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March 2011
cast: Leigh McCloskey, Daria Nicolodi, Irene Miracle, and Eleonora Giorgi
director: Dario Argento
107 minutes (18) 1980
widescreen ratio 1.85:1
Arrow DVD Region 2
RATING: 7/10
review by Jim Steel
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Inferno
The second of Dario Argento's supernatural trilogy concerning the witches known as the 'Three Mothers' is as barking as anything in his canon.
All of his tropes can be found here: his control of symmetry and colour; extreme (almost forensic) close-up; the power of animals (cats, rats,
and ants in this case, pet-lovers); the use of a potent soundtrack, effectively supplied here by Keith Emerson who has to compete with lashings
of Verdi; and, of course, plenty of blood from highly inventive and violent deaths.
After the success of Suspiria (1977), Argento set to work on Inferno.
It's a thematic sequel (most of Argento's characters tend not to last all the way to the end of the film anyway), so knowledge of the first film
isn't essential. Argento's habit of wandering up narrative side-streets with some of his characters tends to make for an unsettling journey, and
you learn that you genuinely have no idea if the person whose viewpoint you have been following for the past ten minutes is going to live much
longer. Argento's indifference to actor direction, it must be said, muddies things further and innocents can frequently come across as very
unsettling people. Accidental art..? Not hardly. Argento deliberately works with dream logic.
Anyway, Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) is a poet living in a sumptuous apartment block in New York (a clue that this is intended to be more of a
fairy tale than a realistic adventure). She's bought a book, from creepy antique dealer Kazanian (Sacha Pito�ff in full Hammer horror mode) in
the shop next door, which tells of the Three Mothers and gives cryptic clues to their whereabouts. She realises that the building she stays in
could even be one of their homes and, in finest horror tradition, goes down to the basement to investigate, nearly drowning in a sunken room in
the process. However, she manages to write a letter concerning the Three Mothers to her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey) who is studying music in
Rome.
Mark has the letter at a lecture when he looks down from his seat in the amphitheatre and sees a beautiful witch staring back up at him (Ania
Pieroni, complete with cat - hey, she might merely be another student but Argento's fooling nobody). Unsettled, he leaves the letter to be found
by his friend, Sara (Elenora Griogori) who decides to go to a library to find this book. In a beautiful set piece full of nightmare logic she
finds the book and then gets lost in the building and discovers an alchemist's lab in the basement. Mark, on discovering that his sister is in
trouble, flies back to New York only to find that she has vanished. Events in her apartment building become increasingly horrific. Much violence
ensues.
It soon becomes apparent that Inferno is a giallo re-interpretation of Roger Corman's The Masque Of The Red Death. Argento is a
massive fan of Poe and would hardly have been unaware of Corman's series of adaptations. The story arc reveals this as much as Argento's use
of colour and interior design. This isn't a flaw; quite the contrary, as it provides much of the pleasure for the connoisseur. There is much
more to delight the serious fan in Arrow's excellent new double-disc set (appalling cover aside). The usual trailers for different international
releases of Inferno, and other Argento films are here as you would expect, of course, but they will really only be of interest to the
completists.
There is a superb hour-long television programme on Argento's career that features Daria Nicolodi (Argento's wife at the time, and un-credited
co-writer of Inferno) and their daughter Asia who has starred in several of her father's films. Asia hints at some interesting Freudian
dimensions to her father's work. John Carpenter and George Romero are merely some of the other names who appear in it. There is also a short
set of interviews with Argento, and Lamberto Bava, where they discuss Mario Bava's involvement with the film (which is obvious to anyone
familiar with Bava senior's own work). Some of the credit sequences to Arrow's own home-brewed documentaries suffer a bit from an attack of
South Park animation but bear with them for they are worth watching. Dario discusses the film at length. Mrs Argento, Daria, discusses
her part in creating the first two films in the trilogy and then dissects the belated follow-up,
Mother Of Tears (2007).
It must be said that, in all the interviews that she gives here, Daria Nicolodi is either remarkably forgiving, or has had the benefit of
sympathetic editing. There is also an interview with Luigi Cozzi, whose The Black Cat (1989) started life as Daria's attempt to finish
the trilogy before becoming Cozzi's metafictional tribute to the series. Cozzi also explains the reason for Argento's apparent creative decline
over the past couple of decades: the Italian film industry collapsed in the 1980s, dragging the budgets down with it, basically. Cozzi's own
film vanished when the American distributor went under, and it wasn't helped by the confusion that arose due to Argento and Romero collaborating
on an adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat at the same time. As far as the interviews go, it must also be noted that some of the participants'
facts differ from those of the others. The editors are commendably neutral and it's your choice as to what you believe.
Inferno, curiously, also suffered at the hands of its American distributor when it first came out. Fox couldn't make head or tale of
the plotting and the executive in charge at the time, Sherri Lansing, found it highly disturbing. It went straight to video. What a waste.
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