Stuff: Dario trio.

S'up, Screamers and Screamettes?

Quick news bit: The newest calendars for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's cinema have come out and horror fans might want take a gander at the first week in September. Starting on Friday, September 4, BAMcinématek is running what they're calling a "mini-retro" of Italio-horror master Dario Argento.

Friday, there will be two showings of his 1971 thriller 4 Flies on Grey Velvet. Then, on Saturday, there are three showings of the magnificent Suspiria. Finally, Sunday afternoon and evening, there are two showings of the second flick in the "Three Mother's" trilogy, the utterly inexplicable Inferno.

While Inferno is barely worth the celluloid it's printed on, the opportunity to see Suspiria on the big screen makes this a notable event for Brooklyn horror fanciers.

I'll probably be giving 4 Flies a pass too, but Dario-philes might find reason to make time. Long considered a "lost" film due to its unavailability on Region 1 DVD, an uncut and remastered version of 4 Flies has been making the rounds since Mya Communication Company issued there admirable R1 DVD in February. I can't imagine there will be tons of opportunities to see it on the big screen.

Books: Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who . . .

'Tis the season for end of the year lists, which presents an interesting problem for us here at ANTSS.

On one hand, we hate to be followers.

On the other hand, we're way too cowardly and lazy to do something that might push us beyond the pale and get us ostracized by the horror blog community.

What's the solution? Do a list, but do it on trangendered sexual weirdness with everybody's favorite moody daughter of Dario Argento (pictured in the typically reserved and humble portrait above). We get in on the whole traditional listy goodness, but we roll a little weird and try to keep our thin alibi of individuality.

Let's begin.

There comes a time in the life of every Asia Argento fan when you wonder to yourself, "Self, I wonder what it would be like to make love to Asia Argento as a girl who had fooled Asia Argento into thinking she was actually a boy who had extensive sexual reassignment surgery done and was now pretty much a girl."

Well, wonder no longer. Savannah Knoop has lived the dream.

In 1999, Savannah Knoop did a solid for her sister-in-law, Laura Albert.

Since 1996, Albert had been writing short stories, musical reviews, and other bits under the penname Jeremiah "J. T." Leroy. Over the course of those three years, Albert had given Leroy a baroque Southern Gothic backstory involving child prostitution, religious fanaticism, drug abuse, truckers, and a titanic Evil Mother figure identified only as Sarah. In 1999, Albert – as Leroy – had produced two novels. The first, titled Sarah, was a dark magical-realist take on the subculture of "lot lizards," prostitutes that haunt the truck stops of America's highways. The second novel, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, was actually an interlinked series of short stories. The novel tossed out the magical-realist angle and went for a more spare, relentless, and grim approach.

The good news for Albert was that both books had become cult hits.

The bad news was that people wanted to meet J. T. Leroy.

The issue was further complicated by the fact that a considerable amount of the buzz regarding Albert's novels came from the fact that people assumed they were largely autobiographical. Part of the attraction of Leroy and his works was this bizarre and horrifying life story he supposedly had. Albert rightly understood that revealing there was no J. T. Leroy would drive a stake right into the heart of her success. Consequently, when Interview requested a photo of Leroy, Savannah was pressed into service. She was dressed up as a young man, photographed, and thanked for her part in keeping the hoax going.

It was meant to be a one-time deal, but for the next seven years Knoop became the public face of the J. T. Leroy literary conspiracy. She was interviewed, wooed, given awards, praised by everybody from Dennis Cooper to Bono, and even managed to sleep with Asia Argento while still disguised. To figure out how she pulled that off, you'll have to read Knoop's new memoir of the hoax, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became J. T. Leroy.

I can, however, share some of the things readers will learn about the tempestuous Italian actress and director from the not-a-man who knew her so intimately.

Without further ado, ANTSS proudly presents the official "And Now the Screaming Starts List of Nine Things You Would Know About Asia Argento If You Made Love to Asia Argento as a Girl Who Had Fooled Asia Argento into Thinking You Were Actually a Boy Who Had Extensive Sexual Reassignment Surgery":

1. When Asia Argento sees a sheep, she makes a flicking gesture with her fingers. It's a motion like trying to flick something sticky off your fingers. Asia believes that doing this will bring her good fortune.

2. In the sack, Asia Argento is "kind of a toppy-bottom." And, somewhat inexplicably, right before getting down to the nasty, she may announce that she wishes she had a penis.

3. When Asia Argento gives a toast, she stares directly into her dinner companion's eyes. She believes that doing so will allow her to detect betrayal. Of course, Asia seems to have never seen through Knoop's disguise, so you could be forgiven for doubting the efficacy of this lie-detection method.

4. Detecting treachery is apparently a major concern with Asia Argento as she seems to react to stressful situations by throwing paranoid fits. When she was directing The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Argento repeatedly announced that her crew was purposefully undermining her. She also stated they resented her authority because she was a woman. She also claimed that they made fun of her accent.

5. If Asia Argento spills wine, she dips her finger in it and dabs it behind her ears like perfume. Why? Who knows?

6. Asia Argento smokes like a freakin' chimney. It is alleged that she smoked through her pregnancy. Agrento helped give this allegation legs by allowing her preggers self to be photographed naked in the bathtub with a lit coffin nail in hand.

7. For formal media-event occasions, Asia Argento always wears Fendi. In fact, she's contractually obligated to. Even though she feels that Fendi designs "conventional" and "prissy" clothes, she likes the money that comes from being their red carpet dummy. In less formal contexts, she prefers jeans, which she covers in ballpoint pen doodles.

8. Asia Argento does not like Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain album.

9. Ask Asia Argento and she will tell you that, despite what people think of her, she's actually quite shy.

Movies: Don't you think it's time you stopped your crying?

All apologies to the New Colony Six for the title.

Who knew that Dario Argentio's Mother of Tears, the third and possibly last installment of his "Mothers" series, would be such a stumbling block for me? This is the second effort I'm making at this review.

The first attempt, not so cleverly framed as a phone conversation betwixt myself and the director, was posted yesterday. It was up for about five minutes when my wife, host of a very successful literary news and book industry blog, told me that I should really take it down. She said it was too nasty and bitter and was more an "I'm an angry jackass" piece than a review proper. She was right. The Interwebs has got enough "I'm an angry jackass" pieces to last us all several lifetimes, so I took it down.

For those who clicked over from yesterday's link on the League of Tana Tea Drinker's aggregator site, my apologies. For you, I present the only salvageable section of the seven-page rant:

CRwM: . . . You even work in a few in-jokes for the hardcore fans. That's nice of you.

DA: The monkey.

CRwM: Yeah. The monkey.

DA: Well you saw what they said about the monkey. How can people hate on a monkey? Monkey equals rad.

CRwM: That's why the UN-recognized standard global unit of fun is the barrel of monkeys.

DA: That's the very point of monkeys! Who doesn't want a monkey in their movie? Nobody, that's who.

CRwM: People are weird.

Weird indeed.

Today we do take two . . . and action.

Being aware of the critical/fan reaction to Mother of Tears before sitting down to watch the film myself, my initial reaction was, oddly enough, pity. I actually felt bad for Dario Argento.

For years, Argento's been flogging the dead horse of his shtick. He's made a name for himself creating flicks with nonsensical, elliptical plots. He's really good at this and he's managed to avoid either "cause" or its dutiful handmaiden, "effect," for many years. He's peopled his flicks with wooden, semi-disposable actors and actresses who don't act in these films so much as get they get stage-managed. Even when Argento had a future Academy Award nominee on cast, he managed to level them down to the status of prop. Stylistically, his rep rested mainly on three things: absurdly and unintentionally comical POV shots, washing scenes in colored lights so heavy-handedly that it looks like his shots were composed in crayon, and an enduring commitment to graphic violence.

In any other genre, this impressive list of creative limitations would have prevented him from becoming even so much as a dead link on some other director's IMDB page. But this is horror. Aside from the sizeable cult of tastemakers whose primary aesthetic interest seems to be the promotion of crap that one is supposed to enjoy ironically - the so-bad-it's-good-set that keeps the rotting corpse of exploitation cinema dancing around like a shopworn marionette - there's a strong sense across the community that any regrettable lack of skill, repeated often enough and earnestly enough, becomes traditional. Aside from one or two genre classics, most of what he's cranked out over the past three decades is notable for its stubborn adherence to his "style," constituting the aesthetic equivalent of a remarkably prolonged adolescence.

Despite the monotony of this output and the inevitable onset of diminishing returns, most of his fans never left him. Although their defense of his work came to sound more and more like the sort of intentionally-missing-the-point-complements one makes regarding the athletic performance of physically retarded children. A few die-hards even go so far as to suggest that Argento's actually "too good" for all those basic filmmaking skills he seems to lack.

That makes the reception of MoT cruelly ironic. Argento finally produces a pic that begins to meet some reasonable minimal expectation of quality. It has a plot that is built out a logical chain of interlinked occurrences, it's built it around the performance of a two-time David de Donatello Best Actress Award Winner, and it subtly integrates he's signature stylistic flourishes in such a away that they work with the film rather than feeling like a like a suffocating layer of slick but irrelevant armor. He nods to his previous films and pulls from the newest on-going source of inspiration, high art from the Renaissance and early Enlightenment.

So, after actually showing some glimmer of artistic development, Argento's fans ditch him. They more than just ditch him: They showed up in droves to absolutely shit all over your work. It's like some horror-geek version of DSP. People frame the film in terms of a personal betrayal. Some who normally champion any cut rate schlock-shocker so long as its got subtitles turned around and suggest that they actually have never liked him. And, in the classiest display of critical insight since film critics made easy copy out of Sophia Coppola's nose in Godfather III, several bloggers and horror site hosts have taken the opportunity to suggest that star and directorial off-spring Asia Argento is ugly.

Let's talk specifics about the flick. A follow-up to your earlier Susperia (one of the previously mentioned genre classics) and Inferno (a moronic mess that even Argento glosses over in this flick), Mother of Tears involves the release of the third of a trio of witches – the Mother of Tears – in Rome. The MoT is, as several characters inform the viewer, the most beautiful and cruel of the three witches. I don't know about relative cruelty levels, but the beauty thing isn't hard to cinch: the first mother took beauty tips from Norman Bates's mom and the second turned out to be a Grim Reaperish figure just slightly less scary, or believable, than an off-the-rack Target Halloween outfit.

The MoT's evil is contagious and a sort of plague of moral malaise spreads through the Europe. Random citizens are committing violent acts while others calmly go about their day, only vaguely interested in the mounting body count and social disintegration.

Ultimately it is up to Sarah (played by Asia Argento), a staffer working in the art restoration department of a museum in Rome, to defeat this makhashaifah. Sarah, it turns out, is descended from a long line of "good witches." Wicca, like the Force, has binary good/bad aspects. Sarah, the last of her kind, must find the lair of the MoT and destroy her before she can usher in a Second Age of Witches, which would probably be pretty awesome if you were an evil witch but would must assuredly suck for everybody else.

Curiously, for all its dependence on supernatural elements, this is the most narratively cohesive of all Argento's works. Though it belongs in same fairy tale/quest story category as your 1985 flick Phenomenon (the other genre classic I was thinking of earlier), it's logic is considerably less willy-nilly. Sure, there's some inexplicable magic shenanigans afoot – as one might well have with witches running about – but for the most part the story is linear and comprehensible. Compare the random acts of violence committed in MoT, which are explicable in light of the Mother's viral malevolence, with the random attack by the meat wagon dude in Inferno who, for no reason, chops up one of the film's characters. The latter is vintage Argento, the former represents a newfound respect for something we call "sense."

Even Argento's famed obsession with color-coding his scenes seems less slapdash here. Previously, he was overdoing the lighting, as if he was afraid his audience was to dim to get it. He's still color-coding everything – which is cool if that's his bag; he's the director. But now he does the same thing through costuming, set design, and prop selection. Instead of feeling like an invasive add-on, the visual schemes seem of a piece with the film. For example, instead of just washing the catacombs of the Mother's lair in red light, he lets blood, red clay mud, and brick colored tunics do much of work. It doesn't feel so desperately stylish, like an amateur's idea of advanced techniques.

Even the supernatural touches feel multivalent and woven into the story. The much-maligned monkey familiar of the Mother of Tears is a good example. Riffing off the Renaissance art he surrounded Sarah with (not to mention the "see no evil/hear no evil/speak no evil" idols that usher in the MoT's reign of terror) he makes the familiar a monkey: a common symbol in of human irrationality, sin, and the Satanic impulse to impersonate beings of greater stature in Renaissance painting. It also let's Argento send the MoT around, via familiar, while keeping her off-stage as long as possible. Finally, it's a nice little wink and nod to the other great female quest story he's done: Phenomenon.

Even the jump-scares show how a commitment to detail. Though folks have pretty much dismissed the flick's one jump-scare as cheap throwaway gag and a sign of Argento's dwindling prowess, careful viewers can see that the screaming demon figure that scares the poop out of Sarah in her dream is, in fact, the killer sneaking into the house. The whole point of the scene was to demonstrate, through a premonition, that Sarah's witchpoo powers were manifesting in increasingly powerful ways.

These dismissals are, to a degree, Argento's own fault. For years, he was lazy about the logic and rigor of his flicks. He made mysteries that couldn't really be solved by considering the evidence. He never bothered to connect dots or explain anything – or, more honestly, make things that could be explained. He trained his fans to not think to hard about his films. Now that he's making links and connections, what are fans supposed to do?

Besides, there are some real bad choices in there. The character of the spirit mother that acts as Sarah's ghostly Obi-Wan is given so little to do that she becomes more annoying than dramatic. The centuries-old tunic that the Mother of Tears wears looks like it was made with a Bedazzler and the members of the global coven look like extras from an Adam Ant Halloween special.

Still, compared to some of the crap Argento has let stand in your older films, those are strictly small potatoes.

In the final analysis, Mother of Tears is better than many of the films he's made. And while it falls short of Susperia, it isn't even the worst of this particular trilogy: that would be Inferno.

More importantly than all of that, Asia Argento is still awesome. Admittedly, she's a bit miscast here. She needs roles that aren't to white bread, but the argument that she's somehow lost the ability to command the screen or has lost her looks strike me as bizarre.

Asia Argento was never beautiful in any conventional way. She looks like that chick nobody remembers inviting to the party, the one the boys want to hang out with, but who has no use for all other the chicks in the room. She looks and moves like a boyfriend stealer – but worse, the kind of girl who steals a woman's man and leaves the poor alteh moid wondering what in world this scruffy, uncouth, outsider, tramp has that she doesn't.

Well. What to do? Should Argento go back to making half-assed reworkings of the same handful of flicks his fan base likes?

Personally, I think he should do non-horror. He should adapt Lucarelli's "De Luca" trilogy or do Carlotto's The Goodbye Kiss. Fast moving crime stuff. He'd get to use his strengths but it would help him shed the luggage of his own mediocre mid- to late- period stuff and help him scrape off the fans who insist that he exist as a museum piece.

Stuff: The bravest movie critic in all of Washington D.C.

Today Washington Post staff critic Ann Hornaday turned in a dismissive review of the upcoming Mother of Tears, the last installment in Argento's nonsensical Mothers trilogy-cause-I-said-it-is, and Stuck, Stuart Gordon's grim satire of the Chante Jawan Mallard case (in which she hit a pedestrian with her car, got him stuck in her windshield, and left him to bleed out – true story, swear to God – took the poor guy more than two hours to die).

The fact that the wonderfully named Hornaday basically dumps on both movies as muddled and gory wastes of time doesn't surprise me or disappoint me. My interest in Gordon is almost entirely based on his status as the go-to cinematic interpreter of Lovecraft. As for Argento: he's so reliably uneven that it is entirely unsurprising to hear one of his flicks is a stilted, bloody mess. Being charitable, even Argento's best films walk a thin line between bizarre puzzle and pretentious disaster.

Hornaday says of both flicks:

So, dear readers, in front of you and the movie gods and everybody, I'm here to say: I don't get it. I don't get why, in "Mother of Tears," I'm supposed to find some kind of taboo thrill in watching a young woman being strangled by her own intestine. I don't get that Argento can write some of the most wooden dialogue and elicit some of the most risible performances to be seen in a movie (think "The Da Vinci Code" with an even more cockamamie mythology), but still get credit as some kind of auteur because of the ingenious weapon he creates to impale two eyeballs at once. I don't get why, in the course of a 40-year career, Argento can still find anything new in a shot of a slit throat and rivulets of burbling, viscous blood. (To the inevitable defense that Argento's work is simply camp, I would say that anything this aggressively hateful forfeits the right to be called camp. As Susan Sontag rightly observed, even camp at its most outlandish reveals some truth about the human condition.)

Compared to the myriad perversions on display in "Mother of Tears" (culminating in the film's star, Argento's daughter Asia, almost drowning in a sea of sewage and cadavers -- grazie, papa!), the degradations of the flesh in "Stuck" look almost endearingly modest. Inspired by a true story, the film stars Suvari as a nurse's aide who hits a homeless man (Rea) and leaves him for dead after he crashes through her windshield. Although Gordon clearly has something to say about poverty, class mobility and throwaway lives, whatever substance might have oozed through "Stuck" is quickly stanched, to let flow the blood, gore and attempts at erotic humor (a catfight between Suvari and a naked rival played for laughs). Admittedly, "Stuck" features only one eye-gouging, but like "Mother of Tears" it climaxes in a fiery Grand Guignol, its portrait of misery and moral indifference complete if not even slightly credible.

There are things to value in "Stuck," including the lead and supporting performances, and Gordon's taut thriller-like pacing. But, like "Mother of Tears," I don't get it. I don't get what fascinates Gordon and Argento -- both men in their 60s -- about thinking up new ways to inflict pain. I don't get what's "ingeniously nasty" about watching people suffer and die. I don't get the "gonzo artistry" of murdering a woman by way of a symbolic rape with a sword. I don't get why that's entertaining, edifying, endorsed by the cinematic canon or even remotely okay.

Let it all out, Hornaday. Tell us how you really feel.

Seriously though, I suspect that most of Hornaday's basic criticisms are dead-on. Gordon's been a reliable, but strictly workman-like horror director for a couple decades now and nothing in his filmography suggests he's got a profound cinematic Jonathan Swift hiding in him, straining to get out. As for Argento: the last movie of his I saw was a "mystery" whose plot hinged on the supposed fact that crows are an innately vengeful breed of bird that will hunt down and peck to death people who hurt crows. His movies are shambling hulks of stylistic absurdity. That's you thing or it isn't, but few folks deny it.

Here's what I hated about her review. From the opening section:

When you work as a movie critic, you learn very quickly which filmmakers are unassailable: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and anyone associated with the French new wave are geniuses. Period. They're bulletproof, and to take a shot at them, whether by way of their body of work or an individual film, is to invite not just immediate derision but excommunication from the ranks of Approved Cinematic Authorities.

There's another version of this intellectual lockstep, one tier down from the universally acknowledged great masters, having to do with cult films by directors that nobody has heard of, other than those benighted souls who have spent their every waking hour in a sticky-floored repertory house. These are the films that over the past few years have often arrived in theaters "presented by" such reigning cinematic tastemakers as Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese; you can also find mention of them on such authoritative Web sites as GreenCine.com and in the hilariously on-point "The Film Snob's Dictionary" by David Kamp and Lawrence Levi.

Two films that coincidentally open today at the E Street Cinema come from directors with creditable standing in the annals of film snobbery: Stuart Gordon, whose film "Stuck" stars Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea, and Dario Argento, whose "Mother of Tears: The Third Mother" completes a trilogy he began in 1977. Gordon attained cult status in 1985 with the highly regarded "Re-Animator," an adaptation of a H.P. Lovecraft story. Argento helped create an entire film sub-industry in his native Italy known as giallo. Both filmmakers traffic in the kind of graphic horror made profitable by such franchises as "Saw" and "Hostel" but enjoy pride of place, along with zombie auteur George A. Romero, as originators of the cult-horror form.

Because Gordon and especially Argento possess such cinematic cred, any self-respecting critic should greet the arrival of "Stuck" and "Mother of Tears" with the requisite phrases about dark humor, recurring visual tropes and pulp sensibilities. The tone should be ironic and supremely knowing: If, dear reader, you can't hang with the kind of graphic gore, sadistic violence, protracted torture and perverse sexist subtext that run through these movies, then you're obviously not in on the joke. You're a philistine. File under "Square, hopeless."

Hornaday, however, bravely resists falling into "intellectual lockstep." She tells those snooty film snobs where they can stick their cult directors. And she does it boldly, with no regard for what it will do to her career. Damn the consequences, she can see these particular emperors have no clothes and she's got the guts to call it like it is.

Why do I hate this? Because it is absurd self-aggrandizement based on half-truths, misunderstandings, and dismissive stereotypes, the final result being that it turns her lack of interest or knowledge about certain genres or filmmakers into a positive good rather than a gap in expertise.

First, let's look at her characterization of Gordon. Sure, I like him enough, but does he really occupy "pride of place, along with zombie auteur George A. Romero, as originators of the cult-horror form"? Stuart arrived on the scene nearly two decades after Night of the Living Dead. The number of directors and movies that arrived in the 20 years between those two flicks, all of which have a much greater claim for being "originators of the cult-horror form" than Gordon. Even among horror fans Gordon's a bit of a one-hit wonder.

As for Argento, perhaps I'm not self-respecting, but I haven't been booted out of the horror blog-o-sphere for thinking Argento's overrated. Maybe the jackbooted film taste police just haven't reached me yet. Or, and I know this sounds crazy, there's simply no goose-stepping central authority of horror fandom. Wait, wait: hear me out. Maybe, just maybe, horror fans are a pretty diverse group of people with varied tastes. Maybe we all apply slightly different critical criteria to the films we enjoy. We engage in dialog with other fans about relative merits. Sometimes we even respect one another's different opinions (not on the Internet, of course, but elsewhere it can happen).

But, then again, I'm not one of those who have spent my entire life in a "sticky-floored repertory house" (shades of the porn theater, that bit), so how I even know about the unbelievably obscure directors is a mystery. In the era of Netflix and the Internet, her characterization of the cult film world is a bizarre fantasy, not unlike the imaginary hordes of socially-stunted troglodyte basement-dwelling bloggers that mainstream literary critics fear are battering down the establishment's draw bridge.

Claiming outsider status is the last refuge of the intellectual bigot. When you can't make a good argument for defending your limited criteria for what makes a good work of art (and we all, by the nature that we don't have infinite capacities for appreciation, have limited criteria), you instead suggest that the issue at hand is that a cabal of elites have foisted what you don't like on you. Genre guys pretend that they've been marginalized by an evil conspiracy of elitist critics. Critics play the same game, simply reversing the positions to become the embattled defenders of true quality. Both sides appeal to the sadly innate American distrust of expertise and love of claiming the status of the righteous victim. You're a victim, fighting for truth and justice. This isn't about the fact that your tastes, knowledge base, and experiences might be ill-suited for the rigorous evaluation of these films. Rather, this is about how you, alone out of all your cynical and mean-spirited film critic ilk, had the mad courage to take a stand. This is what we do with our unexamined prejudices: we dress them up in the shoddy borrowed stage-finery of the "last honest man."

We salute you Ann Hornaday. You're so brave. When the collective weight of the film criticism world crashes down on you for your brave, so very very brave, refusal to toe the line, rest assured that you've got an open invite to guest blog here. Together maybe we can hold our against those barbaric hordes of, shudder to think, cult film fans.

Movies: What's opera, D. Argento?

The standout image of Argento's Opera is a particularly nasty torture prop that is, perhaps, the most metaphorically freighted bit of slasher tech since Mark Lewis's camera in Peeping Tom. The image is so powerfully stark, S & M chic, and meta that it appears on nearly every poster and box cover for the flick. If you can't make it out in the image above, the brutally low-fi device works thusly: A piece of masking tape, on which the baddie places several needles, is placed under the eye; the result is that an attempt to close the eye results in the needles jabbing the upper eyelid. As the baddie informs his victim, any effort to close your eyes will result in shredding your eyelid.

Ouch.

(Actually, as shown, I'm pretty sure the device wouldn't work. Fitting it to the bottom eyelid would make the needles spread away from the eye. Fitting it right above the cheekbone makes the needles point toward the eye. This, admittedly, would suck, but it wouldn't jab your eyelids. Plant it on the cheekbone and you could blink without ever coming into contact with the needles. Still, in cinematic torture device design, as in gift giving, it is the thought that counts.)

Lest I be accused of making po-mo viewer-response hay out of this, Argento himself admits that this nastiness was inspired by his relationship to his audiences. Argento claims the idea came fairly late in the process of developing the flick. He was working on the film, knew there would be some over the top scenes, and thought that audience members would want to close their eyes at several points in the film. He imagined placing these needle-eye thingies on audience members to keep them looking. Sadly, the law prevented Argento from actually deploying this cinematic innovation and he was forced to settle for using the concept in a purely fictional context. How one suffers for one's art!

This seems to me to be a very European conceit about violently transgressive flicks and the audience for them. For reasons unclear to me, some Euro directors like to think of their films as endurance tests. Metaphorically, Argento wants to torture his audience. I'm reminded of French director Gaspar Noé, who has claimed that he's made films intended to be "universally despised." Noé, in his pandering art house pseudo-provocation Irréversible, actually included frequencies in the soundtrack meant to induce nausea in the audience. The conceit is that the Euro filmmakers are throwing these art bombs into the thick of bourgeois audiences. These thick head cattle-people will, of course, bellow out their rage at having their sensibilities offended. And the artist then takes this bellowing as proof that he's transcended the Victorian values that, somehow, are believed to still dominate society. The films are a test: if you can't take it, you must be some middle-class philistine who "just doesn't get it." Ultimately, this is, of course, a self-serving delusion. The audiences for these flicks want both the extreme horror and the sense that they've somehow transgressed. Like the directors who make them, the audiences for these films are self-selected viewers who want invest these brutal self-flagellations with a sense of intellectual and moral superiority. They've discovered sensations and meanings beyond the mental confines of the rubes that watch mainstream films. Like a whore hired to smack about her john a bit, these directors offer a sense of violation that is, in fact, simply part of transaction between to mutually serving parties. The people supposedly targeted by these flicks won't watch them. Some folks, I reckon, just won't pay to be abused.

The irony is that I too take the needle to the eye trap as a metaphor for Argento's relationship to the audience. Only, for me, I see it as a curiously apt metaphor for why I keep returning to Argento's flicks when he's been so damningly mediocre so many times. As regular readers know, I feel that Argento flirts dangerously with the not-so-coveted title of "Most Overrated Horror Director." Though there are many folks out there with a far greater knowledge of his work than I, what I've seen is wildly uneven in quality. His love of creating visual effects and his almost stubborn refusal to yield anything to cohesive narrative puts Argento into this place where he's either got to wow you with stylish filmmaking or you immediately notice that the whole flick is a shambling mess. By my reckoning, Argento is operating at a 50% wow-rate.

Fortunately, Opera is in the happy-half of that output. The flick follows a young understudy, prosaically named Betty, who is suddenly thrust into the limelight when the diva of a production of Verdi's Macbeth is injured in an auto accident. The new-found fame comes with a big downside: a murderous stalker with a mysterious connection to the young singer's past. As the stalker's deranged obsession intensifies, he begins bumping off the people close to Betty. In the overly elaborate manner of all filmic serial killers, the stalker like to tie Betty up, apply the previously mentioned eye-needle thingy, and force Betty to watch the deaths of her friends and coworkers. The police prove useless and it is up to Betty and the opera's director – a former horror film director turned stager of operas (a nod to an autobiographical "what if?": Argento almost mounted an opera himself, but the deal fell through) – to uncover and thwart the rampaging psycho. The "mystery" un-unfolds in a typically Argentine manner, which is to say that clues appear and disappear with connection or explanation, nobody does much in the way of actual investigating, and, when enough bodies pile up, the killer reveals all in a ten-second bit of exposition that doesn't make all that much sense.

The make or break in an Argento flick is the look, and Opera has Argento's stylishly overripe fingerprints all over it. The camera swoops, cranes, and twists throughout the flick. Argento punctuates scene with cut shots of characters internal organs – rapidly beating hearts, blood pulsing through veins, and literally thumping brains. Curiously, Argento seems to be under the misconception that the brain, like the heart, beats. Scenes are washed in blues, red, and greens. The sets are lavish. Most of the film takes place in a truly astounding opera house, played by the Parma theater in Italy, and the fashionably appointed and dubiously large apartment of the understudy. (There is, of course, a street shot in which Betty, having survived her first attack, runs through the rain. When in trouble, Argento's women never call the cops or run to a friend's house. They prefer to run through rain-soaked streets until help or more danger finds them.) And the single image of Betty's eye, hungry needles waiting for her to blink, is a mind-haunting image. The soundtrack, while it includes some of the obligatory embarrassing cheese metal, also includes some work from Brian Eno and some interesting scoring by long-time Argento collaborator Claudio Simonetti, former keyboard player for the prog-rock band Goblin. Though not quite as overwhelming as Susperia, Opera is a full offering of Argento's opulently cool filmmaking.

This is a flick for fans of Argento (even fence-sitters like myself), especially his more giallo-centric efforts, to which Opera is an overt throwback. It has all the standard flaws that Argento has, through force of repetition, turned into something like idiosyncratic genre markers. If his lack of narrative logic, disdain for characterization, and soft spot for really bad heavy metal turn you off, you won't find him suddenly reformed here. However, if you dig on his mannered and strangely beautiful approach to horror, Opera's got a lot to like.

Movies: Show some skin.

Counting the original short story, Dario Argento's Pelts, one of his contributions to the on-going Showtime Masters of Horror series, is third version of the story I've come across. The second was the comic adaptation of the same that appear in the pages of Doomed (reviewed, precious reader of my heart, in this very blog).

The plot of the original involves a trapper who, while checking his fur traps, comes across several bizarre little animals, the likes of which he's never seen before. Being a trapper, he immediately takes them home and skins them. Problem is that contact with these things brings doom: usually you maul yourself in some horrific and bloody way, but, sometimes, if you get lucky, you might end up getting it in a struggle with somebody close to you and you'll both do each other in. Joy! We watch the furs make their way up the fur trade chain, killing folks all the way, until, finally the furs put paid to a fur coat maker and the woman he wishes was his girlie.

Argento follows this structure loosely – the movie revolves around a collection of cursed pelts – but he expands on nearly every aspect of the story, in most cases expanding on the original in some significant way. First, Argento makes the fur coat maker the central protagonist of the tale and reworks the coat-maker's doomed un-relationship with an ex-model lesbian stripper into the central conflict of the tale. This is a significant shift: in the original, the furrier is just another link in the chain of the curse. This is a smart move. The furrier (played to sleazy perfection by, of all people, Meat Loaf – who I notice is now going by a weird combo of his real name and the nickname his gym coach gave him: "Meat Loaf Aday") is a completely unsympathetic and revolting character, but the focus on him gives the story a dramatic unity. In Argento's version, we get a context for the whole story. The furrier is a small time player in the fashion biz: he gets the second tier materials, works with (this is suggested, but not ever stated) illegal labor, and has no real hope of being anything else than a bottom feeder in industry. To make things worse, he's obsessed with a stripper with lesbian tendencies who seems to enjoy taunting him. A more out of luck loser, it is hard to imagine. Argento spends quite a few feet establishing that this guy is looking for a break, and is undeserving of one, before he introduces the pelts.

The second major derivation has to do with the pelts themselves. Instead of making them the skins of some unknown animal, the pelts are raccoon pelts. The raccoon pelts are linked to some strange ruins and a country-witch character that serves to provide exposition. On one hand, this does explain why the pelts are cursed. Unfortunately, it also causes the careful watcher to ask just what ancient city of Native Americans is supposed to exist in Washington state. It's an explanation that opens up more answers that it settles. But this is a minor misstep.

Overall, Argento's gives the Masters of Horror a genuine shot in the arm. It is a violent, dark, and trashy bit of work, but it so vibrates with energy and life that it captures the attention of the viewer and holds it as surely as the steel jaws of a raccoon trap. Pelts is the blackest, most bloody installment of the Masters series I've seen, but it never seems pointless or pandering. I must admit that I'm mixed on Argento, but this one is a solid work – one that follows Jenifer, another win – and makes Argento's contributions to the series well worth the attention of any horror fan.

Movie: Bonfire of the Inanities.

The flicks of Dario Argento, the legendary Italian horror director, seem to be an all or nothing proposition. His work is either utterly brilliant, such as the justly praised classic Susperia, or they are abysmal, such as the absurd and tedious Stendhal Syndrome. Unfortunately, Inferno, Argento's follow-up to Susperia and the second film in the Three Mothers trilogy, firmly belongs in the latter camp.

Inferno involves a young woman who, after reading a book about the sinister Three Sisters, becomes convinced that one of the creepy witches is trapped in the basement of her New York apartment building (New York being played by sound stage in Italy). This is bad news as, not only are the Three Sisters the very personification of fear and death, but they also make your neighborhood stink. Seriously. Because our curious heroine knows too much, she's quickly dispatched by the forces of eeee-vil. Enter her brother, who has the raw on-screen charisma of a man who has accidentally stumbled onto a movie but has decided to make a go of it. This dramatic null-value will finish his sister's investigation and, ultimately, come face to face with the almost scary witch.

The problems with Inferno are, it seems to me, endemic to Argento's entire body of work. As a director, Argento relies on visual bravado to charge through plots as thin and full of holes as a deli-sliced sliver of Swiss. Sometimes, this strategy works. In Susperia, the lavish sets and beautiful imagery take our mind of the fact that you don't even have to pretend to know what is going on to enjoy the flick. In some instances, Argento even manages to turn his fairly weak narrative sense into a dramatic strength. There's something fairy-tale like about the creaky plotting in Phenomena that adds, rather than detracts, from the film.

Problem is that Argento's visual sense is not always up to the challenge. Compared to sets of Susperia, which are like some Beardsley illustration come to life, the apartment sets of Inferno are mundane and timid. Where expressive lighting drew you deeper into the phantasmagoric world of the former film; in Inferno you're more likely to find yourself wondering why somebody painted all the street lights of New York City red. Unable to lull to viewer with the hypnotic force of his style, Argento leaves us free to puzzle over dead end subplots, details that never add up, and plot twists that are more confusing that shocking.

I've got no beef with putting style before substance. If you can make it work and that's how you want to swing, that's cool. But if that's the plan, you have to carry it off, and that's a lot harder than it sounds. Argento's done it before, but he doesn't do it here. Using the hard-hitting Cast of the 1913 Silent Film Classic The Rose of San Juan Film Rating System, I'm giving Inferno a weak Vivian Rich.

Movies: Makes Sophia Coppola's appearance in "Godfather III" look like a great idea.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, who Dario Argento paid homage to in the 2005 mash note flick Do You Like Hitchcock, the old Italian master seems to have entered a sort of uneasy old age. Like the Hitchcock of Frenzy and Family Plot, Argento seems to work in fits and starts. Sometimes he seems to be courting mainstream audiences (see The Card Player), other times he's fully in the luxuriously creepy and hypnotic groove that nobody else can quite do – but even then his flicks are more "interesting" than "good."

The Stendhal Syndrome his 1996 horror-thriller is clear from the second category of late-era Argento. The film follows the misfortunes of a young police officer, played by the laconic Asia Argento, as she pursues a mysterious serial rapists/murderer. The trail leads her to the Uffizi gallery of Florence where she finds out that she suffers the eponymous syndrome – the symptoms of which, if the film is to be believed, include intrusively soundtracks, swirling editing, and falling victim to some very cheesy CGI effects. This would be bad enough for our heroine, but things get even worse as the serial rapist and murder catches and violates her.

Now is filming your own daughter's rape scene a brave directorial move or just sleazy? Before you make a decision on that, I want to point out that previously, in a gratuitously weird CGI shot, Argento took the camera down Asia's throat. Innovative camera work or freaky Freudian incest moment? You be the judge.

Despite the brutality of the attack, the police officer escapes the rapist. He gets away and she ends up on administrative leave. The impact of what has happened to her has knocked her life out of whack – though the film seems to strangely hedge its bets about whether it was the attack of Stendhal syndrome or her being the victim of rape that has so impacted her, as if Argento seems to think that fainting in the presence of classic art and being raped where emotionally equivalent.

Eventually, growing increasingly isolated from her co-workers and her boyfriend, the officer returns to her hometown. Unfortunately, the rapist follows her and she is captured yet again. The rapist holds her prisoner in what appears to be an empty sewer shaft and rapes her, again. (Is Argento twice as brave for filming his daughter's repeated rape, or is this twice as icky?)

At this point in the movie we get into a handful of twists that I cannot get into without giving up what is supposed to be the chief mystery of the flick. Suffice it to say that things get weirder from her on in.

Rarely do I see a movie that I cannot form a clear opinion of. The Stendhal Syndrome is one of those odd works. Compared to my favorite Argento flicks, like Susperia and Phenomena, it has a more gritty, less dream-like quality. This is not to say it is more realistic. Instead, it doesn't have that sort of hypnotic power that the other films, which lose in a world of their own making, have. This is a strangely flat, toneless film. This isn't to say that it is poorly shot. But for a filmmaker like Argento, the film's dull colors and inert sets are strange. (He even manages to shrink the Uffizi gallery - TSS being the only film ever allowed to film inside – into a strangely generic feeling place. How could the director of Susperia not exploit a set like the Uffizi gallery?) The plot is compelling, but marred with what can only be described as overt moments of incestuous weirdness. It is, by Argento's own standards, trashy. Finally, unlike the female leads of Susperia and Phenomena, Asia Argento's cop is purposefully less likable and sympathetic, a point which we can't discuss further without stepping on the end of the flick.

In the finally analysis, what to make of this curious flick? If you're not a fan of Argento, I'd avoid it. This oddity doesn't really showcase the rich, literate style of horror that's made him a legendary horror director. If, on the other hand, you are a fan of the man, then this flick is worth seeing if only to see the famed director work in an unusually restrained visual mode while attempting to work with such strangely unhinged personal subject matter. Borrowing the Rest Stations of the A5 Autoroute Movie Rating System from Roger Ebert, I'm giving The Stendhal Syndrome a reserved, but not necessarily condemnatory, Km 211 Le Bois Moyen rating.

FUN SCREAMIN' FACT:
It has been theorized that legendary horror writer H. P. Lovecraft suffered from Stendhal Syndrome; only in his case it was architecture and not paintings or sculptures that set him off. In a private letter to one of his friends, he described reacting to the architecture of New York City with such overwhelming emotions that he nearly fainted away in the street. Some have theorized that the surreal, monumental, and otherworldly architecture that appears regularly in Lovecraft's stories was inspired in part by his own extreme reactions to architecture.