Films CX and CXI
CX: Il Gatto a Nove Code (The Cat o' Nine Tails, Dario Argento, 1971)
Argento's second film as director, one of the giallos, and oscillating between being Hitchcockian and not. There is a break-in at a medical research institute but nothing is apparently stolen, although someone who thinks he knows what was stolen (and who by) falls under a train. Franco Arno (Karl Malden), a former journalist who is now blind, and Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus), a journalist, investigate the death, and the deaths of a series of witnesses.
Argento's films are frequently an excuse for set piece gross out - here there are a number of garrotings, but the best bits are the body caught by a train and the hands sliding down the lift cable. In the mean time he throws out plenty of red herrings and odd point of view shots (complete with close ups of a single eye) so that the identity of the murderer is kept secret until the set piece rooftop finish (an Hitchcock echo). There is distinctly a macguffin at work driving the plot, with the theft having the exact opposite effect of the one intended. The film lurches alarmingly between the two investigators, one perhaps an alter ego for the other, at times flash cutting between the two, or repeating a snatch of film to indicate a memory of earlier information.
I don't think this has quite the iconic feel of his earlier L'Uccello Dalle Piume di Cristallo, but it's an amusing couple of hours.
CXI: Phenomena (Dario Argento, 1985)
One of Argento's English language films, but probably dubbed, and in fact the performances are so atrocious that it might actually be better in Italian. Donald Pleasance is so focused on his Scottish accent, each line takes a day to pronounce, and Jennifer Connelly makes her later performance in Labyrinth look masterful. But Argento's about the set pieces not the acting.
Here the set-up seems similar to his earlier (and frankly better) Suspiria: an American school girl (Connelly) arrives at a foreign school with a dictator headmistress and disappearing pupils. There is a maniac on the loose, and decayed body parts are showing up to be dated by maggot expert Pleasance. Can Connelly expose the murderer before she is a victim? As a sleepwalker with a telepathic communion with insects, how far can her character be humiliated?
Here we have the requisite number of garrotings, knivings, beheadings, surreal dream sequences and intelligent chimpanzees that you'd expect from Argento. If none of it makes any sense, then that's not exactly surprising, and of course the Connelly character is dreaming for part of it. There's a sequence in another Argento film where a character is attacked by rats in a lake in a park at night, but manages to attract the attention of the ice cream seller. The seller walks rather slowly around the lake, wades out to the dying man and - reaches out with a large knife and stabs him to death. It's that level of gratuity, which you either go with or are allergic to. Me, I think it's good clean fun, although there's a lot of later copy-cat horror films we could blame on it.
Totals: 111 (Cinema: 43; DVD: 63; TV: 5)
Argento's second film as director, one of the giallos, and oscillating between being Hitchcockian and not. There is a break-in at a medical research institute but nothing is apparently stolen, although someone who thinks he knows what was stolen (and who by) falls under a train. Franco Arno (Karl Malden), a former journalist who is now blind, and Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus), a journalist, investigate the death, and the deaths of a series of witnesses.
Argento's films are frequently an excuse for set piece gross out - here there are a number of garrotings, but the best bits are the body caught by a train and the hands sliding down the lift cable. In the mean time he throws out plenty of red herrings and odd point of view shots (complete with close ups of a single eye) so that the identity of the murderer is kept secret until the set piece rooftop finish (an Hitchcock echo). There is distinctly a macguffin at work driving the plot, with the theft having the exact opposite effect of the one intended. The film lurches alarmingly between the two investigators, one perhaps an alter ego for the other, at times flash cutting between the two, or repeating a snatch of film to indicate a memory of earlier information.
I don't think this has quite the iconic feel of his earlier L'Uccello Dalle Piume di Cristallo, but it's an amusing couple of hours.
CXI: Phenomena (Dario Argento, 1985)
One of Argento's English language films, but probably dubbed, and in fact the performances are so atrocious that it might actually be better in Italian. Donald Pleasance is so focused on his Scottish accent, each line takes a day to pronounce, and Jennifer Connelly makes her later performance in Labyrinth look masterful. But Argento's about the set pieces not the acting.
Here the set-up seems similar to his earlier (and frankly better) Suspiria: an American school girl (Connelly) arrives at a foreign school with a dictator headmistress and disappearing pupils. There is a maniac on the loose, and decayed body parts are showing up to be dated by maggot expert Pleasance. Can Connelly expose the murderer before she is a victim? As a sleepwalker with a telepathic communion with insects, how far can her character be humiliated?
Here we have the requisite number of garrotings, knivings, beheadings, surreal dream sequences and intelligent chimpanzees that you'd expect from Argento. If none of it makes any sense, then that's not exactly surprising, and of course the Connelly character is dreaming for part of it. There's a sequence in another Argento film where a character is attacked by rats in a lake in a park at night, but manages to attract the attention of the ice cream seller. The seller walks rather slowly around the lake, wades out to the dying man and - reaches out with a large knife and stabs him to death. It's that level of gratuity, which you either go with or are allergic to. Me, I think it's good clean fun, although there's a lot of later copy-cat horror films we could blame on it.
Totals: 111 (Cinema: 43; DVD: 63; TV: 5)