Three Films Make A Post: How to fail in the music business and succeed as a legend.

Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah (2011): I’m not completely sold on the jumping about Kevin Triplett’s Duct Tape Messiah does in the chronology of legendary – and legendarily unlucky – Texas songwriter Blaze Foley’s life; it doesn’t really add anything, and seems to obfuscate things rather than make them clearer. On the other hand, the film is such a labour of love about a figure at once intensely influential and obscure, full of interviews with friends, lovers, family and peers, as well as some incredibly valuable archive material of the man itself, I can’t find it in me to pick formal nits for too long. Particularly not in a film that’s also not pretending the bad, self-destructive elements of its subject’s character didn’t exist; it just knows this changes nothing about the love (or the great songs).

Travelling for a Living (1966): For the British folk revival and folk rock, the subjects of this short documentary, The Watersons, as well as the work they did afterwards, were an incredibly important and influential group. Here, in Derrick Knight’s grainy verité footage, you can witness the group as working musicians, at the cusp of reaching something new via the traditional, following a very personal idea of freedom and individual expression. If you’ve listened to music by or influenced by the Watersons and their peers for a few decades like I have, you’ll probably be shocked/delighted by how young and hopeful they were here, how very much of their time in the very best way; how much these people feel like their voices, coming from more years away than I’ve been alive.

Tenebrae (1982): These are just a couple of thoughts after a recent re-watch of this Argento giallo. I don’t need to reiterate my love for the man’s visual powers as a director, or how much he manages to turn an absolutely improbable plot believable in so far as it seems to fit the visual world he creates so perfectly. Rather, what was going through my head this time around is how much Argento must have been bothered by the accusations of misogyny and idolation of violence thrown at him regularly, seeing as they are mirrored rather exactly in what his writer protagonist Peter Neal here has to hear. Like Neal, Argento’s not terribly good at defending himself here; but then, given that Neal is also an insane murderer, he’s probably not supposed to, and may very well be meant as a way for Argento to poke fun at himself (or at least his public image) as well as his detractors.

Dark Glasses (2022)

aka Black Glasses

Original title: Occhiali neri

As if two-fisted prostitute Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) didn’t have enough trouble with fighting off horrible costumers, she becomes the next target of a serial killer murdering sex workers. Diana manages to escape a first murder attempt via a car chase, but ends up crashing into a car of a Chinese family. The parents of the family are killed or lethally wounded, and only a little boy we will later learn to be named Chin (Andrea Zhang) survives. Diana herself is blinded in the crash, while the killer gets away unscathed and unidentified.

Being a rather tough cookie, our heroine only falls into depression over her new disability for a very short time, and becomes independent again very quickly indeed with the help of public service lady Rita (Asia Argento) and her very own seeing eye/attack dog. Diana feels guilty about the accident and visits little Chin in his orphanage. During this, she impresses him so greatly, he soon turns up at her doorstep, asking her for shelter until his mother gets out of the coma she’s clearly never going to get out of. Diana has no problem harbouring an escaped orphan, and the duo buddy up quite nicely.

Alas, the killer – remember him? – still has his mind set upon murdering Diana. Surely, now that she’s blind and taking care of a little boy, she’s going to be easier to kill…

Most viewers seem to loathe this late entry into the career of the once great Dario Argento with a passion, so much so I found myself somewhat surprised by actually being entertained by it, sometimes even charmed by its wackier elements. But then, if I remember correctly, I did even find quite a few things to enjoy about Argento’s Dracula.

This giallo is certainly a technically and formally much superior proposition to that movie. Argento doesn’t seem to be in as wildly and trashy an experimental mood as he was there, but he has not returned to the blandness of Giallo or The Card Player either. Though this is still far from the style and beauty of Argento’s classic movies, he does seem to attempt to return to some of the aesthetic pleasures of his past. So here, you can at the very least witness some technically accomplished stalk and suspense sequences, quite a handful of carefully framed shots, and a film that has a degree of visual flow and drive again. Compared to the giallos from Argento’s bad phase, this feels not so much like a return to form, but like a return to genuine interest in the aesthetic forms and joys that were always Argento’s great strengths.

Of course, if one really wants to, one should have no problem smacking Dark Glasses down for the often highly peculiar ways its script finds to get Diana and Chin into trouble, ways rather off the trodden paths of plot logic and reason; it’s not so much that no character here ever makes good decisions, it’s that everyone always makes the most bizarre ones imaginable. Also, there are snakes in the weirdest places. The thing is, narrative logic has never been one of Argento’s strengths, and I really can’t bring myself to criticize the man for exactly the dream logic I’ve so often praised about his films. Particularly since the script puts quite a bit of effort into developments becoming increasingly intense-hysterical in a way that may or may not be Argento poking a bit of fun at himself, or just the great old man being himself very much indeed.

There are also some rather new developments in Argento land, namely a streak of friendly sentimentality that comes to the fore in the whole Chin business (which it is best to simply accept as the film delivers it instead of thinking about it, too hard or at all) as well as in his continued love for murderous animals as seen in the dog business; though there, the sentimentality is obviously spiced with a bit of gore. Argento’s gotten so soft, Asia is only brutally murdered in this one.

That’s what we call “Altersmilde” in Germany.

In short: Door into Darkness: Il tram (1973)

Original title: La porta dul buio: Il tram

The cleaner of a tram discovers the body of a murdered young woman half hidden below a seat. Commissario Giordani (Enzo Ceruscio), a young up-and-coming policeman with the habit of snapping his fingers rhythmically when he’s trying to think, is tasked with solving this puzzling crime. He quickly establishes who shared the last night tram with the victim, but his handful of witnesses seem to have seen or heard nothing whatsoever out of order, leaving the policeman with a murder taking place in front of multiple witnesses who didn’t actually witness it. It’s as if he had stumbled into a modern variation of a golden age impossible crime mystery.

Il tram is the second of four short movies in a 1973 Italian thriller (not quite giallo as we would use the term outside of Italy today) anthology TV show that was at least in part responsible for putting its writer, producer, as well as in this episode director, Dario Argento into the high profile, yellow-press alluring, rock star like popularity he had for a decade or two in his home country. From the here and now, I’m not completely sure why: the four movies are certainly good – particularly on a European TV budget of this time – and Argento is put front and centre via short introductions before each episode, but good filmmaking does not exactly turn a director into a star, and the intros don’t exactly present the mix of wit and shtick you’d get from Alfred Hitchcock. If you’re Italian and know what the special attraction was, please explain in the comments!

As an Argento movie, Il tram is actually an interesting little artefact, in many scenes – thanks to the budget – prefiguring his post Sleepless turn to forms of less visually dreamlike intensity. Here, after his early three giallos for the big screen, Argento is clearly a bit more enthusiastic about ways to still make naturalism sing to a stranger tune. While complex camera work is only in the cards for a couple of scenes, many of the sequences here are edited to a beat – the snapping of Girodano’s fingers and the rhythm of the tram are mirrored in the rhythms of the editing, not just helping to provide visual interest but also making a minimal plot with one single core idea and rather a lot of scenes of people talking lively and suspenseful. Until everything ends in a really tense stalking sequence that’s so Argento, you wouldn’t actually need to see his name in the credits.

Opera (1987)

When the diva playing Lady Macbeth in a version of Verdi’s Macbeth is injured in an “accident” that makes her unable to play her role, her young understudy Betty (Cristina Marsillach) has the chance of her life with taking over her rule. Betty isn’t completely happy about the opportunity, though. Apart from the typical doubts in her own readiness for one of the most important opera roles for a soprano, this is still a version of Macbeth, after all, and Macbeth, as we all know, is a cursed play, even when it’s the opera version. Add to the problems that the play’s director Marco (Ian Charleson) is a movie director loving gimmicks, and with something of reputation, adding live ravens and modern effects to the play, and giving off a somewhat shifty vibe.

All these troubles will turn out to be the proverbial small stuff, however, for the same masked man responsible for diva number one’s little accident now starts hounding Betty, repeatedly tying her up and forcing her to watch him kill members of the production.

For the longest time, I’ve not been able to get along with Opera, often seen as Dario Argento’s last great movie. I took a very tired and anxious evening for the film to finally click with me, and now, like someone suffering from a religious revelation, I do believe it is one of the man’s best films.

On the surface, the film is very typical Argento, or really, simply a very typical giallo, with a script that makes more sense as a mood made moving pictures than a narrative, full of its director’s habits, tics, and gruesome delights. There is a bit more going on in the script of this one, though, I believe. Argento seems to play very consciously with various things, starting the narrative as a clear variation on the Phantom of the Opera but emphasising the elements of obsession and voyeurism in the source as far as he can go with them; and, given Argento’s love of operatic excess, it’s pretty damn far.

There’s also quite a bit of self-conscious irony on display here most other Argento movies earlier or later lack, Marco partially taking on elements of Argento’s public image as a bit of a cinematic madman, a sadist, the kind of guy who insists that he always shoots is own hands as the hands of the killers in his films, but also turning him into a the least horrible man on screen, even if he is a bit of a voyeur and an obsessive.

But then, practically everyone in Opera is, for voyeurism and obsession over the acts of seeing and witnessing is what the film in nearly every shot of the gliding camera is about. Even quite a bit of its violence demonstrates this focus. It’s not just in the (in)famous eye loss by raven scene in the first climax, or the gunshot through the peephole or the little nasty needle contraptions the killer uses to force Betty to see and witness what he does. Even when there’s no eye violence involved, Argento is particularly focussed on showing us the eyes of the killer’s victims when they struggle and die, pulling the audience in like the killer wants to pull Betty in, trying to turn the witness into an accomplice, only in our case through the seductions of cinematic style instead of rope.

I don’t believe Argento wants to criticize the voyeuristic and obsessive aspects of (horror) filmmaking, but Opera does give the impression of a film violently driven to make its audience conscious of these aspects, so that we can at least admit to ourselves that, yes, indeed, there’s something uncomfortable about finding pleasure in all of this, and even more uncomfortable in admitting to it. Argento for his part is, like the killer, not letting up until we see things his way.

That’s where the movie’s second climax comes in, perhaps. On the surface, it’s throw-away and pretty silly (it’s certainly no surprise the US distributor of the film wanted it gone), ripping off Hitchcock while trying to tack on a bit of an operatic mad scene for Betty. However, I also believe it’s Argento’s – not really successful – attempt at suggesting that the voyeuristic draw to violence and obsession is also a gate to a less dubious kind of beauty that may be madness or purity, depending on one’s perception, a place you can’t reach if you haven’t been drawn in by the horrors.

On Dario Argento's Dracula 3D (2012)

I'm pretty sure Argento's version of Dracula will automatically get the critical drubbing all his late period films get, be they great like Mother of Tears, abominations like Giallo and The Card Player, or fine workman-like efforts like his Masters of Horror episodes. Argento shares the fate of his co-sufferers in directing horror films like George Romero and John Carpenter of having turned their once rabid fanbases against themselves by continuing to change their styles. And we all know by now that "fans" only stay "fans" as long as you give them exactly what they expect, lest they turn into a highly enthusiastic lynch mob that wouldn't even realize if you made the best movie of your career. Thusly, the Internet has turned my private definition of "fan" into "person who hates something so much (s)he won't stop shouting about how horrible it is", but I digress.

Not that Dracula (3D) is the best movie of Argento's career. It is, in fact, a rather curious artefact that attempts - and perhaps half of the time succeeds - to build a luridly dream-like mood out of a mixture of operatic theatricality, cheapness, misguided uses of modern technology, an improbably bad soundtrack, and plain weirdness. When this works, Dracula becomes rather magical, like a pulpy version of that weird vampire sex dream (vampirism is all about sex and domination for Argento here) you once had after reading Bram Stoker and drinking too much red wine. When it fails, Dracula turns into a horrible mess half bad soap opera, half gore flick made by a teenager.

The most curious thing about it is how easily the film slips from one extreme to the next, with nearly awe-inspiring moments of Gothic horror turning into poor cheese and back again at the drop of a hat. Really everything in Dracula is changing from one moment to the next in this way - the acting (with generally lovely actors like Asia Argento, Thomas "Dracula" Kretschmann and Rutger Hauer as the least interesting Van Helsing imaginable) is convincing in one sentence, stiff in the next, and melodramatically overdone in the next, the special effects permanently meander between decent practical effects, utterly horrid CG most SyFy channel movies were ashamed of, and beautiful and imaginative CG, while the script wanders between homages to every other Dracula adaptation in existence, clever changes to the original (for example, not taking the plot to England doesn't just put away the xenophobic subtext, and is good for the budget but also makes the film dramatically tighter, or rather would make it tighter if this were a film interested in it; and I love what the film in the end does with the old, terrible "Mina is the reincarnation of Dracula's wife" bit), random weird shit I can't help but approve of (I'll just say "mantis"), and stuff that is of little use however you look at it.

Locations and sets are at times beautiful and atmospheric, and at other times so ill lit they have the fake, plastic-y look of a doll house. In this Dracula, the sublime and the ridiculous don't just go hand in hand, they change from one into the other like a hyperactive werewolf. I'm actually pretty sure Argento does this all on purpose (for he can hardly not see it), but what his purpose is - apart from making it much easier for people to hate on the film without having to think about it - I surely don't know.

What I do know is that, even though Argento's Dracula surely isn't his best film, or even a good one, it is a film containing as much personality, strangeness and idiosyncrasy as I could have wished for. It's certainly not the film I would have wanted Argento to make, but then I'm convinced that if you're expecting any artist, in whatever part of his or her career, to do the exact sort of thing you want from her or him, you're doing art appreciation wrong.

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3 Films Make A Post: The Final Chapter

Drag Me To Hell (2009): Sam Raimi's return BOO! to the comedic horror genre has its moments, BOO! predictably either when the film is getting surreal or when it BOO! nearly becomes a social satire about BOO! class. Alas, too much of the film consists of SOMEONE SCREAMING "BOO" INTO YOUR FACE VERY LOUDLY, which I found annoying more often than not. Also not very amusing is the bleedingly obvious final twist, I can only explain through a) rampant stupidity on Raimi's side or b) Raimi thinking his audience consists only of mouthbreathing idiots.

Of course, horror films in carnival ride mode are far from my favorite part of the genre, so my barely serviceable movie might be someone else's new favorite one.

 

XX: Beautiful Beast (1995): This first of the XX movies is of less interest than some of its successors, despite being directed by Toshiharu Ikeda of Evil Dead Trap fame. The story of Ran (Kaori Shimamura), known as the Black Orchid, a professional killer taking vengeance for the murder of her sister and falling for an ex-yakuza barkeep who is of course connected to the men she is trying to kill, just doesn't have much to keep one's interest. It's nice to look at, but so generically bland in every other aspect that I had a difficult time staying awake while watching it.

 

Giallo (2009): As one of the chosen few (of possibly very dubious taste) who did, well, like Argento's Mother of Tears quite unironically, I was looking forward to this one. I shouldn't have. Giallo is so boring, cliched, repetitive and just plain stupid that I wouldn't even call it an unconscious self-parody of Argento. Self-parodists just misuse their stylistic vocabulary; Argento seems to have lost his completely and replaced it with psycho thriller 101 stuff even more generic than the film's title.

It's worse than The Card Player.

 

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