The Phantom of the Opera

I first saw this movie on a local TV station and figured out it was the Phantom of the Opera. Since I love the musical and have seen it twice, I watched this movie. It somewhat follows the line of the real story but to make it it's own it is a little different. The Phantom actually looks a little like Fabio with his long blonde hair. He plays a very devilish character. I thought at first that this a very old rendition of the movie but when I had searched forever to figure out which one it was, it was the most recent one made. I like the bit of extra sexuality they threw in it. It adds more of a reality to the characters and their feelings for each other. It is sort of like a tacky Italian version but that's what makes it good. I really liked this version of the movie and I suggest people watch it. Again, remember that it is not like the musical in every way, it is different, but it is still good! People need to get off the bandwagon of every Phantom movie made has to follow exactly like the musical, if they were all like that, then there would only be one made, this is why they make several, different versions makes watching each one interesting to see what will be different.

Leaden horror costumer that takes its tenuous starting point from the classic Gaston Leroux novel of the same name. The twist in this variation is that the Phantom was raised by telepathic rats in the subterranean caverns beneath the opera house. Thus our feral Phantom (Julian "Ratboy" Sands) develops an obsessive love for up-and-coming diva Christine (Asia Argento), and sets about to seduce her to his dark, rodent existence. Although beautifully photographed, with lots of ornate period detail to catch the eye, this is largely a by-the-numbers supernatural horror story with scant gory set pieces as diversions. Fans of Dario Argento will yell "Rats!" and all else will merely shrug. And why are the rats telepathic, anyway? Screen writing credits go to Gerard Brach, best known for his many collaborations with Roman Polanski, most notably Repulsion. However, none of his absurd sense of humor comes through in this film, which really needs it. A shame all around. The DVD includes a short interview with the film's star, Julian Sands, as well as a photo gallery, some dispensable making-of clips, spliced together to appear as a featurette (mostly in untranslated Italian) and a very informative article from Fangoria Magazine.

I'm a brand new Dario Argento fan, having only seen 4 of his films (Phenomena, Tenebrae, Suspiria, and this). But I'm definitely planning to see more (my copy of Stendhal Syndrome is preordered and should be here next week). I bought this simply because it was Argento, and I was actually surprised. I was told that this was his worst film, and some even called it his swan song. I rather liked it, myself. If it is made by Dario Argento, it will be good. Dario took a few liberties, making this more of his own instead of yet another adaptation of the novel. I have to applaud him for that, even though some of it hardly makes sense. And there is the fact that electric light was not around at the time. But if you spend your life analyzing movies and hating them for the smallest detail, what's the point of watching movies? I watch to be entertained. The visuals aren't nearly as great as Suspiria, and the special effects are hardly special (you can smell a CGI shot from a mile away). Not to mention some performances. But I still liked it, because it had that Argento touch that all of is films have. Besides, Argento's worst films are still better than most of the 'horror' America has, today. I'd probably give it 3 out of 4 stars if I had to grade it. Check it out.

Dario Argento probably wasn't trying to make a funny movie about The Phantom of the Opera. Probably wasn't, but the point is, he did. While the gore in the film is unnecessary, it is not as frequent as we may be led to believe. The film does start out fairly abruptly with a guy getting his upper half sawed off, and at this time you're wondering, "what the hell is wrong with this picture?" Other death scenes are fairly equally gruesome, but all are also expected, therefore lowering the "scary gore factor." Of course, then you see The Phantom. Now, of course, you're really confused by the blonde hair and lack of a mask. I wasn't complaining about his good looks, though. The acting on Julian Sands's part is sub-par but not horrible, while Asia Argento is somewhat better. The relationship between the two is not incredibly believable, a sort of instant-love instant-hate instant-sadness thing that just keeps the audience confused as to why Christine can't make up her damn mind. Andrea Di Stefano is likable as Raoul, but some of his scenes are just incongruous with his character.

The sexuality of the film is incredibly overdone. Argento seems to need to expose women's breasts as many times as possible, including a very large and very unattractive La Carlotta. The opium den/whorehouse scene pretty much makes the movie (along with the couple of really gory parts) rated-R because we are definitely talking full frontal nudity, both sexes, and if you aren't expecting it you are pretty much blown away.

However: despite its flaws in cinematography (annoying and constantly switching camera angles and a soap opera-like quality), below standard acting, strange and inconclusive love story, and numerous bits of unwarranted violence... there is something about this film that just makes me want to declare it a campy, a cult classic. It is absolutely hilarious to watch, though very disturbing at times. If you've got a twisted sense of humour and/or a love of the bizarre, then this version of PotO with a man sticking rats down his pants for pleasure is the kind of movie you will want to see! 5 stars out of 10 for just being fun, though about 3 stars out of 10 when watched "critically." But as I said above, "prepare thyself for camp" and you'll probably love it.

'The Phantom of the Opera' is one of those books that is impossible to film. part of this is to do with the grandeur of the set-pieces - in one scene, a massive chandelier is dropped on an opera audience; the book's setting, the Paris Opera House, is full of completely realised floors and basements, with a near-magical world of tarns and rocks as its substructure. That Dario Argento, working on a relatively low Euro-budget, cannot approach the novel's visual audacity, is not his fault, as his attempt is always inventive and entertaining.

A more difficult problem lies in the story's magic, in Erik's musical genius, and his bestowing on Christianne a voice of unearthly beauty - this can be easily imagined when reading, but is impossible to realise on screen - one good opera voice is as good as another, not helped here by having to sing what sound like hyper-ventilating scales; while the Phantom's organ-musings are more reminiscent of Sesame Street's The Count than tragic Baroque strains.

The most serious gap between book and film could have been averted by Argento. The book is called the 'Phantom' of the Opera, and although the anti-hero is revealed to be all too human, the first half compellingly records the subversive effects of this ghost, his inexplicable immateriality and omniscience. As the book goes on, the spirit becomes a body, and what was horrible becomes understandable, even sympathetic. Julian Sands is a body from the off, even given a bizarre back-story involving rats, and is thus robbed of his power, just as the narrative is denied its power to chill. There is no transformation, no sense of the body becoming a body, or conversely, no sense of the magic inherent in the real.

I say this could have been averted by Argento. The fact that it wasn't is surely a deliberate directorial choice. Because this is a very strange version of Leroux's tale, rescuing it from the mawkishness it has drowned in since a certain musical. Although constantly alluding to his previous work, especially 'Suspiria' (the ballet girls, the chases, the gynaecological interiors), the film is rarely scary, as if Argento is deliberately working against horror. Just as the film is at its darkest and most gory, Argento deflates the horror with his recourse to pantomime, Grand Guignol, farce, grotesquerie; alternating, as in a Shakespeare play, the high-flown love story with earthier nonsense. The rats bare more than a close resemblance to Roland, and yet, with gleeful viciousness, feed on the rat-trapped hand of a yokel ratcatcher.

Argento is attuned to the political ironies of Leroux's text. The film never leaves the world of the Opera, and still offers a rich, comic microcosm of contemporary French society, including Degas repeatedly sketching the little girls, and Verlaine and RImbaud hilariously brawling at a sauna-orgy. More seriously, the chasing of a gluttonous servant-girl by the Phantom is mirrored by the much more disturbing chase of a young ballerina by a paedophile bourgeois.

The Opera was built as the supreme edifice of bourgeois France, a monumental erection to vulgar taste, which the affronted Italian director mockingly exposes; it was a demonstration of prosperity, pretension, but above all positivism, the progress of science, the idea that the world could be empirically known. Like all great Gothic novels, this modern hubris is in conflict with lingering residues of the past, a material building haunted by phantoms, its very materiality (the chandelier scene) vulnerable, the modern architecture on a prehistoric substructure, like a palimpsest, home to a man raised and pleasured by rats, an affront to contemporary Darwinism.

This breadth was taken further by Leroux into the realm of the metaphysical, avoided by the strictly somatic Argento, although the opening scenes brilliantly play with the idea of absence and presence that form the thematic basis of the book. This is by no means vintage Argento, but his use of interiors and light and shade remain quite inspiring, and there is a hilarious scene involving the ratcatcher and the fate of his dwarf assistant.