Watched March 25, 2009
NOTE: I watched the 126-min. cut of Deep Red.
SYNOPSIS
A pianist witnesses the murder of a psychic, and teams up with a reporter to find the killer before they are killed.
SHORT REVIEW
"Deep Red" was great. This is a very short "short review".
REVIEW
I'm going to admit up front, I'm not the biggest Argento fan around. The other movies I've seen from Argento were "Suspiria" and "Opera"; I thought "Suspiria" was good, but highly overrated, and I thought "Opera" was pretty stupid. Sure, both are stylish as all hell, and "Suspiria" is one of the better looking horror films I've seen, but I could never really get into them, and I felt pretty disappointed after watching both of them. But, I'm glad to say that "Deep Red" restored my faith in Dario Argento, and I'm hoping the next film of his I watch is this good.
The film's got it all. It retains what I liked about "Suspiria" and "Opera", that being the style. It features some gruesome murders, all of which are shot well and will satisfy most gorehounds. The plot is intriguing, as are the characters.
That's not to say the film is without its flaws. There's way too much comic relief in "Deep Red". It's as if Argento felt that the film was too gruesome or whatever, so he just shot a bunch of scenes with this stupid reporter chick who is always trying to be funny. She never is. It's actually pretty annoying. Maybe the shorter cuts cut out all this BS and keep to the interesting plot, but the 126-minute cut sure doesn't. It's unfortunate, as it ruins all the atmosphere and suspense that the film builds so well.
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And the murderer is just some comic relief character who has about 5 minutes of screen time, which I thought was pretty stupid, to be honest.
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It pisses me off when I get things spoiled for me in films, so I have an alert. I hope that was obvious enough.
What is it about Italian movies and their extremely awesome music? I swear, the score for this and other Italian horror movies ("Stagefright" and "Demons" come to mind) just make me want to get up and dance. I don't know why, but that weird jazz-rock music they play is just crazy awesome. It's also quite distracting, as weird jazz-rock music doesn't quite fit with people getting their teeth smashed in. I guess it's less distracting than the ear-piercingly loud heavy metal music Argento picked for the death scenes in "Opera", but still...
On a completely different note, please don't get this film from Netflix. God damn Netflix. The DVD they gave me didn't give me the option to watch the film in Italian with English subtitles, which I prefer to do during foreign-language films. So I had to watch the English dub. But, then the DVD kept switching from English to Italian to English to Italian. It's really pretty annoying when a couple lines are in English, then suddenly they're speaking Italian. Especially when the languages switch mid-sentence, as it did a couple times. Upon further research, it appears they lost part of the English dub, so I guess it isn't really the DVD's fault. But could they at least have had better subtitles for it? Every f'ing line, there's a spelling or grammar mistake. Sometimes, they don't even bother putting subtitles! There was probably 3-5 minutes of the film that I missed every line of dialogue, because it was in Italian with no subtitles. What the hell. Get a better DVD copy.
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Not to mention the goddamn DVD started skipping right when the murderer gets decapitated by an elevator. That's just so disappointing when you don't get to see elevator decapitations. Missing elevator decapitations because of scratched DVDs make me want to decapitate people with elevators.
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Wow, I'm ranting a little bit. I guess that's my cue to end my review. I'd give "Deep Red" a 4.5 out of 5, but since I don't accept half-chainsaw reviews, because of the awesome music, I'll give "Deep Red":
5 out of 5 chainsaws (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)
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