"I only recall
the movie like a bad sickness. Perhaps it worked better because
of the uncomfortable atmosphere in my life when I wrote it...working
with the Fox (20th Century Fox) bureaucracy was awful. I felt
I was trapped in a Russian prison camp. All those actors filing
into my office waiting to be cast. The memos from the studio heads.
The unnecessary problems they caused. How do American directors
cope with the Hollywood regime?"
Dario Argento on making Inferno (1980)
What does it all mean? Who cares! Dario Argento's classic "sequel"
to Suspiria, and the second of the proposed Three Mothers trilogy is
a beautiful, sweeping, epic nightmare. Leave all of your film going
experiences at the door and allow yourself to be swept away by numerous
bizarre set pieces, and illogical situations. Inferno contains many
classic Argento moments.
A snooping Irene
Miracle loses her keys through a puddle in a seemingly abandoned
basement. Fixing a light above the puddle she submerges her arm
to the shoulder. Unable to grab the keys they fall even deeper.
Our perky heroine slides right into the hole to discover an underwater
home (didn't I see a trailer for a film called In Dreams, with
Annette Benning, that completely ripped of this scene?), complete
with a feisty decomposed body!
In
perhaps Argento's most intense moment, Eleonoa Giorgi gets caught trying
to steal an ancient book by a demon handed man in the library's basement.
Narrowly escaping the fiend, she befriends a neighbor on the elevator
ride to her apartment. She reveals how horrified she is and the dorky
man agrees to keep her company in her spooky long corridor complex.
Argento cuts to a strange montage of gloved black hands cutting the
heads off of paper dolls. Each dolls head leads to a violent death,
the third leading us into the apartment where all hell breaks loose.
A really nifty scene - it's simply breathtaking filmmaking.
Surreal set pieces are aplenty in Inferno. Highlights include: the cat killing fiend who inexplicably gets hacked up by a nearby worker after getting
graphically chewed up by some nasty rats - the lady who gets her head slammed onto nails then guillotined by a pane of glass - and a terrific visit by
a beautiful witch (one of the three mothers?) at a music class set to opera.
Inferno is best enjoyed if viewed as a drug induced nightmare.
The film makes zero coherent sense, the narrative is all over the place
and the plot is pretty much incoherent. It is also a sweeping, mesmerizing
ride of classic Italian shock set pieces. A nod to Keith Emerson's terrific,
bouncy score.
