A little less than ten years ago my wife and I bought our first house. Before then we’d lived in apartments or rentals. One of the things I love about owning a house is the traditions you create. One of our first traditions in this house was watching Doctor Who on Friday nights. When we first bought the house, I discovered that the local college television station was playing Tom Baker-era Classic Who on Friday nights and so I’d go upstairs to our bedroom and watch. Eventually, my wife would come up and our daughter would follow. Over time, we switched from Classic Who to New Who. We started from the beginning and worked our way to the (current) end. Then we’d start over. I think we are now in the middle of our fourth watch-through.
Buy Shawscope: Volume Three Box Set Blu-rayWhen the night’s Doctor Who episode was over, my daughter would usually switch on YouTube and she and my wife would watch crafting videos or whatever. It was at this point that I’d go downstairs and watch a movie while lying on the couch. Since the wife and daughter were upstairs, I’d put on something I knew they wouldn’t want to watch, usually a horror movie. Thus began another tradition: The Friday Night Horror Movie.
I’ve loved horror movies for as far back as I can remember, but I was never what you might call a horror hound. I was never exclusive to horror films. I stuck mostly to horror classics and modern films that garnered rave reviews. But since starting this tradition of Friday night horror movies, I have become something of an aficionado. I’ve watched a lot of horror movies over the last several years from across the decades covering multiple cultures.
Which brings me to Dario Argento. I’ve known and loved this Italian Master of Horror for a long time. I have a strong memory of watching his debut film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage not long after I first got married. Soon after, I caught a few of his other major films (Deep Red, Suspiria, and Phenomenon) but I never dug deep into his catalog. At least not until I started watching a horror movie (or two, or three) on Friday nights. I’ve now seen every full-length feature film he’s directed (the exception being the only non-horror movie he ever made Five Days).
Not every film of his is a masterpiece, and his last couple of decades have been pretty hit or miss, but during his peak through the 1970s and 1980s, he made a series of horror films that are unrivaled by any other director. While Argento has always been a bit of a cult director in the United States, he was quite famous during this period in his homeland of Italy. It was also during this time frame that he made a series of television specials for the Italian TV station RAI.
Severin Films has gathered together several of the television series plus numerous interviews and extras into this one extraordinary package. An invaluable gift for any Argento fan.
Disc One and Two consists of all four episodes of Door Into Darkness an anthology series conceived by Argento in 1973 and directed by him and three others. Each episode is about an hour in length and they tell stand-alone stories. Think of them as updated versions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. That comparison is rather apt actually as Argento introduces each story in the manner Hitchcock introduced each episode of his series. At the time, Italy had only two television stations and so Door Into Darkness was viewed by an estimated 30 million people each week making Argento even more famous.
The four episodes are:
The Neighbor (Directed by Luigi Cozzi): A young couple with a baby moves into an isolated apartment only to discover there is no furniture, they have no power and their upstairs neighbor might be a murderer. It takes a long time to get going, but it creates a nice spooky atmosphere, and once they discover the body things get pretty tense.
The Tram (Directed by Dario Argento): A dead woman is discovered on a tram. A detective tries to figure out how she was murdered on a busy tram and no one saw anything. Argento was clearly limited by a TV budget and censorship, but there is enough of his distinctive style to make it worth watching. The finale is pretty good.
The Doll (Directed by Mario Foglietti): A patient escapes from an insane asylum and starts a killing spree. Meanwhile, a strange man appears to be stalking and then harassing a young woman. The twist is predictable and Argento essentially spoils it in his introduction.
Eyewitness (Directed by Dario Argento / Luigi Cozzi): A woman nearly runs over another woman on a dark, deserted street. When she stops, she realizes the woman has just been shot and is dying. She spies a man in the bushes. But when she brings the police, there is no man, no corpse, and no blood. Argento was so dissatisfied with Cozzi’s direction he took over the reins halfway through. The end results are middling.
Disc One also includes a two-part documentary on the films of Dario Argento entitled Dario Argento: My Cinema. It features an interview with the director on the set of his film Phantom of the Opera as well as many other people who have worked with him and delves into his entire career. Disc Two includes another documentary about Argento and his films entitled Dario Argento: Master of Horror.
In 1987 Argento produced another television series entitled Night Shift, which takes up all of Disc Three. It ran for one season for 15 episodes. Each episode is only about 15 minutes each. The series follows a group of taxi cab drivers on the night shift. They are all self-contained mysteries whereupon one of the cab drivers discovers a dead body or some such things and helps solve the case. Because they are so short there isn’t much time to develop the mystery, the characters, or anything else. Lamberto Bava directed about half of them so they are stylish and often a bit of fun, but not much more than that.
Disc Four Features two different television series. The first, entitled Dario Argento’s Nightmares features the director in front of a studio audience describing various nightmares that he’s had. It then flashes to filmed versions of those nightmares. They only last about five minutes and feel more like the beginnings of ideas than anything else. The second series on the disc is entitled Giallo which features the director in a late-night talk show-type format. Each episode begins with an introduction where a man tells us what to expect then a woman walks up a set of stairs to the “attic” where we find Dario Argento and his assistant. He then shows us some behind-the-scenes footage on how he made certain special effects on one of his movies and then he interviews various people including Anthony Perkins and Pink Floyd. It is as strange as that sounds.
Extras on these discs include audio commentaries for certain episodes plus several interviews with Argento and some of the other directors and actors.
The video quality on all of the television episodes is not great. There is quite a bit of grain and on some episodes a good deal of scratches and debris. But considering it all comes from Italian television from 40-50 years ago and was never meant to exist in a home video format it comes out alright. My understanding is the quality here is much improved over previous releases of the same material.
Nothing on Dario Argento’s Deep Cuts is essential viewing. Like the title says these are deep cuts, consider them B-sides to a director who had an amazing run of A-sides and hits. If you are a fan then this collection is an excellent deep dive into a part of Argento’s history you might not have previously seen. Highly recommended.
