Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

I last watched this around eight years ago, and at the time found it to be one of my least favourite Argentos. I must have been in a bad mood at the time, because revisiting it now, it’s gone up significantly in my esteem. So naturally I went back to my old review and tried to unpack, at least for my own benefit, what my issues were at the time and why it worked better for me this time around. I think the most obvious one is a change in perspective. At the time I’d only seen a handful of Argento’s work, and when you compare something something that might not be the absolute best thing a director has done to a bunch of movies that are considered some of the best horror movies ever made, it’s expected that the comparison might not be entirely flattering to the former. But when you’ve seen a bunch more movies from the man, including something like The Card Player with its interminable scenes of characters staring at screens while sluggish video poker animations play out in real time, a movie where more interesting things happen onscreen goes down a whole lot better.

I do think I had a point with my narrative criticisms. Probably the most jarring thing about Inferno is that it essentially resets a few times. We first follow Irene Miracle as she searches for some sort of key hinted at by the cryptic book she reads. Then we follow Eleonora Giorgi, who finds herself tangled in the same mystery. Without spoiling the movie too much, things don’t end terribly well for either of them. Then we switch to Leigh McCloskey, who plays Miracle’s brother and tries to find out what happened to her. You can compare this to Suspiria, to which this is a sequel of sorts, and note the differences in approach. Neither movie is terribly concerned with tying out the details of plot and character, but in the earlier movie, we mostly stick with our heroine played by Jessica Harper for most of the movie, so that we navigate through the proceedings along with her. In both movies, the protagonists are essentially audience surrogates, but in Suspiria, you can see Harper inject a degree of her personality into the movie. She arguably doesn’t need to do a lot of serious acting, given the forceful presence of the director’s hand in moving us along the story, but the mixture of inquisitiveness and trepidation she brings to the role make her character feel recognizably human and sympathetic. She is very much someone I found myself rooting for to make it through the movie.

Here, the performance of McCloskey especially can be described as Bressonian, his expressions pared down to the barest minimum so that he becomes purely a means of navigating the story. Arguably this makes him a more efficient audience surrogate, in that he doesn’t have a whole lot of personality of his own and we can project ourselves more directly onto him. In that sense the movie has a certain video game quality to its storytelling, with McCloskey, Giorgi and Miracle as player characters fully taking on the personality of the player/viewer. The resetting quality of the narrative and the shifts between the protagonists line up with this as well. Lose a life. Repeat the level. The expendability of the protagonists manifests in another, more physical kind of tension. These movies are essentially about seeing graphic violence happen towards characters we identify with or are supposed to care about. I think of a few shots of Irene Miracle’s exposed neck and Daria Nicolodi’s bare feet, where the characters feel almost poignantly vulnerable. (I think Nicolodi is probably the warmest character in the movie, in that her presence manages to come through despite the movie downplaying human emotions as aggressively as it does.) Flesh is fallible, the blade is not.

As for my other criticism of the film’s technical aspects, I’m trying to figure out what the hell I might have been on at the time because on a rewatch, I think this very obviously looks great. Very few directors know how to frame, light and cut an image like Argento, and at least one of the few who operate on that level, Mario Bava, worked as an assistant director on this movie (doing second unit work while Argento was sick with hepatitis), so you know you’re in good hands. The building in which the bulk of this is set is stylized so aggressively that it can’t help but feel inviting despite being undeniably sinister. Wouldn’t you like to spend a little time walking around in this movie? That being said, I’ll go easy on myself and note that no, this doesn’t look exactly like Suspiria. The change in aspect ratios means that this doesn’t feel as grandiose as the 2:35 images of the earlier movie. And the lighting scheme here feels even more artificial and insular. Whatever traces of natural light can be glimpsed in the other movie have been almost completely eliminated here. Characters speak multiple times of a strange odour, and I imagine if I stepped into this movie, it would feel like I was hit with a wall of perfume applied too liberally, suffocating in its strength. Suspiria breathes and moves in a certain way. Inferno kind of sits there and lingers. There’s also the Keith Emerson score, which I found myself warming up to this time around. It compares unfavourably to the Goblin and Morricone scores that other Argentos have benefited from, but as a relatively traditional score, I think it’s reasonably effective (even if it switches to Verdi during one of the movie’s more boisterous highlights). And the fact is, I listen to “Mater Tenebrarum” with some frequency.

And of course, this is an Argento movie, meaning that we have a number of great murder scenes, where flesh and blood are just more colours in the movie’s stylized palette. It also means there are a number of endearingly goofy moments, most notably a scene where Nicolodi has a bunch of cats thrown onto her (which Argento still directs the shit out of, bless his heart) and another where an old man tries to drown a bunch of cats, falls into a bunch of rats, cries for help, only for his supposed saviour to stab the bejesus out of him. (Again, Argento does his darnedest to direct this with style and force some tension into the happenings.) If the movie truly challenges one’s suspension of disbelief, it’s in an early scene where Ania Pieroni pets a cat while glaring at McCloskey during a lecture. One, it’s very unlikely that Pieroni would have been able to bring a cat into class. Two, if she did, it’s unlikely that the other students would have maintained decorum and wouldn’t instead have lined up to also pet the cat. But then you remember that this is a supernatural horror, and that Pieroni’s magic powers might circumvent the realities of such a situation. What do I know. Pieroni’s eyes are supernaturally striking. The cat is supernaturally fluffy.

I have seen Inferno a number of times over the years, and wasn't down with it the first time, but then grew to love its nonsense more with each successive viewing.


The shifting of the protagonists is a narrative problem in terms of wanting to get the viewer to care about who we're sticking with, but on the flip side, the doofus answer to, "surely by now you must know who I am," goes down more smoothly (excuse me? You think I know who you are? Who do you think I am? The protagonist of this movie? I just solved the dumbest, context-free riddle to find you. By the way, have you seen my sister?).


That dialogue might not have actually happened in this movie.

As far as sexy vampire movies go, The Velvet Vampire has at least one claim to greatness in that it features in incredibly sexy vampire. The vampire here is played by Celeste Yarnall, who navigates through the movie entirely slinky and elegant, as all sexy vampires should be. She also finds herself in all sorts of great outfits, often in bold colours and with hats and gloves to accessorize, but sometimes hatless and gloveless, as the situation demands. Indeed, the surest sign of narrative progression in this movie, where not a whole lot happens in terms of the plot, is the changing of her outfits. And she has a way of communicating that’s entirely befitting a sexy vampire, all suggestion and innuendo, like when she hints that death can be sexy depending on one’s point of view, which is exactly the kind of thing a sexy vampire would say, or at the very least a sexy weirdo. And unlike many sexy vampires, she’s quite practical, traveling around her desert estate in a bright yellow dune buggy. If this strikes you as unusual, I should note that a few years prior, all the way over in Pakistan, Dracula frantically drove a car during the climax of The Living Corpse. Vampires, sexy and otherwise, were getting with the times.

So Yarnall is great, and as far as the element of seduction inherent in the genre goes, she holds up her end of the bargain. As I alluded to above, one could find themselves easily seduced by her. And she certainly plays her seduction with a good amount of conviction. The problem is the people she’s seducing. They suck. Her targets in this movie are a husband and wife played by Michael Blodgett and Sherry Miles. They can’t act. Blodgett, who most will recognize from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, is probably the better of the two, but...I’m gonna be mean here, please forgive me. But I found his face unpleasant to look at. Like, from a distance, he looks like he could be handsome. But you move the camera in closer and the proportions are all wrong, like a hunky cave troll. And Miles, well, the nicest thing I can say about her is that she has a Sally Struthers vibe, meaning that during this movie’s lulls, I imagined that Yarnall was instead seducing Archie Bunker in a very special episode of All in the Family.

If you can get past the fact that two out three of the main cast are complete voids of charisma, there are things to enjoy here. This is not a terribly eventful movie, but does have a low key psychedelic ambience that distinguishes it from the elegance of Jean Rollin’s sexy vampire movies and the fluidity of Jess Franco’s sexy vampire movies. The desert setting, likely chosen for budgetary reasons, does add to the stripped down, trancelike nature of the film, nicely accentuating the dream sequences in which Yarnall goes to bed with either Blodgett or Miles, depending on who’s doing the dreaming. The decor and the costumes are certainly striking, and if you squint just a little, you can see there’s some gender commentary here, although I think it’s a bit undermined by Blodgett’s and Miles’ thespian shortcomings. Based on those last few elements, it’s obvious this was an inspiration for The Love Witch, and proves that these movies are a lot more enjoyable when they let their points unfold incidentally from the proceedings, instead of underlining every potentially subtextual point and adding a citation to whatever gender studies textbook the author happened to have read. Movies like this should float along, not land with a belabored thud.

The Criterion Channel was nice enough to put up a bunch of ‘80s horror movies this October, so I’ve been spending the last few days working my way through the collection. Rather than prioritizing the closing of blind spots as I normally do early in the month (although I did finally get around to The Keep, and...eh, it was fine), I’ve tackled a few movies I’ve been meaning to rewatch. Inferno went up significantly in my esteem, the wisdom I’ve accumulated in the years since my initial viewing having primed me for greater appreciation of its merits. The House by the Cemetery also went up quite a bit, although this was more of a Stockholm Syndrome situation where I’ve just spent enough time with the movie to embrace what it does well and ignore its shortcomings (in the case of Stockholm Syndrome, that you’re being held hostage; in this case, that it’s dumb as hell and makes no sense). I will say that in those cases, I could at least recognize some of the films’ merits even on my first viewing, even if I didn’t gel to them entirely.

The Funhouse is one that I also saw back in the day and didn’t gel to at all. I don’t have an old review to look back on and figure out what my criticisms were, but my vague memory is that I thought it was boring and nothing happened. This was before I pushed myself to write about what I saw and as such hadn’t developed much of a vocabulary to articulate my feelings. I will say that I did have some fond associations with the movie, as I’d watched it back then on Scream, the now defunct horror-themed cable channel that used to give free previews every October during my high school years until they closed up shop. That channel was a pretty big influence on my horror movie fandom and cinephilia in general, so revisiting this movie did provide some nostalgia for that reason. I also vaguely remember discussing this on the now defunct Rotten Tomatoes forums. I’m pretty sure I said something to the effect of “this is boring and nothing happens”, which may or may not have exasperated some of the horror fans on there. But those horror fans were and still are good people and I consider them some of my oldest internet friends. For those of them reading this, let me reach out and offer a warm hug, preferably in a darkly lit environment with lots of fog while tense music plays in the background.

But yeah, on a rewatch I can confirm that this is boring and nothing happens. Okay, that was a little harsh, but this is not at all heavy on incident. The movie opens with a Psycho fake-out, not unlike the one in Neon Nights the same year, although it makes more sense here as this is a horror movie and that one’s a weirdly dreamlike porno. I vaguely remember being really put off by the nudity in this scene when I first watched this, but the reason behind my reaction has been lost to time. Then the characters go to the carnival, and basically walk around for over half the movie. There is some nice, gaudy carnival atmosphere, and at least one good gag (involving a magic trick conducted by William Finley), and a pretty weird one (one of the carnival barkers promotes a striptease act by telling people to check out his hot sister), but none of this accumulates to actual dread. (Also, there’s a tent of deformed animals, with the centerpiece being a probably fake two-headed fetus, but the two-headed cow they have readily on display is way cooler, in my humble opinion.)

The supposed dread kicks in after the halfway point, when the protagonists spy one of the carnival freaks (in tights and a Frankenstein mask) getting a handy from the psychic, for which she charges him a hundred bucks in 1981 US Dollars. I don’t know what the going rate for a handjob is, but considering that the act lasts like barely a minute and taking inflation into account, a hundred bucks seems pretty steep. Anyway, the freak kills her and then along with his father (who is not a freak but still unsavoury), goes after the protagonists in classic slasher movie fashion. Some of this uses the darkened, depopulated carnival setting to good effect (although one kill blatantly borrows from Alien), but I dunno, I would have enjoyed this more if it had been spread out better across the movie instead of being saved for the end. I normally like when movies build to the good stuff, but this never actually does. I didn’t hate hanging out in this movie, I just wish it did more with what it had.

I do think this is interesting to consider in the context of Tobe Hooper’s career. There are similarities with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in their similar level of cacophony and the family dynamics of the killers, but the comparisons do not work in this one’s favour. In the earlier movie, the assaultive approach and sheer level of noise really puts you through the ringer, where in this one, it does not. In the other movie, Leatherface, thanks to Gunnar Hansen’s unsettling physical performance, has pretty distinct body language, one which the movie mines for horror and pitch black humour. Here, when the freak is startled or wounded, he flails around, but I don’t sense the same intelligence in how he’s portrayed. (Also, I’m definitely in the minority here, but I think the freak’s appearance is pretty lame, like a kid who dressed up for Halloween in black tights and threw on an ugly mask at the last minute.) This is also closer to the more concretely defined slasher dynamics of the early ‘80s than the prototypical form of Massacre, in that it explicitly defines the heroine as a virgin and frames that against the freak’s sexual troubles. I will also note that I was aware that Rob Zombie is a big fan of Hooper and you can readily see the influence of Massacre and Eaten Alive in his movies, but revisiting this, with its colourful carnival aesthetic, provided another piece of the puzzle.

This displeases me and all I can say is that I completely disagree. I really enjoy The Funhouse, I love all the atmosphere in the first half and the introduction of the idea that everyone just kinda pushes around and shits on this poor girl (Berridge) and then things go bad with everyone she knows getting killed and her barely making it out alive, sobbing.
I don't usually enjoy watching a lot of suffering, but this movie really, really works for me.
You have made me feel like Elizabeth Berridge.

lol I think it was you

Let me offer you a shadowy, windy, tense internet hug as a peace offering.

I watched it earlier this year and spent my viewing noting down recs, haha.

Fun fact: Spalding Gray voices an obscene phone caller in the movie.

This movie owns.