Let's head to Italy for Dario Argento's 1987
flick OPERA. Argento's no stranger to Horrorfest. Some of his flicks are
awesome (DEEP RED), others are just okay (INFERNO) but from the music to
the cinematography to the gore, they're all stylish.
OPERA is kind of a Cliff's Notes retelling of
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, with Cristina Marsillach as an understudy who is
pushed to center stage when the opera's star suffers an accident. There's a
murder in the theater the first night of her performance, and many other
murders follow, with the mysterious killer tying up Marsillach each time and
using needle-like apparatuses on her eyes to force her to watch.
The opera house setting is beautiful, there's
a gorgeous mountainside climax, the murder scenes feature good special effects
and "inventive" kills, and the movie is filled with complex shots.
There's also a great soundtrack featuring the likes of Brian Eno and Bill
Wyman.
But this is one of those Argento movies that's
technically awesome while totally lacking in the story department. For
instance, the whole "forcing you to watch murder" thing is contrived.
It makes for great movie scenes, but even if a killer propped my eyes open with
apparatuses that would stab my eyeballs with needles if I dared to blink, I would
still blink, because blinking is involuntary.
Also, our heroine doesn't even go to the cops
after she escapes the first attack. Stuff like this made a lot of the movie
hard to swallow. It's pretty typical of an Argento flick – they usually have
more of a dream like logic than any kind of plot logic, and that's not always a
bad thing, but sometimes it gets in the way.
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