The Buried Pleasures of SUSPIRIA

Every Dario Argento fan, upon seeing SUSPIRIA for the first time, reacts to this shot of Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) entering the secret domain of Mater Suspiriorum with the same gleeful note of recogition. Here the art direction seems to pay specific tribute to Argento's directorial debut, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE [L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970]. But upon reviewing parts of the film again, I noticed something I hadn't caught after I don't know how many viewings.

In the opening scene at the Freiberg airport, we are given this subjective shot of the exit, whose double glass doors precisely mirror the double-doored art gallery entrance where Tony Musante is trapped to witness the attempted murder that sets BIRD in motion. Since this scene was not actually shot at a real airport, it is quite possible that this exit was literally composed of the same set components as were used in the earlier film.

Another celebrated SUSPIRIA moment among the eagle-eyed is this almost subliminal image, from Suzy's point of view, as her taxi drives her through the Black Forest. As a flash of lightning casts unbidden shadows, we see what appears to be a maniacal hand wielding a wicked blade.

I've always considered this flash -- which exists outside the main narrative but serves to make the night appear full of unimaginable horrors -- to be one of the movie's moments of real genius. It looks so spontaneous but it must have been extremely well planned. But again, while revisiting SUSPIRIA recently after I don't know how many viewings, I happened to catch another subliminal during the taxi sequence -- possibly unintentional -- for the first time.

Right after Suzy presses a piece of paper bearing the address of the Tanz Akademie to the glass separating her from the taxi driver (Fulvio Mingozzi) -- another glass barrier! -- there is yet another flash of lightning, revealing yet another subliminal. What? Didn't catch it? Here, have a closer look...

Yes, that's a reflection of Dario Argento himself, evidently directing the scene from the back seat of the taxi! To the best of my knowledge, no one else has previously documented this hidden image (if so, I'll happily credit them) and it's a particular delight to discover after all this time. It makes me wonder how much still remains to be unearthed from the endlessly rich textures and scenics of SUSPIRIA -- buried references to all of Argento's previous features, perhaps?

I can cite two other examples right away. If something seems familiar about Albert (Jacopo Mariani), the malevolently grinning child in the background of this shot, it is because Master Mariani wore the same, or very similar, shoes and socks when he previously stepped into frame at the end of the startling pre-credits scene of DEEP RED [Profondo rosso, 1975]. My thanks to Thomas Rostock for confirming this in his note below. And isn't Daniel (Flavio Bucci), the school's blind piano teacher, an echo of Karl Malden's Franco Arno in THE CAT O' NINE TAILS [Il gatto a nove code, 1971]?

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I suspect this film still has much left to reveal.

A Night in the Infernal Spotlight

Your faithful blogger poses outside the New Beverly Cinema with Irene Miracle and Keith Emerson, the respective star and composer of Dario Argento's INFERNO.

Photo (c) by Lee Christian. All other photos (c) by Tim Lucas.

Before the screening, a group of 22 attended a private dinner at India's Oven, a restaurant just a few doors down from the theater. Excellent food! Here Irene poses at table with her good friend of 30 years, VARIETY reporter and screenwriter F.X. Feeney.

DVD producer Perry Martin (who supervised my audio commentaries for Anchor Bay's MARIO BAVA COLLECTION sets) joined us for dinner with his charming wife Kelly Ann.

THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR author Scott Bradley generously hosted the dinner, much appreciated by all!

Irene poses with both sides of a special souvenir postcard that she produced as a giveaway item to all INFERNO attendees. Each card was personally autographed and promoted her recent directorial debut, DAWNLAND.

Author John Skipp (center) listens in as documentarian Howard S. Berger (right) invited Keith Emerson (left) to participate in his in-progress film about legendary music producer Joe Meek. In the background, Peter Avellino.

Your faithful blogger with his favorite Argento heroine.

The New Beverly marquee.

Irene basks in the opening night glory she missed in 1980, when INFERNO bypassed US theatrical release altogether.

Tim, Irene and Keith pose for more than a half-dozen photographers outside the theater following the screening.

And who should I discover standing outside in the fog but two of the event's front row attendees: FEAST director John Gulager and his legendary actor dad, Clu Gulager (RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD)!

Allison "Nekromistress" Grace poses in the evening fog with her copy of an original vinyl pressing of Keith Emerson's INFERNO soundtrack, freshly signed by Keith and Irene!

Irene Miracle poses with a special "Three Mothers" bouquet gifted her by three friends Amy Wallace, Scott Bradley and Tim Lucas. The bouquet featured three of each flower.

Coming Into Los Angeles

I'm very happy to announce that I will be making a personal appearance, one week from tonight, on October 17th, at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles.

I will have the privilege of introducing and conducting a Q&A with star Irene Miracle prior to a midnight screening of Dario Argento's INFERNO, the hypnotic second chapter in his "Three Mothers" trilogy. This film was also the last project Mario Bava worked on prior to his death in 1980, and I'll speak a bit about the anonymous special effects contributions that Bava supervised for the picture.

This will be Irene's first US public appearance in many years, and my own first public appearance in Los Angeles since the American Cinematheque's Mario Bava retrospective of 1993, so please come out and join us!

I hear the 35mm print of INFERNO looks spectacular, so it promises to be a fireball of an evening!

Miracle Girl

I encourage all Video Watchblog readers to visit the new website of actress/filmmaker Irene Miracle -- best remembered as the female lead in Alan Parker/Oliver Stone's MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, the young heroine of Aldo Lado's THE NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS and certainly as the initial protagonist of Dario Argento's INFERNO.

Irene has recently directed her first short film, DAWNLAND, the poetic 18th century story of a young white girl's adoption by and assimilation into the Native American Abenaki tribe of Vermont, which was chosen to be featured at the recent Selento International Film Festival in Selento, Italy. It's a lovely film with obviously personal associations for its maker, who dedicated the film to her mother and grandmother. She intends DAWNLAND to be the first film in a trilogy of related shorts to be collected under the umbrella title "Champlain Suite," referring to the Lake Champlain setting which all three projected stories share in common.

The website is offering copies of DAWNLAND for sale; there's also a clip there for viewing, as well as a "director's statement" about the project. Irene's fans will also be excited to learn that her website is also making available, for the first time, autographed photos -- including choice shots from INFERNO, some of them in color. (She confessed to me that she had a hard time coming to grips with celebrity, and for many years refused autograph requests because she couldn't understand why her signature should be considered more desirable than anyone else's -- so there aren't many signed pictures of her in circulation... yet.) There's also a fully annotated photo gallery to make a visit well worth your clicks, a stunning assortment of film, stage and rare modelling shots.

SUSPIRIA in HD

Stefania Casini welcomes you to SUSPIRIA.

I want to caution WatchBlog readers that the version of Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA which is being shown this month on Action Max, the Cinemax subsidiary, is not only the cut US theatrical version (which renders nearly all the violence incoherent) but, for some reason, the stereo surround track is lacking much of its original, room-shaking bottom end. However, on the plus side, it IS being shown in True HD -- as far as I know, the film's high definition debut. For this reason alone, I found it hard to peel myself away... the wallpaper alone (blue velvet, silver foil...) is enough to poke your eyes out. Next showing is at 2:30am eastern, tonight -- and sister station Thriller Max HD is showing MOTHER OF TEARS just before at Midnight.

Redmond, Maitland and Cave

I've been remiss in announcing that VIDEO WATCHDOG #146 was mailed to our subscribers just before the holidays and is now on newsstands everywhere. The cover feature is the first-ever interview with 99-year-old Harry Redmond, Jr., whose long special effects career extended from RKO's classic features of the 1930s (THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, KING KONG, SHE, THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII) to TV's THE OUTER LIMITS in the 1960s. Remarkably, Mr. Redmond appears to be the only worker on the original KING KONG still among us, thereby earning the interview's striking title: "Last Survivor of Skull Island." THE DINOSAUR FILMOGRAPHY author Mark F. Berry, who interviewed Judi Bowker for us in VW #135, adds another feather to his cap with this important career overview, which has already been suggested for a Rondo Best Article Award over on the Classic Horror Film Boards. You can find out more about the issue and its contents, and even order your copy, on the VIDEO WATCHDOG website.

Donna and I are only now starting to work on VIDEO WATCHDOG #147. The feature article in this issue will be another of our popular Round Table Discussions, this one devoted to Dario Argento's THE MOTHER OF TEARS, one of the more controversial horror releases of recent years. In this case, our round table is composed of , including input from Kim Newman, Richard Harland Smith, Brad Stevens, yours truly and -- happily making her first VW appearance since our 8th issue, back in 1991 -- BROKEN MIRRORS/BROKEN MINDS author Maitland McDonagh!

On a more personal note... I've been preoccupied over the past four months with writing a short story for an anthology of fiction based on the music of Nick Cave. I've never had much luck with writing short stories, and I guess this still holds true, since this one ultimately swelled into a novelette of five chapters, running close to 17,000 words -- just a couple of pages shy of novella status. I loved working on it and feel very pleased with the result, and am now contending with the usual post-partum depression though my nest is anything but empty. I've sent the story to the anthology's editor and will tell you more about it if and when it's accepted.

Notes on THE MOTHER OF TEARS

I was able to see Dario Argento's THE MOTHER OF TEARS yesterday and came away with the usual mixed feelings. As I expected, it's not in the same league with SUSPIRIA (1977) or INFERNO (1980) -- its dazzling precursors in the "Three Mothers" trilogy; its visual look is so subdued that it doesn't seem a close relative at all. The new title is better than the Italian one ("The Third Mother") but so bad, it makes me wish Argento would retitle the other two THE MOTHER OF SIGHS and THE MOTHER OF DARKNESS in retrospect, which, were it his franchise, George Lucas would have done before this film even went into production.

Argento has opted to work with a youngish cinematographer (Frederic Fasano, SCARLET DIVA) and production design team (Francesca Bocca, Valentina Ferroni) rather than with the likes of Luciano Tovoli and Giuseppe Bassan, whose visionary skills imbued the earlier films with their all-important sense that "magic is all around us." But the return to alchemical themes alone gives the film an edge that Argento's work hasn't had in decades. In terms of the classic horror setpieces that floated the first two, the third one doesn't really have anything comparable to offer; the terrific stills which have circulated online capture the most arresting imagery for about as long as it appears onscreen. When he allows the horror to linger, it begins to look silly. There's an Asian witch in this movie who is all punked out and supposed to be frightening, but she just looks like a fan emulating an old Nina Hagen album cover.

I'm mostly disappointed that Argento's staging of horror sequences has lost its former sense of beauty so entirely. It has been gone for a long time, and it was only present in parts of THE STENDHAL SYNDROME because Giuseppe Rotunno put it there. The murder scenes included here, especially one involving vaginal impalement, are so ugly and disgustingly misogynistic that they are difficult to watch, and impossible to enjoy from any standpoint of aesthetic pleasure, which is the very hallmark of the first two films in this trilogy. If you recall the slow passages involving Varelli in INFERNO, this whole film is like that, more or less, with a haggard-looking Asia Argento in the foreground, doing a lot of stupid things -- like escaping from a friend's apartment when Satanists break in, then making a call back to the apartment (which she's just visited for the first time!), waking up her friend to tell her to clear out, unaware that the stopped ringing of the telephone will alert the Satanists to her presence and seal her doom. Daria Nicolodi, fairly unrecognizable (Asia weeps when looking at photos of her younger self), is in the movie but only as a Tinker Bell special effect with dialogue like "Run!" and "Go now!"

Speaking of dialogue, we are treated to some more of that lovably loopy Argento dialogue, as in this scene where Asia goes for help to Guglielmo De Witt (Philippe Leroy), "a renowned Belgian thinker." She is greeted (actually barred) at the door by his wary young assistant.

Asia: Would it be possible to see Guglielmo De Witt?
Assistant: He's very busy. Who should I tell him is calling?
Asia: He wouldn't recognize my name.
Assistant: Oh well, come on in.

Jace Anderson and Adam Gierash, the American screenwriters writers of the Nu Image flicks SPIDERS, CROCODILE and RATS, got a lot of PR for writing this movie, and maybe they're the principal reasons why it feels more like an OMEN or EXORCIST sequel than what it really is, but there is no mistaking the auttore of that dialogue.

Moran Atias is an uninspiring Mater Lacrimarum, last in this chain of all-too-mortal immortals, this time with fake boobs, but given the chemical similarity of tears and saline, this may make more sense than I am willing to concede. (Thanks to Richard Harland Smith for that observation.) Her big line is "Who wants to eat the girl?" -- and the "girl" is forty if she's a day. A tight budget hampers what was clearly intended to depict a fullscale breakdown of morality andd society in the streets of Rome, which is conveyed in little two-or-three-person vignettes of beatings which reminded me of the Ludovico Treatment films in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. For all that, the only misstep that actually made me howl in pain is that the man behind the wheel during the obligatory taxi ride scene was not Fulvio Mingozzi. It would have meant so much to have him there.

But mixed feelings means that some of the movie is good, too. Viewers who are well versed in Italian genre film history -- surely all Video WatchBlog readers -- will be hugely entertained by the way Argento weaves familiar imagery from other filmographies into his wicked tapestry. There are a pair of lovers bound together in barbed wire, as in Mario Bava's ERIK THE CONQUEROR, tormented people in shackles as in NIGHTMARE CASTLE, and people getting disembowelled à la Lucio Fulci. Best of all, Mater Lachrimarum is given a domicile that is the logical but wonderfully unexpected successor to the Tanz Akademie of SUSPIRIA and the Riverside Drive apartment building in INFERNO: she lives in Rome in "Villa Graps" from Bava's KILL, BABY... KILL! The unexpected introduction of this beloved location, in my mind the ground zero of Italian horror geography, made me want to stand and applaud (even though this villa has been around for centuries, so Varelli couldn't possibly have built it) . There is some interesting reconjuring of the Italian gothic golden age to be found in Lamberto Bava's recent THE TORTURER too, but Argento really nails it and proves that it could all live again if enough people cared. In fact, the only Maestro that Argento doesn't quite nail is his man in the mirror.

Dario Argento has announced that his next movie -- starring Ray Liotta, Vincent Gallo, and you guessed it, Asia Argento -- is going to be called GIALLO. That's right: an American production with a one-word Italian title, a word known to very few Americans, which till recently still rated an explanatory footnote in most reviews aimed at the genre's cognoscenti. It strikes me as funny but also a little tragic, and makes me wonder if Sergio Leone, had he lived, would be announcing a new movie called SPAGHETTI WESTERN. But if a "reboot" is what it takes for Argento to bring back the magic, more power to him.

FOUR FLIES on Grey Market

One of the most exciting developments of this holiday season is the unexpected arrival of a German gray market release of Dario Argento's elusive FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET on DVD. I've received some e-mails asking me if the rumors are true and, if so, how does it look... so I'll devote today's blog to answering that question.

As these screen grabs illustrate, the 97m disc -- titled VIER FLIEGEN AUF GRAUEM SAMT and credited to a company called Retrofilm -- is indeed real and it looks pretty good. It was also obviously assembled by people who know their Argento movies well. The great bulk of the source material comes from a 35mm print, in English, that looks like it's been around the block a few times; it's a bonafide, old-fashioned grindhouse print, complete with the occasional travelling scratches and thumpy splices... but the image quality, imperfect as it is, is by far the best I've seen for this particular film. If you've only seen the film on one or more of the ratty bootleg videocassettes long in circulation (which happens to also be my story), I think I can safely promise you a viewing of FOUR FLIES that you might consider revelatory.

Closeups like this one, of the blackmailing maniac's mask, are sharp enough to bring out previously unsuspected textures. I always thought this was a facial mask, but it appears to be more of a whole-head mask.

Medium or long shots like this look a bit softer, but still more than acceptable on my 58" widescreen set. If your screen is smaller than mine, the quality will only improve for you.

As always, the sharper the picture, the more attentive we can be to matters of performance and Mimsy Farmer gives one of her most interesting and brittle performances here.

This shot of protagonist Michael Brandon, sharing the screen with Euro great Bud Spencer (as "God") is a good index to the disc's color quality. As you can see by comparing these skin tones to those in the bed shot shown previously, they are prone to fluctuation. Not ideal, but those who saw the film in theaters here in 1972 probably saw something similar.

Earlier I said that "the bulk" of the disc looks pretty good. I qualified my statement because the 35mm print used for this release was evidently incomplete, requiring the Argento buffs behind the scenes to obtain the best possible inserts from other sources to make their presentation as complete as it could be. I didn't notice anything missing from the movie; in fact, there are shots included in this disc that I've either never seen before, or saw in such poor quality that I could never appreciate them for what they were. The scene illustrated here, of Brandon's maid waiting in the park for a meeting with the killer, is one of five or six short patches inserted into the continuity from other sources. They're unfortunate, but it would be worse not to have them in place.

I should also mention that it's a pleasure to see this Techniscope film in its correct ratio, which brings to life fleeting shots like this one -- of the gay private eye investigating the case.

Indeed, the disc salvages so much heretofore obscured detail that, for the first time, I noticed that Argento or his art director used some record albums of the day to wryly underscore the film's death imperative prior to its grand finale: Traffic's JOHN BARLEYCORN MUST DIE and George Harrison's ALL THINGS MUST PASS.

The only source I know for this Region 0 PAL disc is Xploited Cinema, where it is priced at $29.95. The disc includes English, German and Italian audio options, but only German subtitles. A bonus section includes German trailers for this film, as well as one each for Argento's previous features THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and THE CAT O'NINE TAILS. Alternate Italian titles and an extended edit of the film's finale also taken from that version are included, as well.

Of course, VIER FLIEGEN AUF GRAUEM SAMT is not what anyone would call a definitive release. It's really just a deluxe pacifier to keep Argento's fans contented until whatever legal problems are preventing the film's legitimate release can be solved. Anyone who buys this disc will inevitably want to upgrade in the event of an official release, but it's worth the inevitable double dip to have this movie available to us now -- for those crazy goddamn nights when nothing else will do.