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Italy: Dario Argento, 1980

Every year, I promise myself that I'll go on a horror movie binge at Halloween, and every year I come up short. This time round, I have the excuse that, due to October 31st falling on a Saturday, I was working all day and was too knackered when I got home to contemplate a viewing marathon. However, not wanting to let All Hallows' Eve pass unacknowledged, I decided to dim the lights, put my feet up and watch Dario Argento's Inferno.

Inferno is a film that I have a strange relationship with, in that I have to be in the right mood to really enjoy it. Someone once wrote that it was the only film that they loved unconditionally but at the same time could completely understand why others loathed it, and that really struck a chord with me. It's a mesmerising, imaginative and quite otherworldly film, but at the same time so heavily flawed that part of me wants to simply dismiss it as a failure. Its predecessor, Suspiria, while not exactly what you would call mainstream, was far more accessible than this loose sequel, which seeks to capture the atmosphere of a fever dream. Argento was seriously ill during both the writing and principle photography, and some of this actually ends up on the screen in terms of the delirious, nonsensical manner in which events unfold.

What inspired me to pick Inferno over the dozens of other horror films on my shelf was reading a review of it my the ever-reliable Mr. Peel, whose blog is one of my favourite haunts for movie reviews. Watching the film last night with his review in mind, I was struck by just how much my own opinion tallies with his:

INFERNO is a fascinating and, in some ways, daring work by its director but at times maybe too disjointed to entirely connect to any sort of emotional state. Still, it's hard to deny how much the very best moments really do linger in the brain long after it concludes and at its best there is a genuine power in there.

Likewise, I absolutely agree with Mr. Peel's assertion that one of the most problematic aspects of the film is that it feels like the middle chapter of a trilogy that was never completed. Argento did, of course, complete the trilogy two years ago with Mother of Tears, but that film was so divorced from Suspiria and Inferno in every respect (be it mood, aesthetics or even time period) that in many ways the story still feels infuriatingly unfinished. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering what the third chapter would have been like had it been made in the mid-80s when Argento was still at the height of his game, rather than a quarter-century later when his batting average had become much lower and his entire approach to filmmaking changed beyond all recognition.

Much of the frustration I feel when watching Inferno comes in the form of Leigh McCloskey as the protagonist. He is a bland and ineffective presence, and even taking into account the fact that this was surely Argento's intention, the result is that following his journey of (non-)discovery isn't particularly satisfying. In Suspiria, Jessica Harper was the perfect protagonist: sympathetic, resourceful, vulnerable without being helpless, and easy on the eyes. McCloskey is none of these, and the fact that we are initially introduced to two far more promising contenders - Irene Miracle and Eleonora Giorgi - simply adds to the sense of frustration when McCloskey and his hair take centre stage.

And yet it's difficult to deny just how much of Inferno works. The visuals are surreal and stunning, if very different from those of Suspiria. They may seem superficially similar in terms of their foregrounding of bold washes of blue and red, but in many respects the earlier film is far more deliberately stylised. Inferno, by contrast, actually has a more naturalistic look, punctuated by blasts of vivid colour. Some of the set pieces are among the best Argento has ever created, particularly those that involve Irene Miracle going for an impromptu dip in a ballroom submerged in water or winding her way through the labyrinthine corridors of Mater Tenebrarum's New York residence. And even the more batshit crazy moments, which those feeling less charitable than myself would probably blame on bad translation ("heart medicine", anyone?), add something intangible to the overall mood of the piece.

Yahoo! Answers has a very succinct definition of the term "fever dream":

The long, tedious, seemingly endless string of dream sequences that often accompanies an illness that includes a fever. Not usually so frightening as tiring and weird -- long hallways, destinations never actually reached, confusion, dense but only mildly significant symbolism.

When I'm in one of my less charitable moods, this actually strikes me as a highly appropriate description of Inferno itself. It's vivid and intoxicating, but at the same time part of me feels a bit fed up and wishes it would hurry up and get to whatever point it is trying to make. Of course, that's probably the wrong way of thinking about it. Argento isn't trying to say anything in particular, but rather to create a mood, a dream world in which things don't have to make sense. More than any of the maestro's other films, Inferno arguably provides the viewer with a direct connection to its director's own warped imagination. It's no wonder many hate it.

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UK: Nick Park, 1995

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UK: Nick Park, 1993

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UK: Nick Park, 1989

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USA/Canada/Germany: Rob Schmidt, 2003

Ah, the early 00s - a time when the horror genre hadn't yet gone down the route of remaking every single scary movie from the 70s but, by the same token, had only just shaken off the spectre of the nudge nudge, wink wink brand of self-awareness popularised by Scream and its sequels. I'm watched a number of horror movies of this vintage recently, and very few of them hold up particularly well. There's a certain aimlessness about them - they're competently made but generic, populated by bland, good-looking people, and do nothing that wasn't already achieved decades earlier for less money. Wrong Turn actually hold up rather better than some that I could name, although, let's be honest, if you want to watch a proper "nice middle class white people set upon by backwoods savages" movie, Deliverance or the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is probably a better bet.

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UK: John Maybury, 2008

More like the edge of boredom, upon which I tottered for the duration of this biopic of playwright Dylan Thomas, told primarily from the perspectives of the two women in his life. Despite being beautifully shot by John Maybury (The Jacket) and featuring an excellent performance by the ubiquitous Keira Knightley (who seems to come as some sort of package deal with any British period piece), the film feels limp and inconsequential, spending nearly two hours trying to decide what its focus is. Fundamentally, the film doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, and half-heartedly toys with exploring the personalities of Thomas and the two women but never actually commits.

What we're ultimately left with is a lightweight and unfulfilling glimpse at the wartime exploits (or lack thereof) of a bunch of thoroughly self-centred and unlikeable individuals who really should have stopped whingeing about their own infinitesimal problems and realised that there were bigger fish to fry. Cillian Murphy, as Knightley's husband, sent off to fight in Greece while the rest of them stared at their own belly buttons, emerges as the most sympathetic character, to the extent that when he returns from combat, machine gun in hand, you really do hope he'll just open fire on them all. I'm assuming this wasn't the intention of Maybury or writer Sharman Macdonald (who, yes, is indeed Knightley's mother).

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USA: Shane Black, 2005

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UK/Germany/Spain/Lithuania: Brad Anderson, 2008

Would it be an exaggeration to suggest that Transsiberian is the sort of film Alfred Hitchcock would have made if he had still been alive in 2008? The designers of the UK cover art certainly saw the similarities. Myself, I was thoroughly impressed with this intricately plotted nail-biter from Brad Anderson, who in between gigs such as serving as the supervising director of the JJ Abrams-produced TV Series Fringe somehow finds time to make slick, complex Euro-puddings (to borrow a turn of phrase from the esteemed Daniel Bird) such as this and the earlier The Machinist. Here, he's aided by a truly stellar ensemble cast, including Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Kate Mara, Eduardo Noriega and Ben Kingsley, with Thomas Krestchmann (he of The Stendhal Syndrome) also cropping up in a virtually dialogue-free role. I'd rather not say any more about the film for fear of spoiling it (it really does help do go in with little to no idea what it's about), but I heartily recommend checking it out - you won't be disappointed. Possibly one of the best films of 2008 that no-one saw.

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France: Luc Besson, 2005

Angel-A, Luc Besson's return to the director's chair after a seven-year hiatus, is certainly derivative. Highly reminiscent of a Parisian It's a Wonderful Life, it also has obvious parallels with another French film, Patrice Leconte's La fille sur le pont, with its monochromatic photography and story of a man at the end of his tether who is brought back from the brink when a mysterious woman enters his life. Both films also centre around an attempted suicide on a bridge overlooking the River Seine. Still, I'm willing to overlook its derivative nature for the simple reason that it is both very entertaining and genuinely heart-warming. Something about Besson's melding of European art-house and Hollywood mainstream ideas and aesthetics seems to allow him to get away with a grand amount of schmaltz and plain old silliness. Yeah, it's basically a story about an angel (the amazingly leggy Rie Rasmussen) sent down from the sky to teach a petty crook (the eternally scruffy Jamel Debbouze) to tell the truth, and as such is about as daft as it sounds, but it's done with such panache that I can't help loving it.

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USA: Sam Raimi, 2009

Let's get the downsides of Drag Me to Hell out of the way right off the bat. Yes, it's true, there is an over-abundance of CGI effects and a lot of them are cringe-inducingly bad. Also, while a number of people have praised Alison Lohman's performance, I wasn't all that impressed by it. She goes a bit overboard with the "wide-eyed innocent" routine, and some of her reactions to the horrors she encounters don't seem particularly authentic. As for Justin Long, I can only think of those infuriating "Mac vs. PC" commercials whenever see him on the screen, and "drip" seems to be the only role he's capable of portraying.

That said, I was pretty impressed by the film on whole - a decided improvement on the previous Sam Raimi film I saw, the dreadful Spider-man 3. I like how the film accepts the inherent ridiculousness of the premise and milks it for all its worth, combining a genuine atmosphere of dread with some outrageously funny sight gags, most of them involving the various indignities to which the aforementioned Ms. Lohman is subjected. The film is bookended by vintage Universal Studios logos, leading me to suspect that it was intended to be a deliberate callback to an earlier generation of horror movies - presumably the horror/comedy hybrids of the 80s like An American Werewolf in London and Raimi's own The Evil Dead. If so, the overall look of the film is a little too slick and glossy to be entirely convincing, to say nothing of the over-abundance of clunky CGI. Still, on the whole, Drag Me to Hell entertained me a great deal.

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