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Having been a fan of Dario Argento for a number of years, I eagerly anticipate the release of his features. In the United States, this means minor distributions by minor companies on video; theatrical releases are limited to art houses on the East and West coasts if at all. Forget the local multiplex. When I finally caught up with Argento's giallo from 1996, The Stendahl Syndrome on video last week, I was more than a tad disappointed.
The maestro's film bore a Troma logo.
The growling green face of the New Jersey-based schlock studio's radioactive mascot shot a googly-eyed glare back at me from the shelf of my local video store. Somehow, the Toxic Avenger didn't seem like an aptly chosen icon to represent one of the genre's best known and most respected talents. I knew that Dario was in trouble.
I know that many of you might respond to all this with a cynical "No kidding." But seriously, folks, one of the greats has fallen low, failed by an industry that once--while it may not have supported--definitely profited from his work. No doubt many of you caught up with Stendahl on video through bootlegs years ago; even the Troma release has been out for awhile. But it's a sad thing that audiences had to wait so long to see the film, four years after its Italian release, saddled with one of the worst video transfers of all time, reducing the absorbing the haunting, disturbing visuals to a game of squint-through-the-fuzzy-bars. This might fly for the usual Troma release; hey, who watches The Class of Nukem' High and thinks about image quality, anyway? But in a release by a master like Argento, a director whose attention to detail and immaculate visual compositions are legendary, for the first Italian film to utilize computer graphics, for the first film in three years by one of Italy biggest directors, it is inexcusably shoddy.
A similar fate befell Argento's Phantom of the Opera (1998). It was released by A-Pix Entertainment. It boasted one of the worst video transfers of all time coupled with a muddled soundtrack. The virtues of the film are few, but making an objective judgement is difficult working from a less than passable version.
The question arises, why wasn't Dario able to wrangle releases from larger companies? Bad business? Lack of interest? Lack of capital? A combination of all three?
The simple fact that is that the industry has changed. In the seventies all of Argento's giallos rated grindhouse releases--The Bird With Crystal Plumage (1969), Cat o' Nine Tails (1970), Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972), and Deep Red (1975) made tidy profits in small releases, neatly trimmed and messily dubbed for America's exploitation consumption. Argento's stock had risen sufficiently in the US that Suspiria (1977) rated a release by Twentieth-Century Fox through a subsidiary. It was a hit; Argento had arrived in America. With Suspiria Argento got his foot in the door; Inferno (1980), produced by Fox, promised to fling the door wide open. But internal shuffles in the studio left the film flapping in the wind; Argento was mortified to see his big chance get thrown away, never released theatrically in the United States, it finally found a brief release in England. Burned by this, he abandoned the story thread that connected the previous two features and made the angry and cynical Tenebre (1981), which was shelved in America, only to creep out heavily cut three years later under the title Unsane on tape in the US. Phenomena (1984) was similarly cut to ribbons in America, becoming Creepers at the behest of New Line Cinema. Opera (aka Terror at the Opera) (1986) and Trauma (1993) were released in both rated and unrated versions. What happened with the passage of the me decade?
Now, the greats can barely get arrested without teen stars, CGI effects, or hip self-referentiality. We moan about the lack of quality in genre releases, yet we continue to support a system that produces nothing but junk, a system that has David Cronenberg possibly directing Basic Instinct 2, Wes Craven tackling yet another witless Scream sequel, and Tobe Hooper directing God-knows-what. In the 70s, these talents flourished, finding producers ready to finance their visions, distributors ready to show their films. We take whatever the studios throw us, ignorant of the contempt they have for us. One can imagine Frank Mancuso Jr. turning to Sean Cunningham sometime in the mid-eighties, "Just make another Jason movie. Who cares how bad it is? Those morons will watch anything and we'll be laughing all the way to the bank."
Take the case of Dario Argento as a warning: only homogenized, dumbed-down, test-marketed genre junk flies on American movie screens today.
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