The Screaming Krimi

Opening titles of Edgar Wallace-derived krimi DER HEXER, directed Alfred “DEAD EYES OF LONDON” Vohrer. One the one habd, I find krimi a lot more charming and less skin-crawling than gialli, their Italian cousins. Somehow, the Germans, perhaps having gotten all their misanthropy out during the war, are much less appalling and creepy than the Italians when it comes to making sinister and nonsensical crime shockers. On the other hand, the lack of that element of malaise can sometimes make the krimi seem a bit flat compared to the more bracingly scabrous, woman-hating world of the gialli.

Worst best or best worst?

An article in todays’ Guardian by Tim Lott seeks to question the quality of some of cinema’s sacred cows, dissing DEATH IN VENICE, JULES ET JIM, THE SEARCHERS, LA DOLCE VITA and SCHINDLER’S LIST, with secondary side-swipes at Kieslowski’s THREE COLOURS trilogy, SOLARIS, GREED (Lott appears to have seen a ten-hour cut of this, the lucky fellow), LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS, LA REGLE DE JEU, NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and ON THE WATERFRONT.

Making the highly original point that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, Lott basically fails in a potentially interesting task, maybe because he hasn’t enough space to consider even one of these films in the space it deserves, but partly because he squanders the space with profligate cheap shots and non-points. Saying “DEATH IN VENICE’s beautiful cinematography doesn’t make it a great film” does not really address the many ways in which it could still be a great film, and nobody to my knowledge ever claimed it was a great film just because it was well photographed anyway. Straw man argument, how are you?

It all gets to be pretty much like Leslie Halliwell’s reviews — a guide to the personal prejudices of Tim Lott that’s perhaps quite useful to the friends and family of Tim Lott, but perhaps less so to Guardian readers. So films are dismissed as “campy” (the Visconti) or “melodramatic” (the Laughton) or “French” (Carne), as if that were enough to stop them being great. If we can’t have camp, melodrama or Frenchness, one suspects we’re on the way to a rather dreary list of alternative great films. And so we are.

Lott champions THE PAWNBROKER, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, KOYAANISQATSI (“one of the most original movies of the last thirty years”), SOUTH PACIFIC and THE RAPTURE. I’m with him on some of his other choices, but these aren’t films I’m in a hurry to see again. They’re not terrible, you understand, but I’m not sure there’s even much you can say about them.

It’s an amusing and well enough written piece, but not only does it not demonstrate that any of these films might not deserve their reputation, which would be pretty hard to do, it doesn’t really address why they do have their reputations. Part of the problem is I can agree with many of Lott’s criticisms, without feeling that they particularly matter in the case of the films he’s on about. In the comments section you can read everyone else getting in on the act, and very unedifying it is too — opinion really is the least interesting aspect of criticism, and sadly it’s come to dominate. Pieces like this foster the entirely false belief that simply saying “THE GODFATHER? Overrated,” counts as a statement worthy of anybody’s attention.

Harry Potter and the Mother of Tears

Imagine it: you are horror maestro Dario Argento (this might be a stretch of your empathic faculties, but try to imagine it anyway). Everybody agrees that your violent set-pieces are zesty, cinematic and imaginative. They also agree that your scripts are embarrassing and your direction of actors pitiable. It takes a rare kind of anti-talent to make even a suave devil like Tony Franciosa look uncomfortable onscreen. What do you do?

Well, oddly enough, you don’t seek out talented script collaborators (apart from a one-off pairing with Polanski’s agoraphobic pal Gerard Brach, who was never going to crack your dialogue problems), you settle for the kind of lame hacks who have a sorceress offer her assistance with the words, “Call me anytime. It’s no bother.”

No bother.

Also, you dismiss complaints that your stories don’t make sense with claims that they are “non-Cartesian,” and invoke Poe. True, Poe could single-handedly keep every university English department running for years with the crazy ambiguities of his involuted yarns. But then, he didn’t specialise in dagger-wielding psychos in black gloves in every damn story. And that “logic of nightmares” rigmarole barely washes either, Dario — your films aren’t dreamlike, they’re just lurid. Operatic (although Verdi wasn’t quite as dependent on Satanists and disemboweling), maybe, but pretty much lacking in the uncanny qualities to be found in David Lynch, who can be genuinely scary in a way you can only, well, dream of.

And you don’t seek out the best actors, either. Bridget Fonda, a fan, practically begs to act for you, but you replace her with your daughter, because actors ask too many questions. For some reason you prefer to film your own daughter in the nude, shagging Julian Sands or getting raped by psychopaths. I know you kind of cultivate the “weird” thing, but really…

MOTHER OF TEARS, we can probably say, is a return to form, but unfortunately it’s a return to the dreadful form of PHENOMENA, rather than the sort-of great form of SUSPIRIA (whose appalling dubbing and glazed perfs does actually unwittingly evoke the oneiric, or the badly concussed) — it’s good enough to watch, but only barely. The luminous greens and reds and blues (a palette supposedly leeched from Disney’s SNOW WHITE) are back, Asia Argento’s hungover pre-Raphaelite glamour still radiates a seedy allure, and her mum Daria Nicolodi is back for old time’s sakes. Udo Kier appears, hams endearingly, dies.

The ghost of Nicolodi past.

Here’s another thing, Dario, my cadaverous chum — this misogyny rap. If I were you, I might still shoot a murder scene in which a lesbian witch has a pike shoved up her tuppence until it bursts from her mouth (after all, I’d have a reputation for ground-breaking splatter to maintain), but I’d be sure to frame it in some kind of meaningful context, to express some kind of idea with it. What’s odd about you, Dario, is that you started as a critic but seem painfully uncomfortable with thought of any kind. Explaining that, since you really love women, you’d rather see a beautiful woman killed than an ugly man, might just be a perverse joke, but everything else in your work is on a similarly dumb level. I’m beginning to think you really are that stupid.

Our subject is witches. Unlike in legend, these witches are all female. They provoke civil unrest, dress like Goths, are loud and rude in public places. Are you becoming a grumpy old man, Dario? Do you worry that society is going to wrack and ruin? I’m not sure that’s really a tenable position for the king of slasher gore. The witch-plague is really an excuse for lots of protracted violence, and the beauty of it is that you can film women being killed by witches, and when the witches are killed, well, they are women too. It’s win-win. I notice too that in Italian horror films, whenever women suffer horrific sexual assault with bladed weapons, it’s always performed or instigated by other women (in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? or that real piece of trash, THE NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS). I even saw this device in an episode of Cracker on TV. This has nothing whatsoever to do with real psychopathic practice, but instead seems to be a kind of alibi-ing: the unacceptable act is attributed to the other gender so that the guilty male filmmaker can escape censure. Not that this actually works.

Anyhow, we need some light relief amidst all this recrimination, so it’s pleasing to point out that in THE MOTHER OF TEARS, the third film in a trilogy-of-sorts begun by SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, Asia Argento plays the daughter of a white witch who gave her life fighting the terrible Mater Lacrimosae, injuring that demoness in the process. Perhaps only Asia can defeat the returning witch-queen. In other words, Dario has basically nicked the plot of Harry Potter and thrown in some tits and gore.