Film review: Deep Red (1975)

I've been meaning to try Dario Argento again for a while.  I gave up on Suspiria when I tried it once, but that was half-hearted, and so many people seem to love the giallo genre of which he is the acknowledged master.  Well... if one is expecting wackiness, inventive kills and gallons of technicolor-red fake blood, then one will not be disappointed.  It's clearly an influence on the "slasher" films of the late 70s/early 80s (Halloween, Friday The 13th, etc.) but you might also see it as taking Hitchcock films to their post-logical extremes in the same way that the Spaghetti westerns did to, well, westerns (fun fact: Argento was buddies with both Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci, Italians being apparently perfectly happy to mix the highbrow with the low).  Or finally, you might see it as the Italian version of Hammer Horror (I thought at first it was an almost direct rip-off of Hands of the Ripper, but that proves to be a fake-out).  There is no plot to speak of, but essentially an English pianist living in Rome gets obsessed with investigating gruesome murders with the help of a female reporter (who beats him in arm-wrestling as a blow for women's lib).  There are supernatural overtones (the first person killed is a German clairvoyant, a major plot point is a supposedly haunted house) and lots of very groovy camera work, as well as closeups of dead animals (and, rather upsettingly, a live lizard skewered by a pin) and creepy dolls, as well as some seriously disturbed artwork.  Oh, and the soundtrack is a deranged rock masterpiece by Goblin, who are to Argento what Morricone was to Leone.  But the gore is what makes it: meat cleaver attacks!  Person dragged along by a hook hanging off a garbage truck until his head is run over!  Decapitation by necklace caught in lift!  Head boiled in seriously hot bathwater!  It takes its title seriously.  Am I a giallo convert?  Not really, but as Jami said, if she'd seen this as a teenager she would've been hooked, and I concur.  Oh, and the main actor is David Hemmings, who co-starred with Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-Up by the much more highbrow Italian director Antonioni, but whose star had fallen a bit in the 9 years between the two.