Dracula 3-D (2012) dir. Dario Argento

Logline: You've heard of Dracula, right? Well this is vaguely like that, but with more computer generated bloodshed, *spooky* animal transformations, Asia Argento snarling, and Rutger Hauer sighing though the last fifteen minutes. If you weren't already sold on this airtight premise, it's also presented in 3-D. You're welcome, audience.

For Argento completists, Dracula 3-D offers a new light in which to see and divide up the director's oeuvre. Alongside his noted gialli and supernatural horror films now rests a third category of film that summarizes his total output: the literary adaptation. Consisting of his hysterically pitched Phantom of the Opera (1998), "The Black Cat" segment from Two Evil Eyes (1990)-- previously the odd ducks in his filmography-- and now Dracula 3-D, these demented book-to-screen adaptations are as beguiling as the animal-to-vampire transformations that Thomas Kretschmann's whispering Dracula goes through in the latter film. Sometimes a vampire is a vampire one minute and a human-sized praying mantis the next; similarly, sometimes an adaptation looks like an adaptation before metamorphosing into a mess of ideas and images that more closely resembles a human-sized praying mantis than the book it was derived from. Argento's literary adaptations have little use or reverence for their source material, as evidenced by Phantom of the Opera's re-imagining of the deformed Phantom as a flawless English hunk and Dracula 3-D's omission of most of the novel's characters and transportation of the key setting from London to exclusively Romania (and hence losing all of the old-world-meets-new-world relevance of the novel). Loose adaptations aren't inherently wicked, but one as aimless and labored as Dracula 3-D certainly raises questions about the wisdom of departing too far from the generating material. Argento's film employs recognizable elements of Stoker's novel, Browning's adaptation, and Coppola's adaptation, but solely to further its bizarre Z-grade direct-to-video exploitation fodder. There is nothing of thematic interest or novelty pumping out from Dracula 3-D's punctured veins. It's schlock by any definition.

Some critics have theorized that the film is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but the ludicrous content of Dracula 3-D is no more frequent or insincere than anything we saw in Trauma (1993), Phantom of the Opera, The Card Player (2004), or Mother of Tears (2007). The notion that Argento has been playing a decades-long joke on his audience-- his films losing money all the while-- appears untenable, so our only recourse is to assume that this was a film that Argento and his crew earnestly believed would be frightening, provocative, exciting, and visually resplendent to a certain audience of filmgoers, perhaps an audience that they hold a certain amount of contempt for. There are no intentional stabs at cult goofiness here; there are only moments that display the numerous artistic limitations and miscalculations of those involved. It is as if they are without care making a film for an audience that they assume also does not care, that will consume whatever it is tossed as long as it carries the recognizable flavor of gratuitous bloodshed and exposed breasts. Argento's filmmaking is no longer merely lazy, but contemptible.

Why does Dracula 3-D exist? It's an honest question that pops into one's head after sitting through its near two hours of plodding, unimaginative bloodsucking: what creative or commercial compulsion helped to generate this film? It's impossible to find any such point of genesis within the film itself. Creatively, Argento finds little of interest to add to the Dracula mythos, taking what bits and pieces of Bram Stoker's novel and previous film adaptations he so desires and tossing them together at random in order to build towards a climax that features all the vampire vanquishing artistry of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), the movie. Commercially, it's laughable that any producer or financier with a hefty checkbook would have seen domestic or international box office potential in a bloated "classical horror film" laden with Myst-level computer generated imagery from a fallen Italian director, even if it were to bear the word "3-D" in its title. Consequently, Dracula 3-D is an abject creative and commercial failure, with almost no chance of recouping its 7.5 million dollar budget and not a ghost of a chance of recouping its director's reputation. Argento is lost to us in the perpetual mists of the Borgo Pass.

Giallo (2009) dir. Dario Argento

Logline: A viscous, sickly hued madman (Adrien Brody as "Byron Deidra") is prowling the streets of Turin in his taxi cab, abducting beautiful women so that he can torture, mutilate, and murder them. He's pursued by the tireless and troubled Inspector Enzo Avolfi (also Adrien Brody), whose unconventional methods include teaming up with Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner), the sister of the killer's latest abductee, in order to stop the killer before he kills again.

The man must find joy in giving his films misleading titles. Like Tenebrae (1982) before it, the title of Giallo gives those viewers familiar with Argento's earlier work a false impression. Considering he's the man who (despite the existence of examples of the subgenre that predate his own) solidified the template for the Italian giallo film with 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, you'd imagine that a later film bearing solely the title Giallo would be exactly that: an old-fashioned black-gloved, J&B swilling giallo, in the mode that Argento himself established and has returned to, continually, up through the early 2000s. But it's not. Ironically, Argento uses a film titled Giallo to branch away from the Italian subgenre and into markedly American territory, specifically torture porn and the serial killer police procedural. Though Argento apparently had a hand in the story, the film's screenplay is credited to two Americans, Jim Agnew and Sean Keller, whose combined credits boast of little more than a few low budget TV creature features and a straight-to-DVD Wesley Snipes action film. Their American sensibilities combined with Argento's seeming disinterest in the material produces a film so far removed from the modish style and psychosexual mystery of its namesake that we would almost find it funny if we hadn't already been tricked into watching it.

Giallo features no mystery, no suspense, and no revelations. Its story is a flat, one-note procedural that ends on a bizarre unresolved note. Seemingly, its sole narrative concern is to be as grimy and unpleasant as most modern American horror films, at which it succeeds miserably. The cheeky sleaze of a typical '70s giallo is transformed into Giallo's lengthy scenes of living victim mutilation and other poignant moments, like the one in which the killer wheezingly jerks off to digital photographs of his victim's corpses on his computer while sucking an infant's pacifier. There's nothing fun or compelling underneath the layer of dirt caked onto Giallo, making it all the more beguiling as to why big, respected names like Brody and Seigner would agree to participate. In its pitiful grasping at a theme of duality, the film allows Brody the chance to flex his acting muscle by portraying both the hero and the villain (aided by prostheses and yellow makeup in the latter instance), but neither character is given much depth to express beyond simplified tortured childhoods, so, again, where's the appeal? (The killer's motivation by-way-of tortured childhood is one of the genre's most mind-numbingly juvenile: a jaundiced orphan, the killer Giallo was placed into a church's orphanage as a young boy where the other orphans made fun of him for his yellow skin, inspiring him to take revenge by kidnapping and mutilating beautiful women later on in life because, hey, why not.)

In a way, Giallo might be the perfect encapsulation of the goals and intent of Argento's late career. Here we find a film that crassly exploits the goodwill surrounding the director's earlier achievements while simultaneously debasing those achievements through the injection of stale and contrived modern genre elements straight into their still-beating hearts, seemingly for no creative reasons but only to increase their commercial cache. There's not an entry in Argento's last two decades of filmmaking that couldn't be accused of such calloused, uninspired actions, and the resulting feeling produced-- in both filmmaker and audience-- is one of apathy over the films. As disagreeable as its content is, it's difficult to work up much ire over a film like Giallo. Why waste our breath? Argento didn't. A lawsuit lodged by Brody against the film's money-grubbing producers kept the film barred from wide DVD release for about a year after it premiered, but would we have missed it if it still remained in limbo today? Does a film like Giallo slip from our memories as quickly as it enters, or does it debase and devalue the former art from which it's constructed? At one juncture in the film, Seigner's Linda asks Brody's Inspector Avolfi an unanswerable question about the killer's motive that could easily be asked of that killer's creator: "Why would he want to destroy beautiful things?"

The Mother of Tears (2007) dir. Dario Argento

Logline: When art restoration specialist Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) cracks open an ancient box containing the magic cloak of the mythical witch Mater Lachrymarum, the world starts going to hell. Literally. Murderous mall goths, furry disemboweling monsters, and a pesky screeching monkey are only some of the horrors Sarah will have to face as she works with the sparkly ghost of her dead mom to send the Mother of Tears back to the evil dimension from which she sprang.

It's not as if there was any way that this could have turned out well. Filming and releasing the concluding chapter of a trilogy over 25 years after the previous installment hit screens would be an artistic gamble for a director whose career hadn't devolved into utter tripe, and so this effort from Dario Argento-- whose career by 2007 had long been demonstrating some arguably tripe-like qualities-- was doomed from the start. So why did he wait this long to make the The Mother of Tears? Glancing at its tortured pre-production history, we see that the film could have been made as early as 1984, when Argento and his former wife and collaborator Daria Nicolodi had finished a draft of the screenplay. But for whatever reason it wasn't, and it took a couple more decades of drafts and false starts before it materialized. Perhaps it took Argento and his collaborators that long to crack the film's story, but that argument implodes on itself when one watches The Mother of Tears and observes that it boasts the same basic structure as the previous installment, Inferno (1980), but with a more pronounced apocalyptic emphasis. A more likely reason is that it took those decades elapsing (and the critical regard of Argento's back catalogue rising) before any studios would dare pledge him the funds for another supernatural romp. Despite its recent appreciation, Inferno was a critical and box-office failure upon release (going straight-to-VHS in the United States, no less) and may have soured Argento's producers and financiers (and perhaps to some extent himself) on pursuing the surreal fantasy horror mythology he began in Suspiria (1977) with another loose sequel. It's telling that his immediate followup to Inferno, 1982's Tenebrae, was-- despite its being named after one of the Three Mothers-- a back-to-basics giallo. But the notion of a third film never totally faded, and by early 2006 it had acquired its financing from both Italian and American production studios and was on its way to being born.

What rough beast was born out of this deal is a melange of Argento's various periods and styles, all blurring and blending together into a frenzied, volatile, and yet often silly attempt to recapture the favorable critical regard of earlier years. There's decided effort here from Argento (in contrast to some of his other recent works) and this effort results in The Mother of Tears being a provocative film-- one that occasionally brushes up against the aesthetic chills of Argento's peak-- but it's never a satisfying viewing experience, and far less of a satisfying trilogy capper. Like Inferno, it's a messy, at times inscrutable fairy tale, but what coherence Inferno gained from its nightmare logic is traded in for the cheap but nonsensical magical wizardy of Mother of Tears, by which Asia Argento's character can become invisible when she concentrates really hard and the shimmering, floating ghost of Daria Nicolodi can manifest at convenient moments to drag demons down through a craggy portal to a computer-generated hell. These new elements feel frighteningly unimaginative-- the stuff of a lazy fantasist who has chewed on a few too many magical beans-- and those other fresh ingredients added to Argento's stew (like flesh-munching zombies and sudden demon face jump scares) are swiped directly from modern mainstream horror's typical bland entrees. (Credit where credit is due: The Mother of Tears was prescient in one aspect. It presented a series of wildly humorous unexplained mass suicides and murders-- including an uproarious scene in which a new mother throws her literal baby doll off a tall bridge-- a whole year before M. Night Shyamalan would concoct the same in his enviably insipid new comedy classic The Happening (2008).)

The "new things" that The Mother of Tears does it does poorly, without artistic finesse or the proper reverence for what had come before. (The film explicitly retcons the events of Suspiria in order to give a secondary character in this one a more prominent role, it recasts Udo Kier and Daria Nicolodi as entirely new characters from their previous appearances in the trilogy, and it banks on the fact that the viewer won't recognize how fundamentally similar its plot is to that of Inferno.) But, then, the whole ordeal is sort of worth it to glimpse the director's dark dreams alive on the screen once again, however fleetingly: an early scene, in which half-seen demons disembowel a young art curator in a museum and Asia's character, catching sight of the carnage, attempts to silently flee while being sniffed out by a cackling monkey, is the most suspenseful and visually appealing he's captured in over a decade. But that scene's existence within the film is more disheartening than anything else: the nicest thing one can say about The Mother of Tears, as a whole, is that it has its moment.

Jenifer (2005) / Pelts (2006) dir. Dario Argento

Jenifer (2005)

Logline: Frank Spivey (Steven Weber), a police officer, saves a horrifically disfigured young woman, Jenifer (Carrie Fleming), from being murdered by a meat cleaver-wielding madman. Discovering that she has nowhere else to go and finding himself inexplicably drawn to her, Spivey invites Jenifer to stay in his home, despite his family's reservations. When Jenifer begins to reveal her true sinister nature, Spivey's life spirals out of control as he attempts-- against all rational judgement-- to protect her.

From 2005 to 2006, Argento kept himself busy with TV work. His muddled, visually nondescript Italian made-for-TV feature, Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005), proved through its amateurish slog of far-from-clever intertextual references and scenes of near anti-suspense that one can revere Hitchcock without necessarily emulating him. Lacking even the absurdity of an earlier turd like The Card Player (2004), Do You Like Hitchcock? is perhaps the worst film Argento has yet made, and-- at the time-- it seemed to signal a concerning descent into TV-budget schlock. The film hinted that Argento was content to slum it on the small screen (which he hadn't done since early in his career, with 1973's Door into Darkness), where he could ineptly and lazily fumble around in the general wheelhouse of his past glories without necessarily having to please producers fretting about potential box office returns and international sales. Rather than exploiting these relative freedoms and becoming a vessel for experimentation, Do You Like Hitchcock? smells of nothing more than a quick paycheck rooted in the name recognition he'd built from the product of better days. For the handful of months between July and November of 2005, things were looking grimmer-than-usual in the career of one of Italian horror's perennials. 

For Argento to follow-up this ill-conceived TV venture shortly thereafter with yet two more TV ventures only served to make the state of his career appear increasingly desperate, at least initially. Fortunately, the two short films that Argento contributed to Mick Garris's Masters of Horror anthology program for the Showtime network, "Jenifer" and "Pelts," aren't quite the harbingers of obsolescence that Do You Like Hitchcock? was. What they are is decidedly mixed bags of (somewhat shockingly) new tricks. Neither film is quite like anything Argento has produced in the past, perhaps due to the fact that they are the first time that he's shied away from working on the screenplay of one of his films. Both shorts are about supernatural subjects, but they possess little of the breezy surreal fantasy of an Inferno (1980) or a Phenomena (1985). Rather, they're gory, morbidly humorous morality fables in the tradition of 1950s horror comic books. (Not coincidentally, "Jenifer" was adapted by star Steven Weber from a short in a 1974 issue of the horror anthology comic Creepy, a long-running EC knockoff.) Moreover, their major point of departure from the dulling visual blandness of Do You Like Hitchcock? is that both "Jenifer" and "Pelts" look good. Though they carry that unmistakable made-for-TV glow, it's apparent that these weren't sloppy or careless productions. The cast and crew behind Argento turn in fine work on both shorts, resulting in the most competently put together Argento films since Sleepless (2001).

But there is a problem with these Masters of Horror episodes, beyond their moral simplicity: they are above all else achingly misogynistic pieces that construct their female characters as nothing more than demonic sirens leading hapless men to beastly ends. These females' only currency-- both as characters and as narrative devices-- is sex, and they trade in it for their own selfish gain at the expense of the men, who are drawn about helplessly by their groins. What's worse is that the "moral message" of each film is tied into the dangerous temptation that these women pose, urging men to avoid contact with them or else prepare to face the bloody consequences. This is a crude old sexist moral gong to bang (and I mean really old, like Proverbs old), and it results in the films being about as subtle as a witch burning. True, Argento didn't write either of these tales, but he did film them. His culpability can't be totally brushed aside.

The first tale, "Jenifer," is the most egregious offender on this count. Steven Weber's family man police officer, Frank Spivey, is seduced away from said family and into covering up heinous acts by the vile Jenifer, resulting in his own downfall. Jenifer is an interesting character, if only for how far she's been reduced into a gendered narrative device. She's a mute demonic entity of unclear origins (perhaps, in the film's logic, being a woman is demonic enough) and her dual nature-- as seductress and devourer-- is inscribed physically, as physicality is all that she's been provided:  her face is horrifically disfigured-- equipped with a monstrous, snarling mouth-- but she sure does have a rockin' bod otherwise. She is the promise of sex and the hardly concealed "dangers" of sex made flesh. Throughout the film, Jenifer feigns supplication and gratitude (usually of a sexual nature) to Spivey for his efforts in saving and protecting her. In truth, she's using him to cover up her mess, as she tends to destroy (and eat) all that she encounters. The mallet-to-the-head subtlety of the circular ending reveals that Jenifer has been cycling through men for some time now, using them up until they've cracked before replacing them with new saps. The darkly comedic tone of "Jenifer" doesn't earn it a pass for its repugnant formulation of women and male-female relationships, and Argento proves his old detractors right through his association with it.

Pelts (2006)

Logline: Magic raccoons with beautiful pelts are trapped and killed by John Saxon who then sells them to Meat Loaf who himself hopes to make these beautiful, magical pelts into a fur coat for a lesbian stripper who will then (being grateful) allow him to have sex with her. Unfortunately for these folks and their selfish desires, dreadful events befall anyone who chances into contact with these magical pelts.

"Pelts," Argento's second season contribution to Masters of Horror, is only slightly less misogynistic than its predecessor, partly because it has another moral message to jackhammer home: killing animals for their pelts is wrong. Yes, that is exactly as complex as this one's political message aims for. It accomplishes this lofty message by giving just desserts to those folks involved in every step of the fur trade, magically forcing them to commit on themselves the same atrocities they commit on helpless animals for a living. This scenario leads to some rather gory fun, but you'd refrain from calling it an intelligent critique of a bloody business enterprise. Adapted from a story by writer F. Paul Wilson, "Pelts" was apparently "tarted up" by Argento and screenwriter Matt Venne in its journey to the small screen. Because its misogynistic content crops up in that added sex and strip club sequences, we can probably blame its sexist attitude on them rather than Wilson. See, lustful fur trader Jake Feldman (Meat Loaf) will do anything to have sex with sultry stripper Shanna (Ellen Ewusie), regardless of the fact that she's gay. When he encounters the magical raccoon pelts in question, his first thought is to make them into a stunning coat that Shanna can model in exchange for the opportunity to get it on with her. When presented with the fur coat and Feldman's offer, Shanna agrees. (This is, according to what Wilson writes in his above linked post, in direct contrast to the outcome of his story.) Shanna betrays her own sexuality and lowers herself to have sex with Feldman, whom she quite dislikes, for the mere privilege of wearing a more-or-less useless material good. Women, of course, are always seduced by signs of wealth and will do anything to achieve them. Didn't you know this? Similarly to Frank Spivey in "Jenifer," Feldman is presented as a victim of his uncontrollable desires (though a far less sympathetic one, in consequence of the "fur trapping is evil" angle). This whole business with the furs might not have happened if Feldman didn't need to impress Shanna in order to convince her to sleep with him, and his total effort to give her everything she wants from him is rendered, graphically, at the conclusion of the film as him literally giving her the skin off his back (his skin, in this instance, standing in for his shirt). Gee, what a noble, selfless guy.

The Card Player (2004) dir. Dario Argento

a.k.a. Il cartaio

Logline: A maniac is on the loose in Rome, kidnapping women and forcing the local police to gamble for the victims' lives through high stakes games of online poker. Detective Anna Mari (Stefania Rocca) must team up with a troubled English Interpol agent (Liam Cunningham) to suss out the killer's location and put an end to his deadly gambling.

For all the predictability of his stories and plots in these later decades, Argento still possesses the ability to surprise his most observant and critical fans. For me, this surprise rarely registers as unabashed enjoyment of the films, but rather as a morbid appreciation for the wild and often wrongheaded filmmaking choices that Argento makes when constructing his numerous variations on a standard issue thrilling theme. It's fascinating that a single director making the same sort of film again and again over a couple of decades could make each feel so different. Tonally and aesthetically, Trauma (1994), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), Sleepless (2001), The Card Player, and Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005) bear no resemblance to one another, despite the fact that they all share the same well-worn giallo template. Argento's late career is a case that complicates any desire that a critic might have to look at his work through the lens of auteur theory: what was once horror's most distinctive stylistic nightmare vision has fractured like the glass of a broken mirror, producing a run of films that clash with and contradict one another on all possible levels. The influence of producers, distributors, audience expectations, and shrinking budgets have clearly had an effect on shaping Argento's later works, but that doesn't begin to explain the lack of reasonable stylistic and thematic continuity among them.

While a classically defined "auteur" will certainly develop her style and thematic concerns over her career as a director, a viewer should be able (as per the theory) to always recognize the director in her work, particularly if one were to view the director's films chronologically and witness her evolution as it happened. But at a certain point in Argento's career, his evolution as an "auteur" quits being linear: he devolves, rushes forward, backtracks, or floats off into atmosphere. You could pick any film from his later filmography, compare it to either the film preceding or succeeding it, and find each to resemble the work of no one in particular. More often than not, you'll find two films that appear so opposed to the elements and ideas of the other that they couldn't possibly be the work of the same filmmaker. For example, Sleepless, the film Argento made immediately before The Card Player, is the cinematic equivalent of a Luddite, with its stripped-down, old-fashioned procedural approach to the horror-thriller subgenre being placed at the forefront of its concerns. Let's not forget that one of the protagonists of that film, Max von Sydow's Inspector Moretti, actually laments the police's growing reliance on technology, and we see Moretti's distaste for technological advancement mirrored in the film itself both through its narrative (in which the modern cops' tech fails to produce results) and its approach to filmmaking (in which Argento mostly eschews the modern visual effects and cinematography that he had been trying out in previous films with sketchy results). 

In my essay on Sleepless here at the blog, I attempted to argue that the film was, in some ways, a conflicted reflection of Argento's own relationship-- and resistance-- to modern horror filmmaking in the early noughties, which had begun to heavily embrace computer technology in place of practical composition. And yet his follow-up film, The Card Player, throws that reading into disarray by incorporating technology (specifically online video poker games) into the plot as a fundamental feature. Whereas Sleepless eschewed technology when crafting its scenes of suspense, The Card Player relies exclusively upon it, often to its own detriment. (These high stakes online poker games, rendered in circa mid-'90s computer graphics and augmented by shoddy webcam A/V, are about as far from visual suspense as can be.) Consequent of this alteration of technology's importance to the narrative, the visual architecture of the screen adjusts to fit it: Sleepless's gorgeous Italian buildings, which gave the film a classically cinematic air, are replaced in The Card Player with cold office cubicles and computer terminals, more befitting a TV cop drama. Any of Sleepless's perceived sentiments concerning the preservation of the traditions and aesthetics of past horror cinema are obliterated by The Card Player's desperate, flailing attempts to be relevant and timely, as if Sleepless itself was a failed nostalgia experiment and The Card Player is Argento's resignation to the changes of the modern era. 

So is an auteur still an auteur if he gives up, or stops trying? Were those early films the product of the auteur or those who surrounded him? Those are questions for investigation, surely, but the answers aren't hidden in the films themselves. And, unfortunately, divorcing The Card Player from all of these bothersome queries doesn't reveal it to be a good film of its own unique merit. In fact, it's the worst I've seen thus far, the product of some bizarro world wherein FeardotCom (2002) was a creative and financial success worthy of imitation. What's here is all plot, and that plot hinges (feebly) on the viewer buying into silly things like the police's flagrant irresponsibility (for which they are not held accountable) and the ability of a master hacker/poker player to both remain untraceable and remotely control the police's computer network with a "mega virus." The Card Player feels as if it were made with a TV-watching audience in mind, and thus delivers performances and exposition that are easy enough to digest and recall between commerical breaks. And though it's about as melodramatic and preposterous as any episode of any Law & Order spinoff, its broad storytelling feels more egregious at feature length. It becomes a laughable cartoon, in which the climax literally involves the heroine being tied down to train tracks by the villain as a train barrels towards her. A month into my sojourn into Argento's darker days, I'm beginning to wish that train would barrel towards my station next.

Sleepless (2001) dir. Dario Argento

a.k.a. Non ho sonno

Logline: Moretti (Max von Sydow), a retired police inspector, becomes involved with a re-opened case concerning a long-thought-deceased killer whose crimes, which follow the lyrics of a macabre nursery rhyme, have begun to recur in the Italian city of Turin. The old fashioned inspector teams up with a young man, Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), who was witness as a child to the killer's English horn-equipped murder of his mother. Together, the intrepid duo will attempt to best the local police by uncovering the deranged madman's identity before he completes his twisted game.

If Sleepless goes down in the books as the best film of the twilight of Dario Argento's career, it won't be all that surprising: examine the competition. But for the film to garner that accolade would be a disappointment, as it would indicate that the best that he managed to create in these late decades is a competent but ultimately generic giallo, distinguishable from his earlier Animal Trilogy largely by its deficiency of stylistic flourish and use of contemporary film stock. Sleepless finds Argento working in the familiar and mundane mode of his earlier giallo The Cat O' Nine Tails (1971). From the presence of an elderly big-name actor in the investigation (Max von Sydow in Sleepless in the place of Cat's Karl Malden) down to killers who spend at least half of their murdering efforts taking out folks who possess incriminating evidence, the two films share certain superficial similarities.

But, more pointedly, the films are linked by their mutual adherence to the psychological simplicity of the American procedural mystery, in which the heroes are hunting a madman who kills because, well, that's simply what madman do. As Gary Needham notes in his essay linked above concerning the Animal Trilogy, Cat O' Nine Tails sticks out in Argento's giallo filmography due to its avoidance of the giallo's messy psychoanalytic framing, which often casts blame for the killer's derangement on family trauma. In contrast, Cat O' Nine Tails locates the killer's motivation in his genetic code, rendering his murderous nature an unavoidable biological fact. Though Sleepless embroils the killer's family members into the action of his crimes, they are not directly or indirectly responsible for any traumatic event that spurred the killer on. Rather, the killer is a simple sociopath, persuaded by a nursery rhyme that killing animals would be fun and then discovering on his own that killing people is even more fun. Because there are no past traumas for our heroes to uncover in either Sleepless or Cat, the killer could be (potentially) anyone, and therefore the films populate the screen with a deluge of red herrings and over-complicated plot twists to maintain audience interest. Although Sleepless's closing revelations are not as left-field or pseudo-scientific as Cat's, this misdirection nonetheless results in a mystery that is fun to follow along but in the end can't help but feel like a cheat.

But this stripped-to-its-basics procedural mystery-- almost entirely devoid of the misguided reliance on cheap computer effects that is on display in Trauma (1994) and Phantom of the Opera (1998)-- is difficult to view as anything but a return to form, of a sort, even if it's a return to a relatively mediocre form. Sleepless is cantankerously old-fashioned. Argento and his film place a lot of thematic weight on the shoulders of Max von Sydow's Moretti, a retired police inspector who laments the current state of police detection and whose anachronistic methods prove superior to the newfangled electronic methods of the new millennium. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that Argento identifies with Moretti, being that Argento himself is an old-fashioned horror film director working in the modern milieu. His prior attempts to grapple with the content and style of contemporary horror being spotty at best, Argento has seemingly crafted Sleepless to function as an implicit denial of modern horror's appeal. The gory murder set pieces are all composed with practical effects, the action is relocated to a stately Italian city with sumptuous architecture, and the complicated plot requires a few blips of the viewer's brain activity to follow. Its one obvious use of computer effects is a brief collection of shots in which the farm animal illustrations in a digital pop-up book literally pop up as the camera rotates around them, which is an almost subtle use of the technology in comparison with Phantom of the Opera's rat-sucking CGI vacuum mobile. In short, it's diametrically opposed to what horror cinema was fast becoming at the dawn of the new millennium: a brainless, CGI-blood-encrusted, low-light basement of torture.

And yet, despite its desire to be an intentional throwback, the film isn't totally immune to the influence of modern horror and its decidedly undesirable characteristics. The aestheticized murder of Argento's early work is transmuted into Sleepless's startling brutality against women. Fingers are chopped, heads are bashed, and mouths are violated (excessively) with stabbing English horns. Accusations of misogyny are nothing freshly lodged against Argento's filmography, but comparing Sleepless with a film chronologically near to it like Trauma, with its modicum of sympathy for its damaged female characters, is rather damning evidence of a shift in how the director approaches gendered violence. Again, the word of the day is "cynical": Sleepless's murder scenes feel contrived, as if they're gratuitous scraps of bloody meat thrown to the wailing hounds of modern horror fandom. This ugly, sexualized gore and splatter-- so at odds with the otherwise reserved and modest filmmaking elsewhere in the picture-- feels as if it's a sneering condemnation of the elements of an angry male power fantasy that have become requisite in the genre and their debasement of horror's elusive, surreal beauty.

Sleepless contends with itself, creating an internal conflict by allowing its nostalgia for the genre of old and contempt for the genre of today to battle it out. For viewers, this creates cognitive dissonance: we are engaged by the classical suspense plot, but repulsed by the horrible violence the garnishes it. The film forces us, whether intentionally or not, to question our own motives in enjoying these grisly proceedings, like a pulpier Funny Games (1997; 2007). Naturally, we also question those motives of the filmmaker: is his film exploitation or critique? Is Argento scoffing at the ubiquity of gendered violence in modern horror or quietly resigning himself to its infiltration of his own films? There's no easy answer within Sleepless, conflicted and contradictory as it is. Like Moretti, Argento has refused to retire, inserting himself into a gruesome series of modern murders that he's incapable of making much sense of. Despite their best intentions, the case bests them both, leaving Moretti with a heart attack and Argento without heart.

Phantom of the Opera (1998) dir. Dario Argento

a.k.a. Il fantasma dell'opera

Logline: A beautiful and talented opera singer, Christine (Asia Argento), ascends the ladder of stardom with violent help from her friend The Phantom (Julian Sands), a rat-raised orphan with telepathic powers who haunts the Opéra de Paris. Having fallen under the (um) charismatic Phantom's spell, Christine is physically and figuratively kidnapped, her only hope for salvation being her noble suitor, the pencil-bearded Raoul (Andre Di Stefano). But does Christine want to be saved, or does her affection for her Phantom lover extend beyond the erotic?

By being the most unique film in Argento's long and largely excellent but nonetheless rather unvaried filmography, The Phantom of the Opera appears to have inspired a brief bout of enthusiasm in its otherwise increasingly complacent director. There's a sizable gulf separating Phantom from Argento's early stylish masterpieces in terms of quality, but-- in contrast to his sleepy effort in Trauma (1993)-- Argento at least seems like he's trying here, though what exactly he's aiming for is up for either debate or a series of vigorous head scratches. Argento has never been known for the thematic depth of his films, but here he manages to stage a social critique of the hollow materialism of late 19th century Paris, a materialism that--in Argento's imagining-- was corrupt enough to produce candy-toting pedophiles alongside fame-grubbing dandies, with the suggestion that the two are essentially similar. But while Argento and his collaborators were certainly grinning snidely while designing their laughably opulent opera house and its petty aristocratic denizens, much of this critique originates in the film's source material, Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, the basic plot of which this film follows by broad strokes. With that in mind, we're left to evaluate Agrento's particular critique primarily through his alterations to the text. And that's where things become muddled.

What are we to make of Argento's handsome, non-disfigured Phantom? As portrayed by Julian Sands (horror's dopey English pin-up of the '90s), the Phantom is a snarling bohemian, hanging out in the opera house's bowels not because society is revolted by his physical appearance but because he refuses to accept the hypocrisy of Parisian society. Though not a repulsive physical pariah, he is marked by his lower class status (he's an orphan raised by rats, after all) and in a society as vain and superficial as the film's, such an upbringing is enough to lower a person to sub-human status: Sands's Phantom doesn't need to be disfigured to be an outcast. Moreover, his common physical appearance means that this Phantom, unlike the ethereal Phantoms of the novel and previous adaptations, doesn't do much hiding. He spends the film lurking about in plain sight, a lustful bodily presence who is always biting, scratching, and sniffing his victims and the objects of his affection alike. This alters the Phantom's significance in the world he occupies: his anonymity, rather than being the result of the cultivated ghostly persona of a disfigured outcast, is granted  to the Phantom because of his lowly social status. As a member of the lower order, the Phantom is invisible to society, his self-exile under the opera house being merely a physical realization of his place on the social ladder. It is only after he has caused trouble for the more civilized classes that he's noticed and violently dealt with, much like an invading rat would be after it has nosed out of the sewers.

And yet none of this makes Argento's Phantom a sympathetic figure, much less one with a coherent ideology. Far from being an avenging specter aiming to right the wrongs wrought by the wealthy upon the poor, the Phantom spends most of the film slaughtering and mutilating those poor working stiffs sent down to tinker under the opera house, those blighted folk who (filthy and crude as they may be) you'd imagine he would find some common ground with. Sure, we might say that he attacks his fellow paupers because they're guilty of the crime of complicity by working for the upper class, but this would be ignoring the fact that his own violent efforts against that upper class (like the famous chandelier crash, here rendered magnificently as the gory demises of countless dummies) have little to do with rebelling against the unjust station forced upon him and much more to do with securing his beloved Christine a better job entertaining that stuffy crowd. The Phantom is a sleazy prick-- a kidnapper, a murderer, and a rapist-- and pretty soon the lines dividing him from his comically corrupt and perverted opposites dissipate. In one scene near the end of the film, Christine catches him opening his shirt and taking erotic pleasure as his rat friends climb upon him and start their nibbling, in a gross-out mirror image of a nude orgiastic bathhouse romp that the wealthy characters (including his romantic rival, Raoul) take part in earlier in the film. The Phantom wears his class-based indignation as a sort of disguise: underneath is the same hypocrisy.

But what is the film trying to say with this undermining of our troubled antihero's motivation? It's not too taxing to imagine that it's all a misanthropic screed, chuckling at the notion that those at the bottom are more righteous than those at the top. This reading is supported by how the film presents our ostensible heroine, Christine. In the novel and in other adaptations, she is often portrayed as a pure-hearted young woman capable of feeling astounding sympathy for others less fortunate. By contrast, Argento's Christine actively pursues her own advancement at the expense of others, and doesn't put up too much protest after the Phantom kills to help her achieve it. She expresses that she's torn between her equal attractions to the Phantom and Raoul, and finds little fault in sleeping with the Phantom immediately before betraying him to other lover. The film plays Christine not as duplicitous but as a woman incapable of denying a man that which he desires: Raoul and the Phantom both "love" her, and her affections exclusively rest with whichever one she's with in the moment. Though the film attempts to blame her shifting allegiance on the Phantom's telepathic control of her-- "his will is my will, and his thoughts are my actions," she claims-- one can't help but feel that this is feebly obscuring a misogynistic bent of the "frailty, thy name is woman" variety. Because, stripped of any telepathic influence, Christine's lack of autonomy is still chilling: when being "rescued" by Raoul after she willfully ran away with the Phantom, Christine begs of her aristocratic lover, "don't you ever let me disappear like this again."

It's apparent in its presentation of its "heroes" that the film finds that it possesses no human soul to root for. We're stuck watching rats, perverts, and empty vessels take bites out of each other's flesh, and the assumption seems to be that we'll enjoy this viewing experience, which probably doesn't say much for the film's opinion of us either. Phantom of the Opera is far from being the nadir of Argento's latter day work, but it's never much fun to watch. Its distressing social commentary, repugnant characters, and mean-spirited tone, when combined with a flat visual style and an over-reliance on shoddy VFX, create a rather bleak and uninviting world to enter into for even a short spell. The film and its effect on the viewer is best encapsulated by the scene in which one of its pedophilic aristocrats chases down a young girl and force feeds her some Swiss chocolates as she struggles against it: it's uncomfortable, much too much to swallow, and-- despite any intended sweetness-- leaves a sour taste in one's mouth.

Trauma (1993) dir. Dario Argento

Logline: A series of grizzly decapitations has the residents of Minneapolis cowering in their galoshes in fear of a nefarious killer who strikes only when it's raining. The killer's latest dual beheading leaves a teenaged "anorexic," Aura Petrescu (Asia Argento), an orphan. Aura finds safe harbor from institutionalization in the arms and home of a much older journalist, David (Christopher Rydell). Together, the pair attempt to unravel the pattern of the killer's crimes before the end credits roll.

Resting awkwardly among Argento's limper horrors, Trauma suffers most from a lack of ingenuity. Though released exactly two decades after the psycho-sexual Italian giallo thriller reached its apex, the film neglects to update the subgenre for the last decade of the 20th century in any meaningful way. Those few moments that do appear to aspire to represent the surface level cultural trends of the '90s-- like a perplexing closing credits reggae porch jam session with a willowy girl swaying to the music as her hair is blown about-- can't help but feel woefully out-of-touch, not to mention contextually jarring. Considering that Trauma is Argento's first feature-length American production, one would imagine he'd be influenced by that country's contemporary horror scene, but that's not the case: the film is trapped in the sleazy closet of early 1970s Eurohorror, oblivious to the decades of horror filmmaking that had transformed the genre since. The film feels positively old fashion, with the same old type of killer, the same old type of motivation, and the same old creaky psychology in a mystery that hits the same old plot beats. But one would be hard-pressed to call Trauma a deliberate, nostalgic, and reverential throwback to the Golden Yellow Days when one stops to consider the man behind the camera. As the single person most responsible for the giallo's popularity, and with a filmography that features increasingly complex and unique examples of the subgenre up until 1987, Argento settling for Trauma's narrative and stylistic mediocrity is self-plagiarism of the laziest variety. In fact, Argento and his screenwriter, horror author T.E.D. Klein, get no more creative than using Argento's own landmark giallo Deep Red (1975) as this film's basic template (with an splash of  Paolo Cavara's Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971) thrown in for flavor). A seance featuring a medium who discerns the then present killer's identity and is quickly dispatched for possessing this knowledge; a journalist aiding the protagonist in the recovery of a visual memory that cracks the case; a matronly murderess (with past trauma involving her son) and her climactic decapitation. Sound familiar? The small "twists" that Trauma gives to these recognizable story elements (the sexes of the journalist and protagonist are switched around! the medium faked her own death!) hardly disguise the fact that we've seen all of this before, orchestrated with substantially more splattery grace.

All of this said, Trauma isn't a terrible film. It's quite entertaining, actually, though not often in ways that you'd imagine were hoped for. For those who enjoy the cheesier aspects of the these affairs, the film is laden with broad acting (Piper Laurie hams it up perfectly while Asia goes cross-eyed and lead Christopher Rydell bribes a child with an offer to be his best friend), amateur editing (a shot of Asia jumping dangerously off a high roof abruptly cuts to her running, fine and dandy, in the rain), hilarious pre-CGI '90s composite shots (Brad Dourif's decapitation and his gasping head-- from the chin up-- plummeting to the depths below against a green screen), a dreadful silent cartoon score from De Palma's regular composer Pino Donaggio, and curiously creaky practical VFX from the usually skilled Tom Savini (shoddy decapitated mechanical heads with still moving mouths do not scares make). My favorite moments are those containing fallacious bits of pop psychological wisdom concerning anorexia, which Aura is said to suffer from: all anorexics, you know, have unnatural attachments to their mothers and all of them have dreams about their fathers leaning over them in their sleep and planting big wet kisses on them. If you weren't aware of these scientific facts, you should watch more Oprah and Donahue, as one of the film's characters helpfully recommends. The film's cynical presentation of the damage and (ahem) trauma that controlling medical institutions bestow upon otherwise healthy people (see Aura and her mother) suggests that the film has critical aims, but the film's wandering plot tangents and Argento's sloppy, often ludicrous direction prevent any coherent critique of '90s America from emerging.

Make no mistake: this is Argento on the decline. When, in one scene, Aura is force-fed some psychotropic mind berries, Argento is given the perfect opportunity to invest some of his primary color surrealism into the film, but the best he can muster is a translucent ghost ballerina twirling on the ceiling. Granted, seeing him evolve is welcome-- in theory-- but when the result looks like Trauma we can't help but be vaguely disappointed. Because it was made for a meaty-enough estimated budget of seven million dollars, one can't simply lay the film's faults on a lack of funds. Argento seems tired here. Perhaps he was disillusioned with the fact that this sort of been-there-done-that thriller was the only sort of film he could get bankrolled, or perhaps he was beginning to become exhausted with filmmaking in general after two decades of fabulous imagination and productivity. His second collaboration with his daughter Asia, 1996's The Stendhal Syndrome, would find him more focused and less flippant with the giallo material, but even that film is similarly prone to the sloppy production values and style on display in Trauma. In stark contrast to his still-vibrant works of the mid-to-late '80s, Trauma finds the hyper-garish hyperactivity of Argento's fantasy horrors waning. The film's dialogue points to a certain cynicism the filmmakers hold for their entire bloody endeavor: "He only kills when it's raining," one character points out, to which another replies, "Well, stay out of the rain."