Review #261: Inferno (1980)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #15 - Inferno (1980)

I'm quickly learning that I don't care for Dario Argento. This was the first time I'd seen Inferno and I watched Suspiria last year, both movies were incredibly similar in a lot of ways, and I simply didn't like either one, and as I read up on these two films the things I didn't like about them seem to be referred to as staples of Argento's work.

Let me briefly summarize Inferno. Inferno is (I guess?) about a student (Mark) who finds out his sister (Rose) has been reading an old book that's led her to believe that there's a witch or something hiding underneath the building she lives in (or the building next door, or both, I'm not too clear on that). She writes him a letter about it, someone else (Sara) finds the letter and gets killed, then some other people get killed, and then there's some more killings and then Mark finds the witch underneath the building and the building burns down while he escapes. I think that's what happens in this movie.

It wasn't easy to write up that synopsis just now because so much of this movie doesn't really flow or connect. Characters will just show up in places without any real purpose, something spooky will happen there without any explanation, and the movie jumps around from character to character with most of these characters completely incidental to the story. To give you an idea of what I mean, here's a sentence from Wikipedia's synopsis- it's from the end of the movie's first setpiece, about ten minutes into the film:

"Then, wood beams begin collapsing presumably somewhere in the building, but the scene fades out mysteriously before cutting to Rome."

If anyone wrote that sentence in an English class they would automatically fail, because it's clearly very poorly written. And yet, it's a shockingly accurate description of what happens at that point in the movie- wood beams collapse "presumably somewhere in the building", but the scene "fades out mysteriously". This movie is so baffling in many of the decisions it makes, most of which seem to be trademarks of Dario Argento.

I get the impression Dario Argento doesn't like making films, he likes making 90-minute music videos. Because both films of his I've watched seem to have very little in the way of plot cohesion or a message to tell, but they're bang-on with visual flair and music. And oh, the music. Obviously the music was the starting point for this entire film (same as with Suspiria), because it is LOUD AND CLEAR. Argento apparently never records audio when he shoots a film, preferring to get video only, and then 100% of the movie's audio is added in post (leading to all lines being imperfectly dubbed in, sound effects not quite matching up, and ambient noise being utterly absent). I presume this is all in favor of providing a CLEAR AND LOUD soundtrack (an order of magnitude louder than the dialogue, it would seem), which it certainly delivers. But, unfortunately, this is definitely at the expense of the rest of the sound taking me out of the film entirely.

I feel like Inferno would be a great film to have on in the background while you're doing other things, because glancing over once in a while would mean you just see the striking set design and the high-contrast colors on screen at any given moment. But it was a slog to pay attention to and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.

Overall Rating: 2/10 Underwater Keys

Murderous Director: Apparently, every time you see a killer's hands in this movie, the actor the hands belonged to was actually the director, Dario Argento!