So, are all Dario Argento movies this bad? (Inferno)

Cafe Society
1

Last ngiht, some pals and I decided to pick a movie at random from a vast collection of random crap and watch it.

We got Inferno. Inferno (1980) - IMDb

This is a Dario Argento film. We knew nothing about it or the director.

We all three of us, who have seen a metric crapton of movies between us, including such gems as Dragon Wars to Manos: The Hands of Fate, considered this to be right down there among them. I mean, it was that bad.

For a brief recap only of its sins:

  • The plot makes no sense (and there really isn’t one, because that would imply an actual progression from event to event).
  • The entire film is shot in long, languid, dreamlike sequences which rarely work in movies. For some ungodly reason, this seems to be popular with a lot of Italian directors, and is probably good reaosn why they are rarely seen outside of art-critic circles.
  • The Red and Blue mood lighitng is so overdone it becomes laughable.
  • The characters aren’t even interesting enough to be unlikable.
  • You can have your character go to weird lengths to do things, but then they have to be interesting and at least halfway believable.
  • The horror… wasn’t. This man managed to make brutal murders so dull I was just waiting for them to be over. We were making snarky comments about it to avoid going to sleep.
  • A good chunk of the script appeared to be random events, in that characters weren’t really responding in any coherent fashion to the world around them.
  • At the end of it, despite having some kind of evil-witch-death thing pop up, and having revealed the true evil of almost everyone who didn’t die, we still neither care not are very impressed, and there are still massive plot holes.
  • Few films in which the quasi-main-character gets introduced only after a half-hour do well. This is no exception. It does not help that he has few lines and does almost nothing.
  • We know absolutely nothing about most of the events, which seem to have been pieced together randomly.

I then went on to said IMDB site, only to discover that there is a large community of people who liked this movie, and consider it scary. 'A true horror masterpiece", blah blah. I cannot imagine this. Hell, even the gruesome gore scenes were done so badly as I inspire yawns. I despise Hollywood slashers and horror-porn, but they are still far better than this.

Frankly, the only horror movie is that the movie was made, and that some people liked it.

However, apparently there’s a lot of people who liked some previous movie and considered this crap. So I’m mildly curious if we have any Dario Argento fans here, and if they can somehow defend this pile of cinematic dogshit.

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Yeah, you’ve kind of hit on some of Argento’s weaker points :D. Of his films I kinda like Suspiria, which is Inferno’s predecessor ( Inferno was a sequel, sort of ) but mostly for the atmosphere, not for the plot or acting. This quote from the wiki sums up some of the appeal to me and might explain Argento’s odd color palate you noticed:

Suspiria is noteworthy for several stylistic flourishes that have become Argento trademarks. The film was made with anamorphic lenses. The production design and cinematography emphasize vivid primary colors, particularly red, creating a deliberately unrealistic, nightmarish setting. This look was emphasized by the use of imbibition Technicolor prints. The imbibition process, used for The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, is much more vivid in its color rendition than emulsion-based release prints, therefore enhancing the nightmarish quality of the film.

Like I said it kinda, sorta worked for me in Suspiria, but I’m not going to go so far as to say it was a coherent masterpiece ;). In general I’m not a big fan, but there is no denying he has a happy cult following. And he did give the world his daughter Asia Argento, which is something I guess.

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Suspiria, [nevermind, by the time my post went through, the poster above covered the same points]

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Deep Red is my favorite, because I dig the prog soundtrack by Goblin and the Paul McCartney lookalike David Hemmings.

5

I liked Trauma - sort of. Basically what this means is that I didn’t fall asleep, I actually paused it while going to the bathroom, and I didn’t feel the urge to gouge out my eyeballs with a red hot poker.

Suspiria was a complete waste of time - totally craptastic (and not in a Manos-MST3K good way). The only way I will ever again attempt to watch this movie again would be if it were given the MST3K treatment.
Those are the only movies of his that I can recall watching. I will continue to give them chances though because that’s just the way I am. I suffered through at least 4 Will Farrell movies before I declared a moratorium on screening of any movie with him as star.