Neff-3

This film has the same wonderfully subtle direction as "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter," "Diary Of A Mad Housewife" and "Goodbye Columbus." The lost 60s/70s style for dialogue films with immediately profound social messages is probably best exampled in "EGROMMM" -- Newman's daughter (Nell Potts) plays the stoic, life-dampened child who refuses to let her drunken slob of a mother destroy her brilliance.. at least for now. We're just slightly distant observers in this style of filmmaking. You won't get under anyone's skin or into anyone's head. But you may have grown up in similar circumstances, god forbid. An excellent film about the subtleties of abuse without coming across preachy in the slightest. Deeply moving.

This is what I love about "Italian" horror. With titles almost as wild as "And You Shall Scream Forever While Worms Eat Your Eyes!" (which could never work in America), and with such truly nightmarish discontinuity of plot and characters, Gates Of Hell, like so many other Fulci classics, delivers it all. One truly lasting effect of this particular film is the crashing synthesizer explosions as sense-shockers to add to the quick zoom on gory corpses and the living dead. The combination of the maggot infested dead and what is ringing in your ears imprints forever a sensory stamp ala "Fulci."

To date there has not been a film so overwhelmingly beautiful in its use of both existing and specially produced deco and nouveau sets and design -- and only a genius such as Argento could properly light these edifices with the colors to trap them into the dream-like trance of a true classic, abiding, flawless horror film. There is not a moment of this film which is not dripping with artistic excellence, and yet it never lets go of the traditionally macabre, dank, seedy and vile undercurrent in most Italian horror. Susperia is like a lilly floating in putrefied blood. Without question, one of the greatest achievements in horror to date.