Opera (1987)

POV: You love the opera! And you’re a psycho murderer! Great to finally catch up with Dario Argento’s horror thriller, Opera (1987). A ingenue opera singer, Betty (Cristina Marsillach), gets her big break when the original lead to a production of Verdi’s Macbeth suffers an accident. As the gothic production, which uses live ravens during […]

Stage Fright: Aquarius (1987)

The killer wears an owl’s head mask. A bulky, feathery mask with dark eyes and a beak. What a fantastic look! And now imagine an actor wearing that owl’s head with a suit and flying through the air on stage during rehearsal for a musical rock number. This happens in the first five minutes of […]

The Fifth Cord (1971)

The Fifth Cord (1971) is a visually striking giallo thriller from Italy. While there’s plenty of fashionable outfits and stylish interior decorating, there’s an emphasis on figures placed against colossal pieces of architecture, or the use of shadows against lit windows and lamplight reflected by glass. During one sequence where petals drift through the frame […]

Five Dolls For An August Moon (1970)

Five Dolls For An August Moon (1970; 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto) feels like you’ve been invited to a swanky party at a cool pad resting on a hill by the coast of an island. The guests are all glamorous, the music on the stereo system is groovy (score by Piero Umiliani). And then […]

Manhattan Baby (1982)

After watching Italian horror director and gore-meister Lucio Fulci’s ‘Gates Of Hell’ trilogy last year for spooky movie Halloween season, the collapse of logic was definitely understood as an auteur trademark across all those movies. Manhattan Baby (1982) is Fulci’s Exorcist rip-off, which follows an archaeologist digging around a haunted tomb in Egypt whose family […]