Opera (1987)


Dario Argento is considered to be one of the masters of horror.  He is one of the most well-known Italian directors and is almost as celebrated as Mario Bava.  His giallo films and later horror films helped define how both genres are known in Italy and helped put a modern dressing on the frame that Bava had built.  His use of color, camera movements and excess gore constantly pushed his movies into new territory.

That is, until he got into the 1990s.  Trauma received mixed reviews and pretty much everything after that is widely dismissed despite attempts to return to form and to finish off the series of movies that began with Suspiria.  The decline was so rapid as to be as shocking as one of his kill scenes.  Opera stands as his last great horror film, and to me it has always been one of his best movies in general. 

When a famous, but cantankerous opera star is hit by a car and forced to sit out the role of Lady Macbeth in a strange production of Verdi's opera her understudy Betty (Cristina Marsillach) is asked to step up.  She does and becomes an instant star, with the critics praising her performance while panning the pretentions of horror movie director turned opera afficionado Marco (Ian Charleson).  It also turns out that someone was manipulating things for her to get that role.

That someone, rather than being a benefactor, begins torturing Betty by tying her up, taping pins under her eyes so she can't close them and murdering her friends and colleagues in front of her.  She believes it is the curse of Macbeth, but she also fears that it may have something to do with dreams she has been having about her past.  Meanwhile Inspector Alan Santini (Urbano Barberini) sets out to protect her and find the killer, something that Marco thinks he may be able to do himself.

Visually this is Argento's most interesting movie since Suspiria.  One entire sequence is filmed from a raven's point of view as it flies around the opera house, it and its companions causing panic the whole time.  The beginning, with the diva opera star, is filmed in a way that we never see her, as it is all from her point of view.  This was because Vanessa Redgrave was supposed to play the part, but that fell through, and Argento came up with a creative way to get around it. 

In addition, the twist on who the killer is works well - there are not a lot of red herrings - and this has some of the most creative and, in the case of one person being stabbed through the bottom of the mouth, some of the most disturbing.  For the most part the movie stands out as a stunning horror film as well as an artistic achievement. 

There are some issues.  The heavy metal music playing during the kills doesn't fit.  I know Argento meant it as a contrast to the classical music that fills the majority of the film, and to represent the killer's psyche, but it just doesn't work the way he thought it would.  Also, there is the actual ending, which will leave most of the audience just wondering why the movie concludes on that note. 

While Argento was sure that the curse of Macbeth was also upon Opera he still made a brilliant film.  Christina Marsillach was supposedly difficult to work with.  There were also mishaps on the set as well as difficulties getting the production going.  Still, the end result was worth it.  I just wish that what came after this was still the same quality as before.

Opera (1987)
Time: 107 minutes
Starring: Christina Marsillach, Ian Charleson, Urbano Barberini
Director: Dario Argento 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Image
A large portion of the world likes being scared.  This seems to be one thing we all share.  At some point when there were just a few homo sapiens gathered around a fire I am sure they told stories of old Gak who had his arm replaced with a mammoth tusk and terrorized some teenagers making outside of camp when they should have been hunting and gathering.  Everyone enjoys a good scare. Except, apparently, for the French.  Eyes Without a Face came out square in the middle of the French New Wave, a series of films that guys in the late 1950s and early 1960s pretended to understand to impress their girlfriends.  In contrast Georges Franju's film was pretty straightforward.  Although he nominally was more interested in exploring depression and loss, the framework was that of a typical mad scientist film.  However, Franju's surrealist touches set it aside from normal b-movie fare.   Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a brilliant surgeon working in t...
Read more

The Resurrected (1991)

Image
Dan O'Bannon was known for a few things, other than being extremely difficult to work with.  He cowrote and co-starred in Dark Star , wrote Alien and directed The Return of the Living Dead .  Because of the latter he has his own version of zombies named after him.  While he had issues he wasn't the only one in his field that did, and his supposed problems seem tame when compared with a lot of eccentric directors.  Whatever the case, he had early success with his movies and was considered to be quite brilliant.  Therefore, it is a bit of surprise that he only directed two feature films and one of those is almost impossible to find.  Private investigator John March (John Terry) is contacted by Claire Ward (Jane Sibbett) to find out what her husband Charles (Chris Sarandon) is up to.  He has been acting strange as of late and recently moved into an old farmhouse in rural Rhode Island that had once been owned by a  man named Joseph Curwen (Sarandon)....
Read more

Looper (2012)

Image
Looper  was writer and director Rian Johnson's third feature film and first major success.  A major departure from the movie he had done prior, it required immense worldbuilding, a major amount of attention to making the time travel plot plausible and the ability to do so on only a moderate budget.  However, it was a gamble that paid off in major ways for Johnson, at least in the short term. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper, which is basically a hired assassin who takes care of people that a crime syndicate 30 years in the future wants gone.  They send them back to his time - a dismal, dystopian United States in 2044 - to be shot, for which he earns silver bars that he can spend.  What he mainly spends it on is whores and drugs, but it's because he knows that, in the end, he will have to close his own loop.  That means ultimately killing an older version of himself. When Joe's friend Seth (Paul Dano) faces just that and fails he is asked by local crim...
Read more