Fancy Clown
Member
15) Deep Red - (Dario Argento, 1975)
"Maybe you've seen something so important you can't realize it."
Wow. So this was an improvement over Argento's Cat o' Nine Tails, to say the least. I'm tempted to just throw more gorgeous stills from the movie up here and the amazing Goblin soundtrack and just leave it at that, because this film is first and foremost a visual and aural experience, and in its best sequences the images and sound flow and mesh together like a grand opera of violence. Seriously, the first 15 minutes of this movie are flawless, from the enigmatic and creepy opening images, the first time the rocking Goblin score kicks in, and the brutal first kill. This film shares some of the same issues as other gialli I've seen, and there were a few awkward cuts in here that I imagine were because the American version I watched was 20 minutes shorter than the Italian cut. But even the weaker moments of this giallo (the non-suspense scenes) are better than most of the other gialli I've seen since the characters actually have character, the lead actor is quite good, and there's more humor and playfulness...plus the movie is so damn gorgeous it wouldn't really matter if the expository scenes were terrible (they're not). And the murder scenes themselves...whoo boy, they are something else. The brutality combined with the beauty of how they're shot, and the editing along with the soundtrack make them like grotesque ballets, and each one was a sadistic and macabre delight. And of course one film after I comment about how I'm figuring out who the killer is in all these movies pretty early on, I get to this one where I honestly did not see the reveal coming. I'd put this up with Blood and Black Lace as the best of the gialli I've seen, easily.
"Maybe you've seen something so important you can't realize it."
Wow. So this was an improvement over Argento's Cat o' Nine Tails, to say the least. I'm tempted to just throw more gorgeous stills from the movie up here and the amazing Goblin soundtrack and just leave it at that, because this film is first and foremost a visual and aural experience, and in its best sequences the images and sound flow and mesh together like a grand opera of violence. Seriously, the first 15 minutes of this movie are flawless, from the enigmatic and creepy opening images, the first time the rocking Goblin score kicks in, and the brutal first kill. This film shares some of the same issues as other gialli I've seen, and there were a few awkward cuts in here that I imagine were because the American version I watched was 20 minutes shorter than the Italian cut. But even the weaker moments of this giallo (the non-suspense scenes) are better than most of the other gialli I've seen since the characters actually have character, the lead actor is quite good, and there's more humor and playfulness...plus the movie is so damn gorgeous it wouldn't really matter if the expository scenes were terrible (they're not). And the murder scenes themselves...whoo boy, they are something else. The brutality combined with the beauty of how they're shot, and the editing along with the soundtrack make them like grotesque ballets, and each one was a sadistic and macabre delight. And of course one film after I comment about how I'm figuring out who the killer is in all these movies pretty early on, I get to this one where I honestly did not see the reveal coming. I'd put this up with Blood and Black Lace as the best of the gialli I've seen, easily.