All the Colors of the Dark

Sunday, May 18, 2008

I can't resist a good giallo. Or a bad giallo, for that matter, but this was a good one. Like the way some people can always watch a western even if it sucks, I can pretty much always watch a giallo.

This one is good for the same reasons a lot of giallos are good, which is to say there is a lot of sex and violence, juiced up with ridiculous visual bombast. And it's got Edwige Fenech, my favorite/the sexiest of all the ladies that showed up in a lot of these movies. She displays an acceptable amount of nudity, although perhaps not as gratuitously as I would have liked.

The director has done 2 other giallos I saw, the great titled but only OK Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and the awesome-ly, top 10 best titled Giallo, but pretty lame as a movie Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. (Which, believe it or not is one of the many Italian/giallo versions of Poe's The Black Cat). This one doesn't have a title nearly that awesome, but it's definitely the best one of his that I've seen. It's not as insanely violent as I would have liked, but it is entertainingly lurid and has an over-the-top visual style (this is definitely one of those slightly psychedlic, hippie giallos) and a silly-ass satanic cult plot filled with dreams within dreams within hallucinations, etc.

The acting in your typical giallo is usually pretty bad and the shitty dubbing doesn't help, and it tends to add a lot of accidental laughs to these movies. But, still, I have to say that my enjoyment is mostly genuine. All the Colors of the Dark isn't a good movie in many senses, but it's fun and stylish and kinda well-made for what it is. I think it's like that saying (Pauline Kael's, maybe?) about great art being so rare that it's important we learn to appreciate great trash. This is at least good trash, maybe a little more emphasis on trash than on good. With giallos, you occassionally get some great trash from the king himself Dario Argento like Opera, and maybe even trash so great that it trascends trash and becomes art, like Deep Red. But mostly you get average to good trash, and I find that immanently watchable.