Just plain awful .....

this film is ludicrous. it has a truly ridiculous story that could have been told in 80 minutes but the director elongates the film to 125 with long reasonably tense (but mostly sleep inducing) scenes filled with cheesy rock n roll music (the music composer is called GOBLIN!).

there is a lot of intellectual mumbo jumbo at the beginning of the film, maybe argento just inserted them to show that he was an erudite fellow. some of the camera angles and gimmicks (like the scene in the toilet where the victim writes something on a shower partition) are definitely very interesting. i dont know if all of them are original but yeah atleast the first half of the film is reasonably engaging.

everything falls apart when that female journalist makes an appearance. her irritating powdered face and sexist behavior was insufferable. some of the scenes between her and david hemmings where they have a war of the sexes is as bad as scenes in zayed khan-esha deol movies.

the truth of the matter is that argento does not posess much talent as a tight script writer or editor so he shows off with his sets and weird camera angles and music to hide his inabilities. frankly i am still wondering why he wrote the script in such a convoluted way. the film did not even need many of the characters. a lot of them are there purely to show off special effects and gore.

there are some pj's inserted here and there (like the bommerang joke in the bar). i guess argento inserted it to achieve a balance with all the intellectual crap in the first half of the film. the fact that these gimmicks are not repeated in the second half has a very jarring effect. argento is simply a terrible craftsman. BRIAN DE PALMA walks all over this guy.



It was as if irritation exuded from the very soil.