Classic Movie Review Demons

Demons

Directed by Lamberto Bava

Written by Franco Ferrini, Lamberto Bava, Dario Argento, Dardano Sacchetti

Starring Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey

Release Date October 4th, 1985

Published March 26th, 1985 

Demons is a shockingly good and utterly silly horror movie from the great Italian tradition of badly dubbed horror movies. Directed by Lamberto Bava, with inspiration and script doctoring from Dario Argento, the film is a meta take on the passive consumption of horror movies and the insidious nature of our constant search for palliatives to keep us distracted from real life problems. It’s that and it’s a very silly movie where a guy on a motorcycle kills Zombie/Demons with a samurai sword. 

The premise in Demons centers on Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) , a college student who decides to blow off class so that she can go to a free movie screening. This comes after a bizarre scene where Cheryl is menaced in the subway by a man in a metal Phantom of the Opera mask. This man stalks and terrifies Cheryl for several minutes only to finally track her down and invite her to a free movie screening at a formerly closed theater called The Metrograph. Recovering quickly from this strange encounter, Cheryl takes two invitations and invites her best friend and classmate Hannah (Fiore Argento) to skip class and join her.

Find my full length review at Horror.Media, linked here. 

Classic Movie Review Opera

Opera (1987) 

Directed by Dario Argento 

Written by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini 

Starring Christina Marsillach, Urbano Barberini, Daria Nicolodi

Release Date December 19th, 1987

Published February 6th, 2024

The most captivating moment of the new Shudder documentary on director Dario Argento comes during an interview with his former leading lady, Christina Marsillach. Marsillach starred in 1987's Opera for Argento and the two had a deeply fraught relationship. In her interview in Panico Marsillach starts out talking about Argento as a father figure before taking her reminiscence in a decidedly different direction. Slowly she begins to talk about Argento's passive aggressive style in which he would not give her direct instructions but would have other members of the crew speak to her. 

Marsillach goes from painting a picture of a shy fatherly figure to portraying Argento like one of the villains of his movies, a tyrannical figure bent on getting his way at all costs. She appears to want to speak kindly of the director but then, in recalling her actual experience on the set of Opera, we get a short term psychodrama, a battle of wills between actress and director that she was not winning. It's captivating, there is no other way to describe it. I believe everything Marsillach is saying, based on what we see of Argento in behind the scenes footage, and yet her account of her work on Opera is oddly dramatic, not unlike an Argento movie, serene on the surface until everything comes to a boil.

Opera unfortunately is a wildly inconsistent piece of work. It's a slasher film set in the world of Opera with all of the pomp and circumstance of that world. The film stars Marsillach as a young diva who gets a shot at the big time after a big star walks out on an Avant-Garde take on Verdi's MacBeth. It's portrayed as a temper tantrum but it become quite serious when the Opera diva is struck by a car and is most assuredly not returning to the stage. Thus, a call is made to Betty (Marsillach), the diva understudy who now must step up and become a star. 

Click here for my review