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The Witch's Curse: Sexy Israeli actress Moran Atias as the Mother of Tears prematurely celebrating the second fall of Rome in the subterranean city buried beneath the city's ancient catacombs...
Erotico-grotesque horrors from LA TERZA MADRE. This is Argento's most sexually explicit (and perverse) film to date and to add to the transgressive quality his most graphically violent. The sexual violence is so over the top it outdoes his master, the late Lucio Fulci in some of his 1980's gorefests (THE NEW YORK RIPPER, etc).
I've been informed that this was shot in English but have only seen the Italian language version. I assume the English track will be the one heard on the version which will be showing theatrically in select cities across the US later this year. Awkward English language dubbing initially blinkered critical and fan reaction to THE STENDHAL SYNDROME until a proper Italian language version became available. I'm skeptical but will be pleasantly surprised if the Italian version is the one distributed here. Eventually it will be available on R1 DVD. Hopefully, the DVD will contain the Italian as well as English tracks.
Thanks to Russ for sending me a DVD R of the Italian language version of this w/English subtitles. Argento's later films always play better for me in Italian, especially the underrated masterwork THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. I look forward to seeing and reporting on this already controversial film.
It's several hours since I started this post and I've just finished watching it for the first time. I'll be returning for a second and third viewing over this coming weekend. This is one of the great horror films of the first decade of the 21st Century and it clarifies the director's career, where it has been going for the last ten years and where it stands now. It's the work of an artist at the apex of his creative powers. DON'T BELIEVE THE NEGATIVE, SUPERFICIAL COMMENTS YOU ARE READING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT THIS FILM! Could they be talking about the same film I've just seen?! It doesn't seem so.
Considering that many have spoken out against the film based on this presentation it's time for a contrary point of view. I didn't want to comment on LTM until I saw it theatrically [unlikely, considering where I live] or on R1 DVD [which will take some time to come out]...
Gory fun in the catacombs catches Asia by surprise...
Let me start out by saying I've never really been a Dario Argento fan, but I have admired some of his work. I saw SUSPIRIA theatrically several times when it first appeared in the US in 1977 and was bowled over by the set design, lighting and music, but not so much by the direction, which seemed rather rather derivative and overblown. Bassan's surreally distorted sets, Luciano Tovoli's phosphorescent lighting design and Goblin's thumping score really rocked my world, though. Argento seemed like an erratically talented conductor.
My next Argento was to be a long delayed look at INFERNO (1980) via the 1980s era KEY VIDEO, cropped and with rather dulled colors. It still impressed at moments. Then there were the slashed US video versions of TENEBRE, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. OPERA seemed to be erratic. PHENOMENA seemed to be underrated and the switch to a female perspective an advance which TRAUMA didn't really follow up on. Finally I managed to see FOUR FLIES ON GRAY VELVET via an inadequate composite, which I found revealing of a much more experimental artist than I had imagined and seeing the US DVD version of INFERNO made the film seem even more layered than I had first thought.
But it was THE STENDHAL SYNDROME (1996), my favorite Italian thriller of the 1990s that put him in perspective for me. A kind of transgressive culmination of his previous giallo it took the figure of the female protagonist as victim to the next degree. Its daring was more conceptual than visual, resulting in many of his fans to be disappointed with the lack of what is almost always referred to as his trademark "candy colored lighting." But STENDHAL was about something going on in the post-modern cinema world and the world at large, the complex relationships between art, violence, gender and sexuality. From the scrolling strip of classic canvases which opened film (set to Morricone's haunting, sinister, beautiful score to the final tableau recreating Michelangelo's Pieta it had me under a spell. It was a work of a master filmmaker and it was being attacked all over the place. The initial judgement has since been somewhat revised. I still feel it's his best film, or at least my favorite, but the new LA TERZA MADRE is equally compelling and difficult. "Difficult" is the key word when describing this film and it's reception.
I must say I like NONHOSONNO and DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK better than most but they seem minor works as does his very flawed PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. LA TERZA... though is major Argento and, along with Romero's recent DIARY OF THE DEAD, one of the most important and original horror films of the first decade of the 21st Century...
The alchemist (Phillipe Leroy) explains the "plot"... or shall we say "explains" the plot.
Focusing on the admittedly convoluted plot of LTM is an exercise in futility, the plot exists for Argento, as in his past work, as a pretext for his visions. Sometimes those visions are banal, derivative, awkwardly composed. Try and explain or just narrate the plot for Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL. It doesn't really matter. What matters is Welles' vision, his way of seeing, staging, composing, presenting; his use of music, sound, light and shadow, his camera movements and set-ups, the way his performers loom in his frame.
The film deals with the "second Fall of Rome" after the opening a two hundred year old urn exhumed from cemetary in Viterbo. An archaeologist (Asia Argento) runs for her life, at first, and then toward the Truth (note the capital t).
After many extremely graphic and disturbing murders, many with a perversely erotic edge in their depiction, red herrings and seemingly endless twists and turns, represented by Argento's aggressively mobile, constantly forward-tracking camera (the stedicam gets a real workout), the takeover of the world by Mater Lachrymarum (Moran Atias) and her followers is, at the very last moment, aborted. The film concludes with a welcome burst of laughter from the previously morose and anxiety ridden female protagonist, but it's not difficult to discern that Argento is also laughing, not at the audience or his fans, but as a way to suddenly release the previous 97 minutes of rapidly escalating tension. One is taken back to the equally abrupt conclusions of SUSPIRIA and INFERNO. Yes, as numerous critiques have stated, it is totally different than its predecessors, but in a good way. It shows that Argento has grown as an artist instead of remaining static and repeating himself, although there are plenty of references to the architect Varelli, events in Frieberg (the locale of the school of Mater Suspiriorum) and a visit from SUSPIRIA's informative shrink Udo Kier to remind us that magic surrounds us.
LTM is even more esoteric and aesthetically bipolar than the first two installment of the trilogy, but in a more controlled way. With enough dialogue and plot for a half dozen feature films it still never slows down for one second and maintains its balance to the very last image, which leaves us as relieved as Sarah Mandy.
In LTM Argento has, once again, refused to put on his candy colored eyeglasses and replaced them with a magnifying hyper realism which dovetails into a gruesome, daemonic fantasia. LTM does not take place in the fairy tale world of SUSPIRIA or INFERNO, this time Argento goes about displacing the very troubled contemporary "real world" with images inspired by grotesque medieval depictions of crowded Hells where very aggressive, flesh eating beasts flay, rape, torture and eat human prey. It's closer to the aesthetic of Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980), where a recognizable real world (New England) is attacked by creatures from a subterranean hell pit. And the violence is Fulci esque as many observers have noted: slit throats and stomachs, burnings, eye-gougings, innards ripping (a character is strangled with her own digestive track), flayings, sexual tortures, impalements, the list could go on and on, and there are some transgressive instances of violence which I won't mention here but are so disturbing as to throw one out of the film for a time. The special effects are well-handled by Sergio Stivalleti who obviously had a limited budget to work with, but just because they aren't big budget Hollywood does not mean they don't work, they do and are perhaps preferable for their modesty of execution in this setting. Seamless special CGI effects don't impress me; what impresses me is the director's vision and how it's projected. From the opening to closing credit rolls Argento serves up his feast of demons with the speed and gusto of Satan's chef. In a world where God is not only dead but not even a topic for discussion then the varieties of evil await something to stir them up. Claudio Simonetti's magesterial Goth-Electronica score creates an ideal sonic environment in which these themes and images resonate.
Asia Argento delivers a courageous, totally unglamorous performance as the haggard, pursued Sarah. It's not a "hot" or easy-to-identify with character she creates. She seems to work from the outside in, as does her father as director. He masters a tone and she is there to embody it with %100 percent authenticity. And her sudden laughter at the end acts as a much-needed Catharsis considering the grim tone maintained throughout.
The world we live in today is very different than the world of the late 1970's when SUSPIRIA and INFERNO were made. Those films are almost neo feminist fables of the disco era with gore and played on stylized sets illuminated by the oft-praised "candy colored" gels. LTM looks and feels very different. It's more realistic (but not naturalistic) in terms of visual presentation while the content layering is much more esoteric and allusive. The ending is much more ambiguous and leaves room for expansive thought and mediatation rather than the sudden "happy" shut down of SUSPIRIA. I feel that INFERNO is just about perfect. LTM goes off in such a new direction, so many new directions, that confusion and dismay is to be expected...
The Witch's Curse: Sexy Israeli actress Moran Atias as the Mother of Tears prematurely celebrating the second fall of Rome in the subterranean city buried beneath the city's ancient catacombs...
Erotico-grotesque horrors from LA TERZA MADRE. This is Argento's most sexually explicit (and perverse) film to date and to add to the transgressive quality his most graphically violent. The sexual violence is so over the top it outdoes his master, the late Lucio Fulci in some of his 1980's gorefests (THE NEW YORK RIPPER, etc).
I've been informed that this was shot in English but have only seen the Italian language version. I assume the English track will be the one heard on the version which will be showing theatrically in select cities across the US later this year. Awkward English language dubbing initially blinkered critical and fan reaction to THE STENDHAL SYNDROME until a proper Italian language version became available. I'm skeptical but will be pleasantly surprised if the Italian version is the one distributed here. Eventually it will be available on R1 DVD. Hopefully, the DVD will contain the Italian as well as English tracks.
Thanks to Russ for sending me a DVD R of the Italian language version of this w/English subtitles. Argento's later films always play better for me in Italian, especially the underrated masterwork THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. I look forward to seeing and reporting on this already controversial film.
It's several hours since I started this post and I've just finished watching it for the first time. I'll be returning for a second and third viewing over this coming weekend. This is one of the great horror films of the first decade of the 21st Century and it clarifies the director's career, where it has been going for the last ten years and where it stands now. It's the work of an artist at the apex of his creative powers. DON'T BELIEVE THE NEGATIVE, SUPERFICIAL COMMENTS YOU ARE READING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT THIS FILM! Could they be talking about the same film I've just seen?! It doesn't seem so.
Considering that many have spoken out against the film based on this presentation it's time for a contrary point of view. I didn't want to comment on LTM until I saw it theatrically [unlikely, considering where I live] or on R1 DVD [which will take some time to come out]...
Gory fun in the catacombs catches Asia by surprise...
Let me start out by saying I've never really been a Dario Argento fan, but I have admired some of his work. I saw SUSPIRIA theatrically several times when it first appeared in the US in 1977 and was bowled over by the set design, lighting and music, but not so much by the direction, which seemed rather rather derivative and overblown. Bassan's surreally distorted sets, Luciano Tovoli's phosphorescent lighting design and Goblin's thumping score really rocked my world, though. Argento seemed like an erratically talented conductor.
My next Argento was to be a long delayed look at INFERNO (1980) via the 1980s era KEY VIDEO, cropped and with rather dulled colors. It still impressed at moments. Then there were the slashed US video versions of TENEBRE, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. OPERA seemed to be erratic. PHENOMENA seemed to be underrated and the switch to a female perspective an advance which TRAUMA didn't really follow up on. Finally I managed to see FOUR FLIES ON GRAY VELVET via an inadequate composite, which I found revealing of a much more experimental artist than I had imagined and seeing the US DVD version of INFERNO made the film seem even more layered than I had first thought.
But it was THE STENDHAL SYNDROME (1996), my favorite Italian thriller of the 1990s that put him in perspective for me. A kind of transgressive culmination of his previous giallo it took the figure of the female protagonist as victim to the next degree. Its daring was more conceptual than visual, resulting in many of his fans to be disappointed with the lack of what is almost always referred to as his trademark "candy colored lighting." But STENDHAL was about something going on in the post-modern cinema world and the world at large, the complex relationships between art, violence, gender and sexuality. From the scrolling strip of classic canvases which opened film (set to Morricone's haunting, sinister, beautiful score to the final tableau recreating Michelangelo's Pieta it had me under a spell. It was a work of a master filmmaker and it was being attacked all over the place. The initial judgement has since been somewhat revised. I still feel it's his best film, or at least my favorite, but the new LA TERZA MADRE is equally compelling and difficult. "Difficult" is the key word when describing this film and it's reception.
I must say I like NONHOSONNO and DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK better than most but they seem minor works as does his very flawed PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. LA TERZA... though is major Argento and, along with Romero's recent DIARY OF THE DEAD, one of the most important and original horror films of the first decade of the 21st Century...
The alchemist (Phillipe Leroy) explains the "plot"... or shall we say "explains" the plot.
Focusing on the admittedly convoluted plot of LTM is an exercise in futility, the plot exists for Argento, as in his past work, as a pretext for his visions. Sometimes those visions are banal, derivative, awkwardly composed. Try and explain or just narrate the plot for Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL. It doesn't really matter. What matters is Welles' vision, his way of seeing, staging, composing, presenting; his use of music, sound, light and shadow, his camera movements and set-ups, the way his performers loom in his frame.
The film deals with the "second Fall of Rome" after the opening a two hundred year old urn exhumed from cemetary in Viterbo. An archaeologist (Asia Argento) runs for her life, at first, and then toward the Truth (note the capital t).
After many extremely graphic and disturbing murders, many with a perversely erotic edge in their depiction, red herrings and seemingly endless twists and turns, represented by Argento's aggressively mobile, constantly forward-tracking camera (the stedicam gets a real workout), the takeover of the world by Mater Lachrymarum (Moran Atias) and her followers is, at the very last moment, aborted. The film concludes with a welcome burst of laughter from the previously morose and anxiety ridden female protagonist, but it's not difficult to discern that Argento is also laughing, not at the audience or his fans, but as a way to suddenly release the previous 97 minutes of rapidly escalating tension. One is taken back to the equally abrupt conclusions of SUSPIRIA and INFERNO. Yes, as numerous critiques have stated, it is totally different than its predecessors, but in a good way. It shows that Argento has grown as an artist instead of remaining static and repeating himself, although there are plenty of references to the architect Varelli, events in Frieberg (the locale of the school of Mater Suspiriorum) and a visit from SUSPIRIA's informative shrink Udo Kier to remind us that magic surrounds us.
LTM is even more esoteric and aesthetically bipolar than the first two installment of the trilogy, but in a more controlled way. With enough dialogue and plot for a half dozen feature films it still never slows down for one second and maintains its balance to the very last image, which leaves us as relieved as Sarah Mandy.
In LTM Argento has, once again, refused to put on his candy colored eyeglasses and replaced them with a magnifying hyper realism which dovetails into a gruesome, daemonic fantasia. LTM does not take place in the fairy tale world of SUSPIRIA or INFERNO, this time Argento goes about displacing the very troubled contemporary "real world" with images inspired by grotesque medieval depictions of crowded Hells where very aggressive, flesh eating beasts flay, rape, torture and eat human prey. It's closer to the aesthetic of Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980), where a recognizable real world (New England) is attacked by creatures from a subterranean hell pit. And the violence is Fulci esque as many observers have noted: slit throats and stomachs, burnings, eye-gougings, innards ripping (a character is strangled with her own digestive track), flayings, sexual tortures, impalements, the list could go on and on, and there are some transgressive instances of violence which I won't mention here but are so disturbing as to throw one out of the film for a time. The special effects are well-handled by Sergio Stivalleti who obviously had a limited budget to work with, but just because they aren't big budget Hollywood does not mean they don't work, they do and are perhaps preferable for their modesty of execution in this setting. Seamless special CGI effects don't impress me; what impresses me is the director's vision and how it's projected. From the opening to closing credit rolls Argento serves up his feast of demons with the speed and gusto of Satan's chef. In a world where God is not only dead but not even a topic for discussion then the varieties of evil await something to stir them up. Claudio Simonetti's magesterial Goth-Electronica score creates an ideal sonic environment in which these themes and images resonate.
Asia Argento delivers a courageous, totally unglamorous performance as the haggard, pursued Sarah. It's not a "hot" or easy-to-identify with character she creates. She seems to work from the outside in, as does her father as director. He masters a tone and she is there to embody it with %100 percent authenticity. And her sudden laughter at the end acts as a much-needed Catharsis considering the grim tone maintained throughout.
The world we live in today is very different than the world of the late 1970's when SUSPIRIA and INFERNO were made. Those films are almost neo feminist fables of the disco era with gore and played on stylized sets illuminated by the oft-praised "candy colored" gels. LTM looks and feels very different. It's more realistic (but not naturalistic) in terms of visual presentation while the content layering is much more esoteric and allusive. The ending is much more ambiguous and leaves room for expansive thought and mediatation rather than the sudden "happy" shut down of SUSPIRIA. I feel that INFERNO is just about perfect. LTM goes off in such a new direction, so many new directions, that confusion and dismay is to be expected...
