Only now does it occur to me... THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1963)

Only now does it occur to me... that Dario Argento may have tucked an incredibly subtle homage to his mentor, Mario Bava, within his 1980 film INFERNO. (INFERNO being, perhaps, one of the most Bava-influenced of all the Argentos––its opening setpiece in a flooded manse was even guest-directed by Mario Bava himself.)

First, let's go back to 1963, when Bava was directing the granddaddy of all gialli, the Hitchcock-inspired THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, which is still the only giallo I can think of that ends with a joke about a priest accidentally smoking a whole bunch of weed.

Anyway, there's a scene in THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH where our heroine (Letícia Román) sneaks away from home at midnight and into a cab which drops her off at a mysterious rendezvous in Rome

at a spooky building in a deserted plaza with an ominous fountain in the foreground. The cab pulls off and she faces the unknown alone.

At a similar moment, storywise, Argento has one of his three protagonists (the plot of INFERNO follows a sort of "hot potato-protagonist" motif), played by Eleonora Giorgi, take a midnight cab ride to a mysterious rendezvous in Rome

 

at a spooky building in a deserted plaza with an ominous fountain in the foreground. 

 The cab pulls off and she faces the unknown alone.

I don't think I would have noticed this, had I not watched both THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and INFERNO within a short span, but it's likely the smallest tip of the hat from pupil to mentor... or perhaps it's something more. Argento fell ill with hepatitis during the making of INFERNO and directed several sequences from his hospital bed. And in addition to the opening setpiece, it is said that some of the second unit work was directed by Mario Bava––so it's possible that this bit is not actually a minor homage by Argento, but, in fact, pure, unadulterated Bava! Yes, I am a giallo nerd.

Film Review: KILL, BABY...KILL! (1966, Mario Bava)

Stars: 4.3 of 5.
Running Time: 85 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Starring Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, ZORRO '75), Erika Blanc (I AM SARTANA TRADE YOUR GUNS FOR A COFFIN, SHOOT GRINGO SHOOT!), Fabienne Dali (LE DOULOS). Assistant directed by Lamberto Bava (DEMONS 2, BLASTFIGHTER). Music by Carlo Rustichelli (DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE).
Tag-line: "Makes you shiver and shake!"
Best one-liner: "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

A woman screams. "NO, NO, NOOOOOO!" She dashes across a garish, Eastmancolor landscape.


She flings herself from a great height, impaling herself on the spiked fence below. Cue opening credits. That's Italian horror for you in a nutshell- gory, stylish, and abrupt. As such, KILL, BABY...KILL is an untamable mini-masterpiece. Sure, you may never really connect to the story or the characters, but... oh, the spectacle! The artistry! The ingenuity! The cobwebs! It's Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James fed through a rainbow-colored meat grinder and transmogrified into batshit crazy Italo-Gothic fettuccine. It's full of striking, stirring imagery: Four red-hooded men solemnly convey a coffin across the countryside in silhouette. The camera wanders through a mist-enshrouded graveyard full of moss-covered masonry lit by a deep, dark blue sky. Bava's frenetic zooms and pans (i.e., a POV shot of a girl on a swing) elevate those basic cinematic techniques to new pizzazz-y heights: the sheer, intoxicating joy with which he tackles these simple elements recalls the boundless imaginations of cinema pioneers like Méliès or Lumière. Consequently, Bava's (and this film's) influence on cinema is staggering: Argento, Kubrick, Fellini, Burton, and Lynch have all followed in his wake at one time or another.



As an aside, this film's influence on TWIN PEAKS cannot be understated. We have out-of-town experts and inspectors carrying out an investigation of one in a series of murders, which are blamed on an ambiguous, localized evil. During the autopsies, coins are discovered- inserted into the corpse's hearts (á la BOB's fingernail messages). Later, when entering the mansion which apparently is the locus of said evil, our hero must chase a doppelgänger of himself through a looping, interdimensional hallway- a scene duplicated almost exactly with Agent Cooper is in the Black Lodge in the Season 2 finale:





Giacomo Rossi-Stuart catches up with himself...

...as does Kyle MacLachlan.

In the end, who says you need narrative coherence to make a superior film? Not Mr. Bava! Almost five stars.

-Sean Gill

Film Review: MANIAC! (1980, William Lustig)

Stars: 4 of 5.
Running Time: 87 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Joe Spinell (everything from STARCRASH to CRUISING to ROCKY to TAXI DRIVER to THE GODFATHER to THE SEVEN-UPS– damn!), Caroline Munro (everything from DR. PHIBES to CAPTAIN KRONOS to SINBAD to THE SPY WHO LOVED ME to TO DIE FOR to STARCRASH), Abigail Clayton (HOT COOKIES, SPIRIT OF SEVENTY-SEX), makeup and acting by Tom Savini, and was supposed to star Argento's then-squeeze Daria Nicolodi, but there were scheduling complications of some kind- stock footage from Argento's INFERNO was used, however.
Tag-lines: "I warned you not to go out tonight."
Best multi-liner: "Now you tell me what I should do. I heard about it, I always do. I can't go out for a minute. It's impossible. Fancy girls, in their fancy dresses and lipstick, laughing and dancing. Should you stop them? I can't stop them. But you do, don't you? And they can't laugh and they can't dance anymore. You've got to stop, or they'll take you away from me. I will never, ever, let them take you away from me. You're mine now forever. And, I'm so happy."
Fun fact: Michael Sembello's "Maniac," later toned down and used in FLASHDANCE, was originally composed for this film!

MANIAC. Before I begin- let's talk about the director. Bill Lustig, is a pretty damned interesting guy. Like another underground NYC auteur, Abel Ferrara, he started off directing blue pictures, and his first 'mainstream' feature was a Manhattan slasher with the killer as the protagonist (like Ferrara’s DRILLER KILLER). Lustig’s also Jake LaMotta's nephew, a friend and collaborator of Larry Cohen, and currently runs Blue Underground, a grand purveyor of paracinema and ridiculous Italian gems.

Also, I’ve really gotta hand it to him for having the word "Maniac" in the title of about half of his directorial output. Anyway, on to the MANIAC at hand: it's good.

It's got that classic 70's NYC gritty realism, Tom Savini gore (and a cameo as "Disco Boy"),


lots o' hookers, the legendary Caroline Munro,

and an amazing fashion montage set to some rockin' 80's tunes. Joe Spinell (he’s kind of like Ron Jeremy meets Vincent Price)

is damned scary, and there’s something about his delivery that is consistently, terrifyingly believable. The film is a love letter to the Italian slashers that Lustig adored (black-gloved killer, female victims, over-the-top kills, visuals that pop, and childhood traumas like Bava and Argento, mannequin madness like Lenzi's SPASMO) and as that, it succeeds. (I'd also say that it was probably the direct precursor to HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER.) Overall, a very solid underground slasher, and, in my opinion, it’s far better and more personal than the other Savini effort of 1980, the original FRIDAY THE 13TH. Four stars.

-Sean Gill

Film Review: THE TAKING OF POWER BY LOUIS XIV (1966, Roberto Rossellini)

Stars: 2 of 5.
Running Time: 93 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Jean-Marie Patte, Raymond Jourdan, Katharina Renn, Dominique Vincent.
Tag-lines: None.
Best one-liner(s): "Music, please, my brother!"


This film isn't really bad, per sé, for a TV movie, but maybe they should have titled it THE TAKING OF QUAALUDES BY LOUIS XIV. Yeah, not a whole lot of energy there. Louis himself really pisses me off here. I don't know if it's the fact that he's READING EVERY LINE OFF OF CUE CARDS, but I'm gonna go ahead and say it: he sucks. I mean, Rossellini's not exactly my favorite director of all time, but if I was cast as the lead and TITLE CHARACTER in a Rossellini film, I'm pretty sure I would take the fucking time to learn my lines.

That's the insufferable little cue-card-reader on the left.

The pacing's a little off, too: Mazarin takes like a half hour to kick off (time to smell his bedpan again) and we don't even get the fancy period costumes till well over an hour in. And even then, the costumes still smack a little of community theater.

Louis gets a little less annoying when he gets his 'stache, but then most of the screentime is wasted on the notorious marathon eating scene.

Let's go back in time. Back to when the gods of Italian cinema were meting out various filmic talents. They messed up. They accidentally gave ALL the restraint and subtlety, intended for entire generations of filmmakers, to just a couple guys, like de Sica and Rossellini. The others had to compensate for lack of self-control, and it wasn't even their fault. If Lucio Fulci had directed this, Mazarin would have died by ever, ever so slowly having his eye impaled by a sharp object. If Mario Bava had directed this, Louis XIV would have rolled around in bed naked with a pile of money and a bodacious German babe, and his court's fashions would have changed to black and yellow leather outfits with spandex accents and insanely popped collars. But Roberto Rossellini directed it. Which means he probably did his research and everything depicted on screen is gonna be pretty accurate.

Hey, if Rossellini put it in the movie those drapes must be historically accurate.

It might even make a great background movie for some history professors having an 'Age of Enlightenment party.' But it kinda fails as entertainment... of any kind. Two stars.

Film Review: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965, Mario Bava)

Stars: 4 of 5.
Running Time: 88 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Barry Sullivan, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Antonio Perez Olea, Lamberto Bava, Ivan Rassimov.
Tag-line: " This was the day the universe trembled before the demon forces of the killer planet!"
Best exchange:
Captain: One entire crew lost; two of our own crew gone. Bert dead, Eldon disappeared. And this unknown enemy keeps getting closer.
Doctor: The enemy is also becoming visible.
Captain: What do you mean by that?
Doctor: Well, you saw something. Something not quite identifiable out of the corner of your eye.
Captain: Ah, yes. As if it were composed of little globes of light, something fleeting, nothing definite. And the minute I looked at the things directly, they were gone.

Alternate titles: Demon Planet, Planet of Blood, Space Mutants, Terror in Space, The Haunted Planet, The Haunted World, The Outlawed Planet, The Planet of Terror, The Planet of the Damned, Terrore nello spazio (original title).

Bava strikes again, with basically FORBIDDEN PLANET meets DANGER: DIABOLIK. This film has been a tremendous influence on subsequent sci-fi/horror from ALIEN to GHOSTS OF MARS, but its American title is about as appropriate as if THE THING had been named THE VAMPIRE, or if MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE had been called MAXIMUM VAMPIRES. The setup is this: starships investigating a phantom signal decide to land on a mysterious planet, whereupon the crew starts, without provocation, whaling on and beating the crap out of each other.


Then they investigate and find some enormous alien skeletons. If that doesnt sound like a terrific setup to you, then you probably shouldnt be watching these sorts of (Italian) movies. In fact, theres a line near the beginning of the film that is a beautiful metaphor for this type of cinema (lets say Bava, Argento, Leone, et al.): "Without this meteor rejector, we'd look like a piece of Swiss cheese, our ship would be down in less than a minute." In this metaphor, the meteors are plot holes, incomprehensibility, and bad dubbing. They can kill any movie in seconds for almost anyone. But what is the meteor rejector, you say? It's the mise-en-scene. It's style over substance that works! It's imaginative sets, colored fog, breathtaking matte paintings, inspired theatrical lighting, kickass costumes-

(black and yellow leather uniforms with insanely popped collars), blinking control panels and other made up technology- in short, it's the crazy Italian spectacle. And in the hands of an operatic virtuoso director, it works almost every time. Bravo, Mario!

-Sean Gill

Film Review: DEEP RED (Dario Argento, 1975)

Stars: 5 of 5.
Running Time: 126 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Goblin, Gabriele Lavia, Luigi Kuveiller
Tag-line: "When was the last time you were REALLY SCARED!!!? PSYCHO? The EXORCIST? JAWS? Now there's DEEP RED."
Best one-liner(s): "Come on, Tarzan, why don't you try me? ...Indian wrestling!" [She then clearly assumes typical arm-wrestling stance, NOT Indian wrestling, which Webster's defines as "a form of wrestling in which two opponents, lying supine in reversed position, lock their near arms, raise and lock their near legs, and attempt to force the other's leg down." Gotta love Argento- this is the same guy that refers to bulimia as anorexia in TRAUMA.]


Four reasons why DEEP RED is an enduring masterpiece, not just as a giallo, but as something that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the other magnum opuses that emerged from the cinema of the 70's:

#1. The visuals. DEEP RED pops and astounds in a manner that puts other filmmakers to shame. Whether it be incredible camerawork that was only possible because they were shooting non-synch sound, magnificent closeups with precise tracking, or exquisite architecture framing the scenes, Argento hits every shot out of the ballpark. And even though it lacks the sustained lighting of SUSPIRIA, I still might name this as Argento's most beautiful film. Every lesson he learned from Bava is on display here, and it is visually breathtaking.



#2. GOBLIN. In their first collaboration with Dario, Goblin shines, crashing onto the scene as a combination of ELP, J.S. Bach, and 70's hardcore bass lines. They would later evolve into Italo Disco of similar weight, but here they are perfect. I think anyone would be ecstatic to have this stuff be their theme music.

#3. The banter. Daria Nicolodi and David Hemmings cultivate a genuinely amusing relationship, with arm-wrestling and awkward Italo-British tension. The fact that it's done with Hawksian zest reminds the viewer that all too often, banter is utter crap or detrimental to a story.

#4. The ornately crafted mystery. Argento keeps a flawless balance between the heroes, background characters, and the audience, with each knowing more and less than the others at any given time. Layers of mystery are peeled away visually (writing on a steam-covered mirror, a walled-in room, a buried mural) so that YOU viscerally discover the answers along with the characters. And the icing on the cake is the fact that a crucial clue divulging the killer's identity is hidden in plain view at the start of the picture, and not unveiled, Agatha Christie-like, at the end as a deus ex machina letdown. It holds you in its grasp until the final, absurdly abrupt moment... "You have been watching...DEEP RED."



-Sean Gill

Film Review: DEMONS 2 (1986, Lamberto Bava)

Stars: 3 of 5.
Running Time: 91 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Dario Argento, Asia Argento.
Tag-line: "Let's party!"
Best one-liner(s): "We CAME to celeBRATE you, not your DRESS." (Eurotrash accent emphasis added.)


Having Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava (Mario's son) collaborate on a film is pretty similar to what the outcome would be if, say, the inmates in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST had collaborated on a novel during that scene where they're totally wasted. The end result is going to be at once hilarious and kinda scary, overall it's not gonna make a whole lot of sense, but ultimately, it's gonna hold your attention in the way that only the work of lunatics can. We got a lot going on here. We got an apartment complex full of people who exist in a post-events-of-DEMONS world, but they happen to be watching DEMONS on TV. The demons come out of the TV (in a pretty awesome VIDEODROME-inspired scene), and start their crap all over again. (I'm afraid that by posting this photo, I will lead some to believe that DEMONS 2 is way cooler than it actually is.)

Then the heroes have to destroy TVs. So I guess there's some sort of anti-TV message. There's a lot of good stuff going on in this movie. We got 11 year old Asia Argento delivering an amazing performance, but then becoming part of a subplot that kinda trails off. We got the seamstress from OPERA as the birthday girl who starts flipping out about horrible 'party crashers' who politely called to ask if they were invited. Well, it doesn't matter cause everyone gets turned into demons anyway. We got the Italian version of Ken Foree (DAWN OF THE DEAD) as the hardass shotgun totin' gym owner:

We got some of the worst dubbing in Italo Horror history, and they even shot it in English! It's well worth a watch if you're into the volatile combination of unintentional Eurotrash laffs and nihilistic horror.

Also of note, Bava is awesomely pretentious on the audio commentary, saying he 'knew DEMONS was making a sociological impact on the populace' when he heard kids on the street saying to each other, 'stop acting like a demon!' You know what, you're absolutely right, Lamberto.

-Sean Gill