than much in this genre, is handled relatively inoffensively (in comparison with über-pretentious namesake Cannibal Holocaust), and all of which is couched in such a ridiculous and random plot that it's difficult to take any of it seriously.

Take, for example, the heroine, a true tour de force of constant nudity by Alessandra delli Colli. Refreshingly nubile for a joint degree anthropologist/medical doctor, who just happens to have grown up in the southeast Asian islands where the cannibals who just happen to reappear at the very hospital where she works and who go after the ceremonial knife which she just happens to have because she just happens to study the same cannibal group who just happen to have shown up at the hospital in the first place. That, and she has to be told by another anthropologist (the one who they're just waiting to be given the Nobel Prize. You know, the coveted Nobel Prize in Anthropology...) that the island of the cannibals (in the same island group where she spent her childhood, mind you) bears the name of the obscure cannibal spirit, or something. Not that delli Colli conveys anything remotely resembling intelligence anywhere in the movie. But she doesn't have to.

And then there's the plot. It's never really established _why_ the group of people go to find the cannibals, other than to act as human bait. Or why the mad doctor (hate to include a spoiler here) uses the Blofeldian device of slowly sedating the hero with a scalpel within arm's reach. Or why none of the countless eviscerated people seem to have ribs.

Anyway, this movie is so resolutely cheesy that it goes down a lot better than most of its contemporaries in either the zombie or cannibal genres (especially the latter). By no means essential viewing, but pretty harmless garbage.

Strained and humorless (especially in light of its rather dubious psychology), but well-paced and comfortably lurid, this genteel body count movie highlights the unusually hypnotic presence of Angharad Rees as a young woman periodically possessed by Jack the Ripper, thus allowing for some nasty gore effects amidst the Edwardian propriety. It's all pretty standard stuff for Hammer, but is handled with a good deal of visual elan, even if the central relationship, between psychoanalyst Porter and Rees, drives the narrative without ever being satisfactorily explained.

Although a product of a different era to be sure, it's hard to view this film without addressing its particular brand of racism; adapted from a stage play and largely an excuse for some fairly convincing makeup for Chaney, it addresses the results of Western intrusion in China with an eye towards the perceived barbarity of (invented) Chinese custom, while at the same time reveling in floridly orientalist dialogue and presentation. Some striking visual moments aside, it alternately mocks, idealizes and patronizes (primarily the latter) the Chinese characters before ultimately exculpating the British interlopers in a disturbing climax. Still largely involving, though.

Thoughtful if unsubtle epic follow-up to Night of the Living Dead was one of THE influential movies of the late 70's; pity, then, that the people it influenced paid more attention to the amped-up gore than to the sense of contained hysteria that makes what should be tough going (there are basically three scenes in this movie: zombies attack people, people attack zombies, people stand around talking) a uniquely involving and provocative self-analysis of the zombie film.

The symbolism is, well, not delicate. Just in case we missed it the first time, the trope that the mall attracts the zombies "because it was an important place to them" is repeated for our rumination. But the overall sustained atmosphere, inside and outside of the banal environment of the shopping mall, is by far the film's salient contribution; even when there is no obvious action onscreen, there is the threat of an attack to come, and the clock is clearly ticking on the four protagonists during their idyll. Moreover, it takes the conspicuously familiar and catapults it into an apocalyptic situation, creating a powerful sense of displacement.

The violence, which is primarily what draws people to or repels them from this movie, comes on strong, but quickly becomes monotonous (as it is, the vast majority of the violence in the movie is inflicted against the zombies rather than by them, though is none the less repulsive for that); the scariest part of the movie is how plausible it makes the concept of total disintegration of what we perceive as civilization. The soundtrack, highlighting pulsing, insistent synthesizer chords, contributes much to the onscreen tension, which the action choreography is exemplary. An unlikely masterpiece.

A charming foray into the world of castration anxiety, Sisters is at once highly inventive and highly derivative, and after an odd start takes off in some disturbing directions. It's not the most masterfully paced movie, but it truly comes alive in its setpieces, which are handled with a great deal of visual flair.

Margot Kidder gives a serviceable performance as the mysterious model with a Dark Secret; Jennifer Salt comes across a lot better, as hers is a trickier part to play; and William Finley has a field day as Kidder's ex-husband, who is alternately disturbed and fascinated by his ex-wife's psychosis. But the true star of the movie is De Palma, nestling cozily within the confines of the genre to produce a more or less unique picture; audaciously switching to split-screen technique to increase tension (he would go back to this well again), and providing the film's reason for being in the form of a hallucinatory recreation of the traumatic separation of the titular sisters. Furthermore, as mentioned before, I've rarely ever seen a movie confronting male castration anxiety so directly; if it's all a little Freudian-in-primary-colors, it still has an impact entirely of its own.

John Carpenter's canny little exploitation film suffers some from its reputation; nothing makes a rickety shocker made on the cheap less potent than the complicated analysis of its characters' motivations.

As a shock machine, it leaves no stone unturned; it comes across as an enthusiastic low-budget film whose maker had just seen a couple of Dario Argento movies (the comparison in some scenes, such as the eerily lit driving-in-the-rain sequence early on, is striking). Many of what would be determined as the slasher film's worst excesses are here, as in, for example the topless-girl-getting-strangled scene, but the main problems with the movie are its intrusive soundtrack (telegraphs more than its share of scares) and the fact that Carpenter goes to the well too many times with scenes where a group of people have a conversation, and a cut reveals the killer observing them, stripping this ploy of its effect early on. The Steadicam work was influential but somewhat amateurish. However, effective use of sets and lighting work wonders for increasing the on-screen tension.

It isn't one of the great horror films of the 70's (its lack of anything but the crudest and most forced subtext makes it seem small-time in comparison to more challenging movies), but it's great for its genre, even if its phenomenal success helped doom the horror film.

Roman Polanski's garishly satirical adaptation of Ira Levin's potboiler still works as effectively as a discomforting thriller as it does as a surrealist re-presentation of Faust in New York, with Cassavetes (a weak performance) trading his wife's womb for success and upward mobility. Farrow is the frail, white-bread owner of the uterus in question, and after getting the appalling visual joke of Rosemary conversing with the Pope while being raped by the devil out of the way, settles in on her gradual consumption by the living symbol of the corruption of her marriage by the values of a complacent and crotchety bunch of geriatric satanists, primarily in the form of Ruth Gordon's crassly intrusive Minnie.

Farrow, looking painfully small in the middle of the grotesques, suffers evocatively throughout the protacted running time, as her sense of displacement becomes brutally clear, while Levin's less delicate theme (the wife as pawn in the attempts of a man to achieve prestige, later to be reintroduced to similarly devastating effect in The Stepford Wives) becomes subordinated to Polanski's chilling representation of alienation and the inherently corrupt nature of traditional values. The final joke -- the eponymous baby -- is one of the most devastatingly delivered in cinema.

Tobe Hooper followed up the exhausting Texas Chain Saw Massacre with this oddity, a cartoonish, basically plotless picture about a character who can only be described as a nutcase knocking off the guests who stay in his hilariously squalid swampland motel. Which, of course, has gotten a lot more mileage as plots go than it really deserves. But between Hooper's direction, Neville Brand's inspired raving as the scythe-waving Judd, and appearances by a motley crew of exploitation film vets, this is an often hysterically funny horror comedy (successful horror comedies are not something you see very often) which takes the humorous aspects of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre plot to the extreme, while still managing to be intense and suspenseful when it has to be. The finale gets a little bit out of control, even for a Hooper movie, but it's a fun ride while it lasts.

Romero's shoddy protest picture dates pretty badly, and suffers severely from comparison with his other films. A few effective moments, but on the whole a rather strained (and awfully heavy-handed) mess...it doesn't work without characters to sympathize with, and the lead characters are utter blanks, while the other characters are totally anonymous (see? Because of the dehumanization of the...well, you get the point). So instead it's standard early 70's "soldiers are pigs" ranting, with briefs spots of graphic violence. Best forgotten.

After showing with Profondo Rosso and Suspiria how much logic matters in his visualization of a theme, Argento apparently annoyed a number of people by junking it altogether with perhaps the movie in his filmography that provokes the most divided reactions from viewers. If Suspiria followed a fairy tale structure, Inferno's structure is more that of a fever dream...it has no logic at all, except for that of a nightmare.

Essentially, this movie is a series of scenes, and not much more. One does not lead sensibly into another in the way we commonly associate with a "plot". But what scenes...the accentuation of the visual in this film is so profound and thorough that it in some ways represents the culmination of what Argento was trying to do with the visuals in Suspiria, although without that film's more audience-pleasing aspects and accessibility. The sheer number of arresting visuals crammed into the running time is staggering.

And the pace? Problematic. There isn't any cohesive central character (Mark, the ostensible lead, literally doesn't do ANYTHING until the finale). It's mostly on the order of "introduce a character, kill him/her a scene later". Moreover, the first hour of the film is so packed with intense and beautifully realized scenes that it has no choice but to peter out before it hits the finish line.

Even a number of the film's staunchest defenders find the climax a bit of a letdown. The fact that the whole "woman turns into Death" scene was devised by Mario Bava, though, makes perfect sense; it just doesn't fit as well into a film that is otherwise so idiosyncratically Argento's.

That said, though, it is definitely a film that improves with repeated viewing. The score takes a little getting used to (especially when it breaks into mock-Omen choral rumblings), but most of all one has to adjust to the fact that film isn't SUPPOSED to make sense. And anticipate that Leigh McCloskey's performance will not be involving (while Daria Nicolodi, Alida Valli and Irene Miracle will make unfortunately only brief appearances). And it makes an excellent double feature with Suspiria.

Definitely heady stuff from a filmmaker whose prior experience with psychological subtext has been problematic at best, this film highlights a fearless performance by Asia Argento. The obvious "Argento touches" (i.e., pills rattling down an esophagus, the bullet through a woman's face) stick out like a sore thumb, as they act not in service to the story but rather to reference what is expected from Argento; after the catastrophe of Trauma (Argento imitating a hack filmmaker imitating Argento), this film goes in directions that the director's previous films had only hinted at, and doesn't lead to rely on trademarks for a crutch.

The pace of the film is extremely well-handled in the first half, although it seems to lose track in the second half exactly where the narrative should be tightening up. But given Argento's lack of experience with more plot-driven material, this is in some measure to be expected. Cinematography, sets, art direction are all exemplary.

The acting is always a sore point for Argento movies. Here, only a couple of actors are allowed to give performances, but they make them count. Thomas Kretschmann is only on screen a few times, but gives a strong enough impression in that time (and not simply because of the brutal material contained there) that his role seems much larger. However, the film lives or dies with Asia's performance, and she throws herself into it with abandon. She's ultimately more convincing when she's required to be fierce than when she's required to be vulnerable, but goes through a bewildering range of emotions with scarcely a false note. And it's to her credit that it's so unsettling watching the torments her father subjects her to, so to speak, because she commits herself to their realization so thoroughly.

Comparing this to films from Argento's peak period is not really applicable...it comes from an entirely different vein. Which makes it all the more depressing that his next movie would be Il Fantasma dell'Opera, easily his worst.

Essentially the same movie as Reazione a Catena, without that film's energetic use of explicit sex and gore, this is instead a glacially slow movie wherein a great deal of uninvolving acts of violence perpetrated on uninvolving characters pile up before an uninvolving (and predictable) conclusion. Since all of the bodies are found after the fact, there are no suspense scenes to speak of. Inappropriate music pops up every now and again, but Bava's directing talent only surfaces periodically...for most of the duration, this could have been directed by anybody. No interesting psychological angles, just formulaic dismissal of the cast. For completists only.