Shit I Haven't Seen #4: TENEBRE

Director: Dario Argento
Screenplay: Dario Argento   
Starring: Anthony Franciosa, Daria Nicolodi, John Saxon, Giuliano Gemma
Release Date: 1982

Apparently I’m not a fan of Dario Argento, which is surprising because I admire the hell out of the technical aspects of his films. Unfortunately his inability to adhere to any kind of cohesive narrative and general lack of relatable characters has soured my ability to enjoy the sensational camera set-ups and gore set pieces he is famous for.

The flick gets off to a great start with a truly epic and riveting reading scene.

TENEBRE is the sixth film I’ve watched from his oeuvre, and only the second of his giallo that I’ve seen. “Giallo” was a term used in Italian cinema to describe a certain type of film, tales that seemed to relish in the lurid details of murder and sexual perversion. These films took for inspiration mass-marketed murder/mystery novels that were usually printed on cheap yellow paper, hence the moniker “Giallo”. The lead character of TENEBRE is the author of just such a story.

Subtlety. This movie doesn't know the first thing about it.

Peter Neal (Franciosa) is an American novelist, the bestselling author of numerous controversial tales of sexually motivated homicide. Critically lambasted and loathed by feminist rights groups, his latest masterwork, “Tenebrae”, is another runaway success, and his agent (Saxon) has booked him on a tour in Rome to help promote the book in the European market. However his arrival in the ancient city coincides with a string of brutal murders of young women that seem to be inspired by his latest novel. Any doubt of this is removed by the fact that the victims have pages of “Tenebrae” jammed down their throats. Neal himself begins to receive cryptic messages from the killer, and works in tandem with Detective Giermani (Gemma) of the Rome police department to track him (or her!) down. Toss in Neal’s stalker ex-fiance and a literary critic with with an unhealthy obsession with his novels, and you might just have enough red herrings to stretch this thing out to feature length.

Peter Neal, about to go all "private eye" up in this bitch.

An angry Levar Burton continues to push the importance of literacy after the cancellation of "Reading Rainbow".

None of the plot really matters, unfortunately. With a murderer who claims to highlight “human perversion and its’ effects on society, the entire film is basically Argento’s way of giving the middle finger to his critics, who have long accused him of dealing in misogyny. He doesn’t exactly to much to prove them wrong, as all of the victims are mostly-nude women, and they all seem to be punished for their open sexuality, be they a lesbian couple or a shoplifter who gets out of trouble through promises of sexual gratification. Every woman in this flick is constantly under some kind of sexual or physical assault, if not from the killer then from crazed hobos with raging boners and overzealous guard dogs. Based on its portrayal here, I’d say Rome needs to change its name to Rapesville McStabtown. All of the women meet heinous ends at the hands of the black-gloved killer. Those hands, by the way, belong to Argento himself, as they do in all of his movies. He always likes to add his own personal touch to the death scenes in his movies, adding another uneasy layer of subtext to the proceedings.  Argento takes vicious glee in reminding us of how sick we are for watching this movie, while simultaneously relishing every last titillating detail, including the repetition of an image of one of the victims’ heads leaning back and bleeding out through a broken pane of glass, an image which also appeared in his earlier works SUSPIRIA, and DEEP RED, as well as in the later PHENOMENA. It’s a neat, gruesome image, as the head appears to hang surreally in midair. But what the hell does it mean? I’m not sure even Argento knows, but it sure looks cool.

This is the best still I could find of that shot.

    

Equally masturbatory is his use of the camera lens. There’s a really neat 180 degree shot halfway through the movie achieved with a Louma crane in which the camera starts on a woman looking out the window of her over-production-designed house and then pans up, up, climbing over the roof, following the pattern of the shingles and latticework in extreme close-up before finally settling on the killer cutting through some blinds on the other side of the house. The shot goes on for way too long, does nothing to advance the plot, and serves no purpose other than for Argento to show us something really cool he felt like doing.

The horror of moths!

  

That’s pretty much what Argento is all about. He is the supreme example of a director who is all style and very little substance. That approach worked fine when dealing with a tale of the supernatural like SUSPIRIA, where the threadbare plot and extreme lighting created an eerily nightmarish atmosphere. Here, though, I really needed more. Neat camera tricks aside, the look of this film is very flat and drab, Argento’s trademark eye-popping colors only showing up in a series of frustratingly vague flashbacks in the murderer’s mind that highlight the crimson high-heels of an anonymous temptress. This movie was boring to look at. Too many scenes drag on with no point, like when a young girl is chased by a guard dog for what seems like miles, only to end up in the backyard of the killer completely by coincidence. If  Argento needed to get the girl to the killer’s house, the dog is a horrible way of going about it, as it is completely random and has nothing to do with anything. The characters are all pretty weak, as well. Peter Neal seems like an amicable enough fellow, and Franciosa does well with what he has to work with, but he disappears for vast swaths of the film, only to start taking an active role in the plot machinations at about the hour mark. And veteran hard-ass John Saxon (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) is criminally wasted here as a literary agent whose sole story thread involves the fact that he wears a silly hat. I figured he’d play a cop, or something badass that entailed him planting one or more feet into a score of metaphorical asses. Nope, he’s just got a silly hat, and that’s that.

No, John Saxon! I don't know what you're doing in this movie, either.

   
What little this flick has going for it, besides the usual death scenes, resides in the last ten minutes, which includes one twist I saw coming from the first scene, a second twist that somehow makes the first twist seem even more stupid, and a seriously epic fucking axe murder that comes out of nowhere. The ending is brutally intense, but without a single character to latch onto and give a damn about, it ultimately falls flat. The screen fades to black and the end credits roll over the sounds of a woman screaming herself into madness, but it’s little more than the final sturm and drang of a flick with some neat ideas and a few cool scenes in search of a reason for anybody to care.

My Rating:

5/10

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