A Horror Film Blog

 In his 80s, Dario Argento could be forgiven for not bothering any more, or for having absolutely nothing left to shock or surprise us with.  Glad to report, he still cares a bit, and he can still startle his audiences, though not with the trade mark gore you might expect. His last few efforts - Giallo was described as "a deeply disappointing work from a director who seems to be yellowing with age, his vision progressively jaundicing" and Marc Kermode - perhaps forgetting he was talking about a Dario Argento film - decried it as a "depressingly sleazy shocker."  Marc, sleazy and shocky are what makes a good Argento film. Sleazy, geddit?  Mark? And before that there was The Third Mother , an incoherent (again, an expected trait in any Argento film) banal (very un-Argento quality) conclusion to the sequence started with the mind blowingly lunatic Grand Guignol brilliance of Suspiria . So it comes as a pleasant surprise to encounter Dark Glasses , a likeable late ...

This Italaina film, directed by Lorenzo Bianchini, is a curious effort.  It is pretty much setting and atmosphere in search of a story.  There are some very ambitious ideas here - the film is virtually a one-man show, with our attention centered squarely on wildlife researcher Marco Contrada (played by Renzo Gariup) who wanders into an old abandoned village, redolent with menace, and finds himself somehow unable to leave. It starts brilliantly - the first half is an assured demonstration of building up unease, as Marco potters about putting cameras on foxes and so on, before exploring the obviously doom laden abandoned village. Even with essentially one character and virtually no dialogue, it is is fascinating. The use of sound is particularly good - every crunch of gravel, scrape and creak seems to intimate a mysterious danger. The cinematography is brilliant - stark and drained of colour, to the point where it seems we are watching a series of sepia photographs come to life....