OK, here's where I alienate all you nice "His Girl Friday" fans from last week; sorry. This week's movie does not have Cary Grant, but it does have a man being eaten alive by rats!
"Inferno" is the second in Dario Argento's loose trilogy "Three Mothers," following his 1977 masterpiece "Suspiria"; the third, "Mother of Tears," wasn't released until 2007. None of the movies share characters, just a concept: three evil female forces (fates? witches?) lie waiting, each in her own building, in her own city. People who come asking questions feel her wrath, often in gruesome ways! In "Inferno," the Mater Tenebrarum (Mother of Darkness, or Shadows) lurks in a massive New York apartment building. One of the residents starts asking questions, and — uh-oh.
It's barely a plot, just a flimsy structure to hang some of Argento's beautiful horror sequences around. But those sequences are why you're here, and Argento delivers magnificently. My favorite is the first big death scene: a young couple is in a big apartment listening to opera (Verdi's "Va' pensiero…") when the power starts flickering — the lights switch off and on, and eerily, so does the music. The guy heads down to check the fuse box, and if you've ever seen a horror movie, you know how this ends up. Ciao, young couple! But the scene is played so elegantly, it's unforgettable.
As the movie goes on, the deaths get increasingly zany: A countess (Daria Nicolodi, Argento's then-partner) gets attacked by a pack of vicious cats in a sequence that actually reminded me a bit of "Night of the Lepus." (It just takes some careful framing to make it look like cats are biting someone. The camera kept cutting to a cat's claws on the floor.) An antiques dealer (Sacha Pitoeff) falls victim to the rats. A butler's eyes pop out. A concierge catches on fire. There are plenty of stabbings.
As Argento movies go, it's actually pretty tame; there's nothing quite as melodramatic as the stabbing/hanging that opens "Suspiria," or the fabulous bit in "Mother of Tears" in which the museum employee (Nicolodi again, bless her oops, it's Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni; many thanks, M Frost) is strangled with her own entrails; but the deaths are still pretty creative. Argento, as always, walks the line between gonzo and baroque. (Lamberto Bava, son of "Black Sunday" director Mario, was an assistant director. I got to see Lamberto on an Italian-horror panel at Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors last year, and he was cute as a button! But I digress.)
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