Inferno

So for the first post with actual content, I thought I'd plug a horror film since it's, like, October or something. I am sure that you're all shocked. Both of you. (And you're both probably my Mom, checking the page twice.)

I did this once before at the Tuesday Night Movie Club, where I briefly worked as a film and TV critic about seven years ago. Man, I feel old, although I think that's probably because I had to review Crossroads while I was there. Head on over to their site. Good guys.

At the time, I pompously assumed that I would be able to post a review of one horror movie a day for all 31 days of the month of October. I'm not even going to check to see how many I actually reviewed. I think it may have been about 9. So I'm not even going to attempt that number here, although that may be because I'm starting on October 11th.

I have learned nothing.

Anyway, we'll start with Dario Argento. For those who don't know, Dario Argento is pretty erroneously called "The Italian Alfred Hitchock," even though they had very little in common, apart from their talent of course. Hitchock made suspense films of all shapes and colors. Dario Argento generally makes gialli - a fairly unique Italian genre that combined elements of mysteries and slashers. Some non-Italian films that sort of qualify, for the uninitiated? Try Wes Craven's Scream, or the criminally underseen Cherry Falls, directed by Geoffrey Wright (who also directed Romper Stomper, the film that got a young whipper-snapper named Russell Crowe noticed for the first time).

Some of Dario Argento's best gialli include The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, and my personal favorite, Opera. We are not going to be talking about any of these films.

Instead, we're going to be talking about Inferno, the second in his Three Mothers trilogy that started with the uniformly praised Suspiria and ends, 30 years later, with Mother of Tears, which is slated to come out in the states sometime in 2008. These films are not gialli. They are fucking nightmares with graphic murders in them. And the first two, at least, are wonderful. (I haven't seen Mother of Tears yet, but supposedly it's a return to form for the director, who hasn't directed a truly great film since 1996's The Stendhal Syndrome.)
Inferno is about... something. Hard to say what, exactly. Unlike Suspiria, which for all its fever dream madness did have a plot of sorts revolving around an American girl trapped in a German ballet school run by witches, Inferno's plot is much more complicated, to the point of being inconsequential. It begins with a girl reading a book about "The Three Mothers" - ancient witches who live in three haunted buildings spread throughout the world. The first was the German ballet school in Suspiria. The other two are in New York and Italy. This girl thinks the apartment building she lives in is one of them. Then, horrible things happen and we cut to her brother in Italy.

So, it seems like we have a structure. A guy's sister undergoes some horrible events, and then the rest of the film follows her brother, right? Well, not so much. The film somehow features stream-of-consciousness protagonists, and constantly flits between focusing on one character to another for extended periods at a time. Usually until one of them dies. For true film aficionados, Inferno is a must-watch for no other reason than that it may have the most complicated structure of any film I've seen since Last Year at Marienbad.

(For the record, I'm pretty sure I'm the first person who has ever compared these two films.)

For everyone else, it's a must-watch because it will seriously freak your shit out. My favorite scene? The old antique dealer with no legs, who insists on using crutches instead of a wheelchair, decides he has had it with all the cats coming in from the strange building next door and breaking his valuables, and decides to gather them all up in a large burlap sack. He then proceeds to a large pond in Central Park, where he walks out into the middle of the body of water to drown these poor defenseless cats. Just as he finishes this ghoulish task, he tries walking away, and one of his crutches lands in a too-deep part of the pond, causing him to fall as comically as Buster Keaton could imagine. As if things couldn't get any worse, an army of man-eating rats starts to descend upon his helpless upper body en masse. He's being eaten alive, and starts calling for help to anyone within earshot. A butcher, working for some unknown reason in Central Park, hears him in the distance and runs to his aid. Then...

Just watch for yourself in the link at the top of the page. It's in the first 6 1/2 minutes of the video.

Inferno is a complicated movie. Maybe it's a great film. It's certainly unappreciated. Fans were confused by it, critics were not impressed, and only just recently is it starting to find the true cult following it deserves with special edition DVD releases from Anchor Bay and Blue Underground (hint: it's the same content, different companies). If you ever wondered what would happen if David Lynch decided to make what he would consider a "straight-forward horror movie," this is probably pretty close to what you'd end up with.

Until next time, you stay frosty out there, people.