SLEEPLESS (2001)

  I had thought that I had seen this Dario Argento movie before but I guess not since it all seemed new to me. Not bad for a bloody 2000's giallo by Argento. Definitely better than his previous film that crappy PHANTOM OF THE OPERA interpretation and more reminiscent of his earlier best stuff. You get the expected gore including a gruesome death by a musical instrument, fingers chopped off, a head rolls and lots of stabbings occur.  A hunchbacked dwarf is our main suspected killer, nursery rhymes become a major plot point and somehow Max Von Sydow agreed to be in this! While there seem to be a few plotholes(who exactly called the police at the end?) it's still an entertaining one if you're seen all of Dario's classics already. 

       Super generic trailer because it's the 2000s and everyone has lost all their creativity!:

 

Released in Italy as NONHOSONNO which sounds very Japanese to me but I'm no linguist!:

THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970)

  While this is not my favorite of director Dario Argento's giallo films(DEEP RED holds that position) it is the one that kicks off his run of super stylish mystery-killer flicks and made him a director to watch from then on in the process. So it deserves credit just for historical purposes if nothing else.  Argento was called "The Italian Hitchcock" after this for obvious reasons but his films would get quite a bit more graphic and colorful than anything ol' Hitch ever put on film as time went on. This one was somehow originally only rated GP when released in American but it's still an important starting point and essential viewing for Eurotrash connoisseurs.  AKA POINT OF TERROR and THE PHANTOM OF TERROR

Japanese poster:

DARIO ARGENTO'S DRACULA (2012)

 Classic Italian director Dario Argebnto's last film and sadly his worst! It took me a few attempts to make it through this cgi-filled crapfest. Perhaps if this was made back in the 70s or 80s it wouldn't be so awful. There are some gory bits and some nice boobs on our vampire chick but of course everything is filmed so terribly it's hard to care. This is extra depressing considering the things Argento has done in the past. How a director could go from the visual style of something like SUSPIRIA to this flat-looking(if I didn't know any better I woulda sworn this was shot for Italian T.V. or something) garbage is beyond me. Also I have to note that there's a stupid giant praying mantis in this that Dracula decides to turn himself into. I think it's mandated by law that if you talk about this film that is the dumb thing that you're supposed to solely focus on. 

 Released in 3D under the title DRACULA 3D back when everything was coming out in 3D versions. I doubt the extra dimension helps much. As usual stick with the classics unless you really need to see everything done by once-great horror personalities. 

GIALLO (2009)

 I've avoided watching this one and most of Dario Argento's more recent films because of all the negative shit I hear about them from everyone. While I can understand being disappointed in the look of this movie and the general blandness of it, especially when compared to Argento's classics like DEEP RED or SUSPIRIA, I didn't think it was terrible. Maybe I just have very low expectations for modern movies but I found this at least mildly entertaining and way better than that terrible PHANTOM OF THE OPERA that Mr. Dario crapped out. It's all pretty basic psychopathic-murderer-on-the-loose stuff with a couple of scenes of mild torture and bloodshed and I was a little disappointed that this wasn't actually a giallo but is just called that in reference to the killer's skin-tone. Pretty sneaky Dario! Overall though it wasn't as painful of a watch as I had been warned.
 Apparently the two lead roles here were originally supposed to have been played by Vincent Gallo and Asia Argento which probably woulda been better. Then Ray Liotta was cast which also might have been interesting. As it ended up lead actor Adrien Brody wound up trying to get the release of this movie stopped since he wasn't paid what he was promised. I guess we won't be seeing him in any more low-budget Argento flicks.

This trailer is super generic but that seems to be pretty typical of the majority of modern cinema:

SUSPIRIA (1977)

 The closest thing to a nightmare that has ever been put on film. The perfect mix of soundtrack(The Goblins), amazing visuals and the closest thing a gory Italian horror film has come to being an art movie. The weakest thing about SUSPIRIA, as is the case with many of director Dario Argento's films, is the plot. Basically this is a tale of a gal who's sent to a dance academy that is run by witches. On paper it's the kind of movie that I should hate since nothing makes much sense when you think about it very hard but it's impossible to deny this film's power and catching a 35mm print of it last night just reaffirmed the ability this movie has to convey dread and horror as well as anything I've ever seen.
 There are two sequels about some other witches. One of them, INFERNO, isn't terrible and the final one, MOTHER OF TEARS, is pretty awful.

FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1971)

 This is one of director Dario Argento's early giallo films and it's a surprisingly almost bloodless(rated PG) murder tale with a very Hitchcockian-feel to it. I caught a showing of this a couple of nights ago in a theater but it was far from an optimal viewing experience. There was a live-band playing an accompanying musical set and that woulda been fine except for some reason some jackass decided it would be a good idea to play the dubbed version of this film instead of going with the subtitled print which is what they did the last time I saw a movie presented like this and makes a hell of a lot more sense. In this case the band would play for a bit while the sound was turned down then there were long stretches of silence, then the sound from the movie would come back on, sometimes we would get English dialogue, sometimes Italian. Basically it was a big cluster-fuck of an experience. This definitely colored my viewing of the movie a lot but from what I could make out I'm not sure this woulda been much better even if it was presented correctly. One of the pluses though was Bud Spencer in a rare non-spaghetti-western role. Argento followed this one with DEEP RED which is my favorite movie ever by him and I would recommend watching that over and over again before this one.

DARIO ARGENTO: AN EYE FOR HORROR (2000)

 
 This is a documentary about Italy's great horror master made by British TV and works as a cool greatest hits type of package with scenes from his earliest films all the way up to the 90's(which is right were his movies started to go downhill).  There was a better earlier doc from 1985 called DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR which went a lot more in depth into the man behind the camera and his influences but that one was an actual full-length movie whereas this one is just an hour long TV special so I guess that's understandable.  Either way it's too bad stuff like this would never play on American airwaves for oversensitive types to complain about. 

CAT O' NINE TAILS (1971)

I can appreciate the first two films of  Dario Argento but they've never really been my favorites from his body of work.  I think DEEP RED is the movie where he really hit his stride full force and made some really good films from then on up until around THE STENDAHL SYNDROME after which he turned out some pretty hacky stuff.  This one is Dario's second film and it's probably closer to a Hitchcock film and is way less graphic than most of his other bloodier giallos.  There is a guy who gets smushed by a train so that's something to watch for.  It features Karl Malden as a blind man who likes to do puzzles.  Now I remember Mr. Malden as the American Express guy who made all those commercials telling me "don't leave home without it" so maybe that's why I find it so hard to buy him as a blind guy who hangs out with a little girl and solves crimes in his spare time.  The soundtrack is by the great composer Ennio Morricone but it doesn't really stand out much and seems sorta bland.  Another major problem with this film is it's generally pretty boring and you kind of have to pay attention if you want to follow the plot so it all seems like quite a chore for little pay-off.  Still it's better than the crap Mr. Dario is making currently and it is available on a dollar DVD so maybe it's worth watching if you're on a low-budget and aren't too picky. 

INFERNO (1980)

Stupidest ending of any Dario Argento film so far has to be the one in this film.  There's a person in a rubber Halloween skeleton outfit yelling about being death while an "inferno" engulfs them.  Maybe this looked like a cool ending on paper but the way it's filmed it just comes off as the most embarrassingly ridiculous spectacle you will see in a somewhat serious film.  There's other nonsensical things that happen including a crazy(or is he possessed?) hot dog salesman who kills a guy for drowning cats and other things that may have seemed cool in the script but come off really bizarre on film.  The music, even though not done by Goblin, is cool in its own way.  This is a sequel to SUSPIRIA  but besides the underwater sequence and some strange colored scenes here and there it doesn't come close to being the amazing trip through witchy wonderland that SUSPIRIA is.

OPERA (1987)

Hard to believe that Dario Argento used to make movies as visually exciting as this. Everything works in this. You get gory blood-drenched murders done while heavy metal blasts your eardrums!, crazy-ass Hitchcockian birds ripping eyeballs out of heads, needles taped to eyes, an impromptu autopsy and all kinds of bat-shit insanity going on involving an opera house trying to put on a performance of MACBETH while someone with black leather gloves is getting stab-happy. The ideas even for the simplest killing(a shooting through a keyhole) are overflowing with artistic intent. Even if he can't afford to do the awesome shots that he pulls off in this if Dario put at least half as much thought into his newer stuff people would still be cheering him on instead of dreading his next film. AKA TERROR AT THE OPERA