Director: Dario Argento
Writers: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Thomas De Quincey
Starring: Jessica Harper (Suzy), Stefania Casini (Sara), Flavio Bucci (Daniel)
A student goes to a prestigious German dance school and finds a supernatural mystery to solve…
Summary:
One thing to keep in mind with this film is that it was written as the dance students were 10-12 years old. They had to “age up” the characters because you just can’t kill too many toddlers on-screen before they ban your movie. However, they didn’t change any of the writing. This becomes important, because everyone acts like a stupid ten year old. It’s really something seeing high-school/college students going “Nyah, Nyah!” To each other.
Suzy arrives in the rain. Everything is very colorful. She arrives at the dance school, but no one would let her in. She sees another girl running through the woods at night.
This other girl goes to a hotel to stay with a friend and is freaked out by the window. She looks out the window and someone stabs her to death. Then drops her through a stained-glass window, and then hangs her. Her friend is killed by the falling debris. Nothing like a little overkill!
The next day:
A new character, Suzy, arrives at the dance school. She gets settled in and meets the other students. There is some confusion about whether or not she is living on campus or off; she chooses to live off-campus.
She shows up for classes the first day, and she’s suddenly sick and very weak. She passes out bleeding from the nose and mouth. Surprisingly, when she wakes up, they’ve moved all her stuff into the school. She’s now staying at the school, as the headmistress wanted all along.
In one scene, she finds maggots in her hair. The entire ceiling is covered in maggots that fall all over the girls’ faces. It turns out that there were simply boxes of spoiled food on the floor above.
The blind pianist’s dog bites someone and he is fired rather harshly. On the walk home, the dog goes crazy and kills him.
Sara does one stupid thing after another and is killed by falling into a room full of barbed wire and then having her throat cut. Why would they have this in a dance school? No school I’ve ever been in had a room neck-deep in razor wire, although that might have been a fun after school activity…
As Suzy looks into Sara’s disappearance, she learns that the school was founded by a witch called the Black Queen a hundred years ago. It was known as “The School of Dance and Occult Sciences.” That sounds like a potential comic book series to me!
She goes back to the school and everyone has gone to the theater without her. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?” She asks. Then, she’s randomly attacked by a bat in the bathroom for no apparent plot purpose.
Where do all the teachers go at 9 pm? There’s a secret passage that leads to… Witches! And Helena Markus is at the end of the search. She stabs the old woman and the building explodes as she runs out.
Opinion:
This may be the first horror movie filmed entirely using Instagram filters. The lighting and colors are exaggerated and dreamlike in most scenes. It’s an interesting visual, but at times it’s hard to tell if the characters can see or hear the pulsing lights and quiet screams, or is that just for us? What about the heavy breathing and screaming? Most of the time it’s just non-diagetic sounds that are there for mood.
Soundtrack is overpowering. We keep hearing noisy music and screaming that the characters don’t hear… In scenes that aren’t remotely scary. It’s like they took a non-scary movie and added the most obnoxious music they could to make it more tense. “<raspy> la la la la la la.”
The voices were overdubbed in post-production, and this is very clear in this film.
There are lots of long shots of the back of people’s heads as their lips probably didn’t move close enough to the English words.
This one gets a 4 out of 10 from me. Some people dearly love this movie, but none of it made any logical sense, and it wasn’t scary (except for the music). The dubbed audio also really hurt this movie.