Inferno [reviewed by Lackey]

Inferno 106 min., 1980
Directed by Dario Argento
Language: English (some dubbed dialogue)
My rating:
IMDB • Netflix

Argento by numbers.

* * *

While browsing through an antique shop, New York-based poet Rose Elliot comes across a rare book entitled The Three Mothers. The book’s author, an architect named Varelli, claims that the world is secretly ruled by three evil women, who live in special homes (in New York, Rome, and Freiburg, Germany) which Varelli designed and built for them. A series of weird happenings leads Rose to believe that her own apartment building is one of these homes. She dispatches a letter to her brother Mark, a music student in Rome, asking him to visit her–but when he arrives in America, Rose is nowhere to be found. Will Mark solve his sister’s disappearance and uncover the secret of Mater Tenebrarum, the youngest and most cruel of the Three Mothers?

Dario Argento’s sequel to Suspiria isn’t exactly a rehash of its predecessor, but it can be accurately filed under “more of the same”: elaborate, beautifully staged kill scenes; astonishing cinematography; artful use of colored light sources; excessively weak script. The structure of the film is frustratingly slapdash, and its insistence on waiting 45 minutes to bring its protagonist to center stage (Mark does very little until he arrives in New York, about halfway through the picture) is alienating. Diversionary tactics–including a mysterious fellow music student who brings a cat to class and attempt by one of Mark’s friends to investigate The Three Mothers in Rome–are unnecessarily protracted and padded out.

The characterization is very weak, with very few roles exhibiting much in the way of personality. Argento is perfectly happy to eschew exploration of the characters’ vocational choices; one gets the feeling that Rose is only a poet so she can buy a rare book and Mark is only a music student so Argento can set a scene at a music-appreciation seminar.

The leads–soap star Leigh McCloskey as Mark and Irene Miracle (still best known for appearing in the only scene in Midnight Express that anyone remembers anymore) as Rose–are lackluster and limp. (Legend states that Argento originally wanted James Woods for the McCloskey role, but Woods turned it down to do Videodrome. The right choice, although Woods would have been much better in the role than McCloskey.) Sascha Pitoëff is amusingly cranky as the antiques dealer and Ania Pieroni (of Tenebrae and The House by the Cemetery) makes the most of her etherial presence as the cat-loving classmate; sadly, the rest of the supporting cast (most notably, The Beyond’s Veronica Lazar as an eccentric nurse, Suspiria’s Alida Valli as the apartment building’s caretaker, and Argento’s longtime partner Daria Nicolodi as Rose’s sickly neighbor…basically an assortment of actresses who always appeared in these sorts of movies) don’t seem particularly interested in what’s going on. Or maybe it’s the dubbing.

As for the score, supplied by progressive rock keyboardist Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake and Palmer)…25% of it is very good (particularly a discortant piano theme), but not matched very well to what’s going on. The other 75% is terrible, and a good example why exactly so many people hated ELP.

As is so often the case with Argento, the saving grace is the visual aspect. He makes great use of his locations and does a great job of turning Rome into New York. Even the exteriors are claustrophobic. The interior sequences aren’t as successful–the sets are a bit too stylized, and he goes overboard with his colored light sources, but they’re still beautiful. But they’re not strong enough to keep me from reaching the conclusion that Argento simply was running on autopilot for this one.

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About Lackey

Daniel Lackey is almost 40, and still considers the gremlin from the Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" to be the scariest thing he has ever laid eyes on. He has a personal blog and can be found on Twitter at @Daniel_Lackey.

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