Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Declaring Dark Glasses to be the best film directed by the legendary Italian horror master Dario Argento in 20 years is almost literally meaningless. First and foremost, he hasn’t made anything for the last ten of those years, since 2012’s dreadful Dracula 3D threatened to be the final film of his illustrious career. And that came […]

From among the Video Nasties If you were to know only the title of the film Tenebrae, you might think- actually, you would probably have no clue. Before I saw it the first time, I think I had some vague sense that it might have something to do with the spinal column, because of -brae. […]

October’s such a busy month: here I am, looking to pack away the Chicago International Film Festival and get to work on Kevin Olson’s Italian Horror Blogathon, and wouldn’t you know it, but I was given an absolutely perfect, gift-wrapped transition from one to the other in the form of Dracula 3D, the latest film […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies An earlier review of this film can be found here. It’s one thing to watch Mother of Tears, Dario Argento’s 2007 conclusion to his Three Mothers trilogy, with some distance between yourself, and Suspiria and Inferno, and understand in a general way why it […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies From among the Video Nasties 1980’s Inferno, Dario Argento’s very next movie after Suspiria was not just a sequel – a sequel that had not by any means suggested itself from the plot of the first film, mind you – but a film that […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies Suspiria is not just AN Italian horror movie – it is THE Italian horror movie. The best-known, the most widely-seen and widely-discussed, the one held to typify the style of Italian horror the most; the last of which, at least, is profoundly unfair, because […]

The golden age of the gialli was not all that long; it can be conveniently be bracketed by two Dario Argento films, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970 and Deep Red in 1975. Though examples would occasionally creep out after then – Argento himself has never truly abandoned the giallo style, up to […]

If Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much can be identified as the first giallo, it’s mostly because of hindsight: it is ground zero for the form, the earliest ending point for most of the tropes that came to define the subgenre. But at the same time, it’s notable as much for the ways […]

Name-drop a fella enough, and you start to feel guilty about it. Or in other words, the time has come, the Walrus said, to review a classic Dario Argento film already. Our volunteer is Deep Red, 1975 giallo that was one of the director’s finest works in genre that made his name. It comes in […]