Video nasty number 37 is arguably the best of the bunch. A giallo mystery from the imagination of Italian director Dario Argento that genuinely gets under your skin and a film that seems to get better and better everytime you watch it. The BBFC took a dislike to it back in 1983 and it ended up on the DPP list of 39 banned movies as a result. Having a director with an Italian name was enough to get a film banned in the heady days of Mary Whitehouse it seems. It's lucky Bernardo Bertolucci and Michelangelo Antonioni didn't try to make any horror movies.
Peter Neal is having a shitty time in Italy. He's flown from New York to Rome and he's been instantly implicated in a murder when a young woman has her throat cut and her mouth filled with tore out pages of his newest book. More bloody murders occur and each off them seems to have been inspired by the violence in his writing. Then the killings start getting way too close for comfort.
On paper Argento's films don't sound like anything special but the man can make magic from nothing. Everything he touches overflows with style, even his biggest duds. With Tenebrae he mastered the form. Not a shot is wasted, even when nothing is happening. One of the film's best scenes is just a one take camera shot crawling up and across a building containing two soon to be victims. Moving restlessly it peers in windows and tells us no where within is safe. Narratively it adds nothing but an extra few minutes to the running time but it's just so audacious, so unexpected, so good at building tension. It turns us into voyeurs, implicates us in what is about to happen, leaves us waiting with bated breath for the violence we know has to come. It's clever film making. It's what rises this one high. Look at those pictures above and below. A victim framed through a rip in her clothing. That final scream from Anne (Daria Nicolodi, Argento's partner, mother of his daughter Asia, and co-writer of Tenebrae) as Roman rain washes away everything that came before it. Jane (Veronica Lario) spraying a crimson tide across a pristine white room after her arm has been axed off and that perfectly created but oh so simple jump scare near the end. You won't see that in The Beast In Heat or The Mardi Gras Massacre.
That claret soaked scene above caused the film all manner of problems. The original release of the film in Italy suffered big cuts to this moment. Actress Veronica Lario later married Silvio Berlusconi before he became the Italian Prime minister and he used his sway to make sure an uncut version of the film wasn't going to see the light of day. No one was going to see his Missus getting splashed across the screen. Eventually it did get an uncut DVD release but SB was too caught up in the Bunga Bunga scandal to care. In the UK it got a cinema release in 1983 and despite the fact it was Argento's most violent film so far it only had 4 seconds removed. All from the scene above of course. Months later the same cut version got a VHS release but the time of the nasties was upon us and anything violent was being scrutinised. Despite the perfectly legal release it had received that same year all copies of Tenebrae were seized and found to be obscene. Owning a copy of a film you'd just seen in the cinema was enough to cause legal problems now. Fucking ridiculous. In 1999 the film finally got a legal release again with 5 seconds missing and eventually it got a fully uncut release in 2003. Finally everyone in Ireland and the UK could watch Dario Argento's masterpiece the way it was intended to be seen.
Did Tenebrae deserve it's video nasty status? Nope. Not a bit of it. Nonsensical decision making and hypocrisy gave this film a new and enduring life.
Would I recommend it? Wholeheartedly. It's fucking brilliant. The sexual violence/animal butchery/nazi sleaze that pervades so many of the other nasties is nowhere to be seen here. It's rough in places but it's style and verve will win you over.
Next up - The Werewolf And The Yeti. A Paul Naschy kitsch fest that might be the most fun nasty you'll ever see.
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