How one DVD label and a crop of finger-licking bonus features led to a second chance for Dario.

Man , gotta love Arrow Video.  Just watched their fully uncut, 30^th Anniversary release of Dario Argento’s Inferno,  his fantastically odd sequel to Suspiria, and one-time casualty of the video nasties fiasco.  What’s that I hear you cry?  “Wow Kevan, that’s brilliant, but what bonus features can I expect to find on the disc?  By the way, love the blog.”  Well firstly thanks for the kind words, but to answer your question, the 2-disc beauty contains, among other things, interviews with director and cast (ace!), a substantial collector’s booklet (rad!), and a fine documentary narrated by none other than Mark Kermode (mega!)! 

Oh and no, I don’t work for Arrow Video.  But damn, I wish I did.

See while (as I touched upon in my last post) DVD has meant that grindhouse addicts such as myself can now buy all kinds of forgotten trash guilt-free from respectable outlets, one thing we rarely get is decent extras.  Of course this is due to the fact that such releases are generally from small labels such as Vipco, Hardgore or tireless flag flyers Shameless Screen Entertainment, and putting nice packages together costs money.  Also, when you’re dealing with obscure, 30 or 40 year old cult films, extra materials are not easy to come by.  Yet Arrow Video keep doing it, be it for their release of Dawn of The Dead, or the grimy urban filth of Street Trash, an unbelievably out there film whose tagline screamed “The ultimate melt movie!”.  What was that, treasured readers?  Is that you I hear piping up again?  “What the hell is a ‘melt movie’ Kevan?  Maybe you could enlighten us, perhaps in a future post of your entertaining yet informative blog”.

Well, thanks again, there’s really no need.  But seeing as you requested it, I will, in an upcoming post, educate one and all with a history of the sparse sub-sub-genre known as the melt movie.  You’ll have to remind me though.

But anyway, enough of the shameless gushing over Arrow Video (God, I love them), and back to Argento, whom I first came became aware of  when, as a horror-hungry teen I stumbled across a video of the Argento documentary Master of Horror.  The early years of my obsession with horror and trash cinema involved watching anything and everything that looked like it might be even vaguely fucked up, and reading up as much as possible.  As you can well imagine, I quickly became aware of Argento’s reputation as Italy’s ‘Master of Horror’.  Yet when I first saw Suspiria, much as I wanted to love it, I just wasn’t that blown away.  As a gore addicted young ‘un I was more partial, in terms of Italian horror, to Lucio Fulci’s over-the-top gore ‘epics’, and the supremely nasty cannibal gut-crunchers, which I still think rank among cinema’s most extreme offerings.

 I wanted to love Argento, but why force it?  I resigned myself to feeling that while his films are far from terrible, the man is really overrated.  It filled me with warmth then, as my feelings were validated years later by Jason Bateman’s character in Juno, who expressed his preference of Herschell Gordon Lewis over Argento: “Argento’s alright”.  I didn’t have to feel alone any more.

But time goes on y’know?  And things change.  Once you’ve exhausted Fulci’s best films, like City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, Zombie Flesh Eaters and yes, The New York Ripper, there’s really little to discover.  Sorry, what was that?  “The New York Ripper Kevan, really?  But I’ve heard it’s a startlingly adolescent and misogynistic piece of utter filth.  Also, your words are pure linguistic beauty, your blog life-changing”.

Please, you really must stop, but yes, The New York Ripper has been berated by critics for its thoroughly unpleasant lady-slicing, and it takes some defending, but sometimes you just gotta take the ride.  If you’re gonna watch an abhorrent piece of shit, why not yourself become an abhorrent piece of shit, if only for ninety minutes.

Anyway the point is, I’m older and a little wiser, and I think the time has come to revaluate Argento.  Watching Inferno for the first time, I enjoyed it immensely, and I do think I’d get a lot more out of his films nowadays.  Therefore, I have promised myself I will begin by revisiting Suspiria and Deep Red, and getting a copy of Terror at The Opera (the spangly 2-disc Arrow release, natch).