Schock (1977)

... aka: Al 33 di Via Orologio fa sempre freddo (It's Always Cold at 33 Clock Street)

... aka: Beyond the Door II

... aka: Beyond the Door #2

... aka: Les démons de la nuit (The Demons of the Night)

... aka: Schock (Transfert-Suspence-Hypnos)

... aka: Shock

... aka: Suspense

Directed by:

Mario Bava

Many years after her drug-addicted, "half-crazy" husband Carlo (Nicola Salerno) died by suicide, Dora (Daria Nicolodi), her 7-year-old son Marco (David Colin Jr.) and her (frequently absent) new husband Bruno (John Steiner) move back into her Dora's former home. It was the same home she had once shared with her late husband and has been unoccupied since his passing. Thanks to Bruno's busy job as a pilot and the home's close proximity to an airport, Dora has decided to move back in and try to adjust to all of the bad memories associated with the place as she goes. She almost immediately begins to regret that decision.

It doesn't take long for Marco to start behaving strangely. He frequently asks, "Are we going to stay here forever?" and is caught talking to himself... or perhaps an imaginary friend... or an invisible entity that no one else can see. He wakes up late at night and starts growling "Pig! Pig! Pig!" as Dora and her new husband make love downstairs. He spies on her in the shower, steals her panties, crawls on top of her and starts thrusting and grunting in a decidedly non-childlike fashion. And let us not forget the unnerving casual asides like "I have to kill you mommy." All rather disturbing changes in the young boy, I'd say! And it only gets worse from there.

After a series of minor "accidents," which find Dora falling and bruising her arm when the lights suddenly go out, slicing her finger with a razor blade hidden between piano keys, cutting open her hand on an exploding pill bottle and slicing her leg open with a strategically placed rake, she begins to fear that she's going crazy. Again. She'd already spent six months in an asylum after the death of her first husband in what we can assume was an abusive, tumultuous relationship. If that's not bad enough, she's haunted by terrifying nightmares involving someone trying to break into her bedroom late at night and a floating utility knife slicing at her, plus flashbacks to her terrible first marriage. And if that's not enough, she also has daytime hallucinations like a bloody hand emerging from the ground to claw at her ankle. New husband Bruno, who ignores her frequent pleas to move out, resorts to secretly drugging his increasingly more hysterical wife.

Shock falls into a number of different popular horror subgenres. We get a haunted house film (complete with doors opening by themselves, furniture moving, creaking floorboards, etc.), an evil kid movie (complete with lots of shots of the boy glaring at his once-beloved mama and gleefully laughing at his various evil deeds), a ghostly revenge / possession flick and a psychological horror all wrapped into one. Hell, this even incorporates a little voodoo black magic into the proceedings, including the little boy using a voodoo doll, plus a photo fastened to a swing that almost brings an airplane down!

The multi-layered plot offers up a few distinct possibilities. Is Marco really possessed or just showing signs of psychosis himself due to having been raised by mentally-imbalanced parents? Is his late birth father using his child to try to return to life? Is Dora simply going insane? Is the ghost of the former husband out for revenge and, if so, why is he out for revenge? Bava manages to neatly tie it all together by the surprisingly downbeat finale whilst leaving a trace of ambiguity behind.

I completely disagree with those who've claimed this is "lesser" Bava or a disappointing final feature for the director, and anyone out there who claims this is less stylish than Bava's previous films doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. While it may be less colorful, less elaborate in regards to production design and lower-budgeted, there's more than enough visual style, great camerawork and directorial cleverness (especially good use is made of image distortion and out of focus shots) on display to satisfy, plus a highly effective score, great use of sound, some genuinely creepy moments and one of the best-executed jump scares you'll see in any film.

The camera swoops into a hole in a wall and then rises back up looking out the other side, the son uses a flashlight and a cutout from a photo to cast a spectral figure on a brick wall that may or may not house a corpse and ghostly hands made of light strip sheets off a bed. Those are just a few of the cool little touches found herein and the movie is filled to the rafters with other such moments.

Nicolodi is almost entirely known for her work with director Dario Argento, whom she dated on-and-off for years and had a child (actress Asia Argento) with, but was never technically married to. That relationship worked as something of a double-edged sword for her career. While it got her involved with some of the most famous Italian horror films of the period (notably SUSPIRIA, which she also wrote), Argento barely ever gave her a decent acting role in any of the films, with PHENOMENA perhaps being the lone notable exception. Here, however, she's given a central role and an actual character to play with some dynamics (not to mention hysterics!) and this is clearly the best role she ever got to play in a horror film. Annoying dub aside, little Colin Jr. is also very effective as the son. Genre regular Ivan Rassimov (MAN FROM DEEP RIVER) also shows up in a small role as a doctor friend, though he's not given anything interesting to do.

Shock was in pre-production stages as early as 1972, starting with a screenplay by BAY OF BLOOD writers Dardano Sacchetti and Gianfranco Barberi called Al 33 di via Orologio fa sempre freddo ("It's Always Cold at 33 Clock Street"), which was based very loosely on American mystery writer Hillary Waugh's 1971 novel The Shadow Guest. The script ended up sitting around for several years while Bava was working on other films but was later reworked by two new writers: Alessandro Parenzo, co-writer of Bava's great Rabid Dogs (1974), and the director's son, Lamberto (also the assistant director). The film finished up its five week shooting schedule at the end of June and was already playing in Italian theaters later that same summer.

Because there were no big bankable names to American audiences attached to the film, distributor Film Ventures International cooked up a new plan. Hey, since one of the actors was in another hit film, why not make this a bogus sequel to that film? The film in question was the Exorcist wanna-be BEYOND THE DOOR (1974), which became an international surprise hit despite being a piece of shit, so Schock then became Beyond the Door II. While I'm sure this did alright business under that title (there's also a bogus Beyond the Door III, after all), it didn't do nearly as well as the "original" despite being infinitely better. In the UK, it played (under its original title) on a double bill with The Blood-Spattered Bride (1971).

This title has always been much easier to find here in the States than most of Bava's other films. The initial VHS distributor was Media. It was then re-released on VHS by Video Treasures (who just recycled the Media poster art). DVD releases followed in the early 2000s from Anchor Bay and Blue Underground. Arrow (out of the UK) is going to handle the Blu-ray release, which is currently slated for a January 2022 release. My screen caps were taken from the Anchor Bay DVD and, as you can see, there's still a lot of room for visual improvement here.

★★★

Inferno (1980)

... aka: A Mansão do Inferno (The Mansion of Hell)
... aka: Dario Argento's Inferno
... aka: Feuertanz der Zombies (Fire Dance of Zombies)
... aka: Horror Infernal
... aka: Pokol (Hell)
... aka: Rædslernes inferno (Inferno of Horror)

Directed by:
Dario Argento

This continuation of, and elaboration on, what went down in SUSPIRIA deals with The Three Mothers; a trio of evil witch siblings whose reign of terror leaves behind a string of bizarre, grisly murders stretching from Europe all the way across the Atlantic to America. An architect / alchemist named E. Varelli, whose diaries comprise a book on the gruesome gals titled - you guessed it! - The Three Mothers, designed three homes for the sisters to hide out in as they plot their nefarious schemes... whatever those may be. Mater Suspiriorum - the "Mother of Sighs" - calls Freiburg, Germany home. The eldest of three, Suspiriorum is the same witch who was featured in Suspiria and referred to as Helena Markos there. Seeing as how she's killed by Jessica Harper at the end of the film, she's not featured here at all, though the other two are. Mater Lachrymarum (or "The Mother of Tears") is the most beautiful of the sisters and resides in Rome, Italy, while Mater Tenebrarum ("The Mother of Darkness"), the youngest and most cruel of the three, operates out of New York City in the United States. Though the former is featured here in a few scenes (she becomes a greater focus in Argento's 2007 conclusion of the trilogy: The Mother of Tears), the primary focus here is on the latter.

For the record, this mythology is loosely based on Thomas De Quincey's Suspiria de profundis, in particular the essay "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" which involves Roman childbirth goddess Levana and her three companions: Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum. Luigi Cozzi's unofficial pseudo-sequel to these films (1989's The Black Cat), which was made when it looked like Argento had completely abandoned his trilogy concept, concentrates on the Levana character, who's also a powerful witch and causes problems on a movie set filming what's basically an updated remake of Suspiria. Meta!

New York writer Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle), who also happens to be a tenant in the same large, barely-occupied brownstone as one of the Three Mothers, gets her hands on Varelli's book from a next door bookstore run by the mysterious Kazanian (Sacha Pitoëff). We can only assume the book has been left there intentionally to lure inquisitive victims to their doom, though that kind of flies in the face of the concept that the witches want to remain hidden from the world as not to have someone interrupt their evil deeds. Either way, Rose becomes obsessed with the book and the story of the sisters. Three "keys" are pointed out in the text. The first states that the land around the witches' homes will become "deathly and plagued" and start smelling horribly. Second, the secret of the witches is hidden in the cellar underneath the home, which will contain a painting of and the name of the sister occupying it. The third secret "can be found under the soles of your shoes." In this case it turns out to be literal.

After mailing out a letter to her brother, receiving little information from the bookstore owner and already picking up on a foul odor surrounding the area, Rose decides to see if the second clue contained in the book is real. She explores her building's cellar, finds an underground room flooded with water and, hidden down there, the painting of Mater Tenebrarum... along with a rotting corpse! Instead of phoning the police, she rushes up to her apartment and apparently just stays there... for a week or so... or however long it would take for a letter to arrive overseas back in 1980. Meanwhile in Rome, Rose's brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey) has received her letter but he's too distracted in class by his "musicology" final and a mysterious beauty (Ania Pieroni) who's seemingly materialized out of thin air with her cat, to actually read it.

After Mark accidentally leaves the letter behind, his friend and classmate Sara (Eleonora Giorgi) hops in a cab and heads his way. However, she decides to first investigate Rose's claims all by herself after reading the letter, which clearly isn't going to end well. That leads her to a library, trying to check out "The Three Mothers," becoming lost at closing time and ending up in the basement for a freaky encounter with a deep-voiced man who appears to be not quite human. Soon after, both she and a neighbor (Gabriele Lavia) are viciously murdered. When Mark finally decides to fly back to the states, he finds no sign of his sister when he arrives as she's been killed herself. He receives little help from the building's other suspicious tenants aside from the mentally-imbalanced Elise (Daria Nicolodi), who really isn't much help herself as she's killed off shortly after she appears, leaving Mark alone to uncover the secrets of the building and of Mater Tenebrarum.

For your money you get a cat eating a rat, a cat attack, a rat attack after someone drowns a bag of cats (?) during a lunar eclipse (??) and a handful of bloody murders, including a neck slashing via window pane, a head hacked with a cleaver, a knife through a neck, eyes gouged out and a burning body falling through a glass window. Giuseppe Bassan's art direction and Romano Albani's photography are both great and it's all drenched in blue, red, green, yellow, orange and purple light so nearly every shot looks vibrant and visually pleasing. Beyond that, this is one of Argento's most frustrating films to sit through.

Inferno is unfortunately sorely lacking in narrative drive. Compound that with the complete absence of a compelling central focal point and the film has a tendency to lurch along looking pretty but otherwise feeling rather empty and aimless. The closest thing we get to a lead is former soap opera actor McCloskey and, while he's not a very interesting on-screen presence, it's difficult to blame him since he's not alone in that regard. Second lead Miracle also doesn't make much of an impression, but in the interview she gave with House of Freudstein, it's not difficult to see why. According to the actress, she was given little direction, no real character to play and more of an outline of the story than an actual script. She also claimed that Argento wasn't even on set when she filmed many of her scenes. Since there's not much of a plot to advance, most of the other actors are there merely as props to die, resulting in long scenes of bland cardboard cutouts wandering around colorfully lit sets looking confused and / or bored.

I've seen the story written off as incoherent but I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment. The film does make sense for the most part. The problem is it's lacking in plot complication, story interest and character motivation. We learn the witches are doing evil things from their residences and that's about all. What's the end game? Why leave obvious clues around for bystanders to find? Why are these all-powerful women doing everything so small scale? Why is so little time spent on them and why do these potentially fascinating characters come off as being so bloody uninteresting and non-threatening here? They're also ultimately defeated in rather pedestrian fashion after their whereabouts are discovered, leaving the final confrontation here feeling extremely underwhelming.

Stylistically, there's too much carried right over from Suspiria, which isn't just limited to lighting, camerawork and set design. Exact moments are duplicated, like the taxi ride with the flashing colors, the exploding lights, shots of street drains, shots of things like the moon shown in three progressively-closer jump cuts and basically the entire fiery final scene. While Suspiria had a genuinely memorable, scary and unnerving score from Goblin, Keith Emerson provides a score here that's a mix of more elegant-sounding compositions with noisier and more thunderous ones, which gets to be distracting and even irritating at times. One thing it's decided not is scary.

Inferno was not given a wide theatrical release outside of Italy, nor did it receive the same glowing critical reviews of Suspiria. It was released by 20th Century Fox on a very limited basis and was considered a box office disappointment upon release. Retrospective reviews since then have typically been much more kind, but I'm not on the same page with people like Kim Newman, who referred to it as "perhaps the most underrated horror movie of the 1980s," (Nope! It's not even Argento's most underrated film of the 80s. That would be PHENOMENA.) It also occasionally ends up on Top 100 horror lists, though usually / rightfully left off in favor of Suspiria and DEEP RED (1975). Time Out threw it on the tail end of their list, with Nigel Floyd complementing it for its "free associative fluidity of the unconscious," which is basically critic-speak for "it lacks a proper plot."

This film is as noteworthy as anything else as being the final film Mario Bava ever worked on. He helped with lighting, special effects, direction and photography, though all curiously sans credit, while his son, Lamberto Bava, actually does receive credit as assistant director. Parts were filmed in New York City, including at Central Park. Andrew W. Garroni and William Lustig (who also isn't credited) worked as production managers on these scenes shortly before filming MANIAC (1980). In fact, at one point Maniac was slated to co-star Nicolodi, be co-produced by Argento and feature a Goblin score but none of that came to pass. The cast includes Veronica Lazar (who later appeared in Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome), Feodor Chaliapin Jr., a completely wasted Alida Valli and Fulvio Mingozzi reprising his Suspiria role as a taxi driver.

★★1/2