Quint

In his most expensive and most daring film, Dario Argento completely detached himself from reality and created his own phantasmagorical universe in which he gave full rein to his horror fantasies. The interior of the hotel, where most of the action takes place, is architecturally nonsensical and resembles more of a theatre stage, constantly flooded with garishly coloured lights coming from nowhere. The main characters, who change every twenty minutes, are just helpless pawns in the hands of malevolent forces and die in very unlikely, yet visually arresting ways. To evoke a dreamlike logic, Argento even instructed the actors to behave in front of the camera in a way they normally wouldn't. Inferno has been criticized by many for its incoherent and absurd plot, stupid dialogue and terrible acting. Others see it as a remarkable autobiographical dream piece in the tradition of Fellini. According to Argento, it is one of his most honest and purest films, but one that he doesn't have very good memories of. Due to a serious illness, he had to direct some scenes lying down, and was even replaced a few times by the famous Mario Bava, who was in charge of the second crew (he shot, for example, the famous scene in the flooded ballroom). The result is a pure horror symphony whose strength lies in Argento's visual virtuosity, surreal production design and a roaring rock-opera soundtrack.

An unusual vampire movie without vampires, where the supernatural is replaced by the blood fetish of bored aristocrats. Jean Rollin once again teeters on the edge of surreal art film and exploitation trash. As in porn, basically any interaction between men and women ends in sex, but this is not a typical sexploitation film. Here, the men initially think they have the upper hand over the women, but it actually turns out to be the other way around. The eroticism here is not gratuitous, but an organic part of the narrative. Jean Rollin used to say that all you need to make a film is beautiful women and a castle or a cemetery. And it's truly fascinating the elegance with which he can make such a captivating film with hypnotic atmosphere and erotic tension using only porn actors, austere sets, minimalistically lit locations, sounds and music. If you're the right target audience, you won't get the shots of Brigitte Lahaie in a black dress with a giant scythe out of your head right away.

In what is probably his strangest film, Jean Rollin swaps the usual romantic-gothic setting with vampires for a sterile industrial environment in which the main characters gradually lose their memories, turn into wandering bodies without souls and, of course, have a lot of sex in between. Rollin manages to sexualize everything, even memory loss. But aside from the unnecessarily lengthy sex scenes (which are only there to fill the feature-length running time), the rest of the film is quite a suggestive nightmare, convincingly evoking a chaotic vision of a world of disoriented amnesiac characters wandering aimlessly like zombies through the empty corridors of a modern high-rise. Moreover, the Parisian streets, thanks to the fact that they had no money for extras, feel fittingly post-apocalyptic. The final minutes are strikingly reminiscent of the similarly haunting final shot of Fulci's horror film The Beyond, a year later.

The combination of Nazi zombies, the French countryside and Rollin's melancholic poetics has something to it, but the stupid dialogue, terrible make-up and sound effects make it extreme trash. The film was originally supposed to be directed by Jesus Franco, who left the project due to the low budget. Rollin took over from him at the last minute. He read the script on the way to the set, and if he had known how bad it was, he said he wouldn't have bothered with it at all. Zombie Lake is a harrowing but at times fascinating mess, jumping from unabashedly exploitative scenes (naked volleyball players swimming in zombie-infested water) to tender, sentimental moments (an emotional zombie visiting his daughter) in which Rollin manages to stamp his unmistakable signature.

This B-horror film, made shortly after the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant disaster, attempts to redefine the term "nuclear family". Here, children exposed to radiation after a nuclear power plant accident burn their parents to the ground by hugging them with their radioactive arms. Really! Probably the craziest metaphor for the nuclear threat I've seen in a movie. The Children teeters strangely on the edge of scary and ridiculous. It shocks you with the unusually high level of violence perpetrated by and on children, but its silliness and ridiculous premise prevent you from taking it seriously.

Unlike its successful predecessor, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever received extremely negative reviews. Critics slammed the film for replacing the dramatic depth of the original film with a series of cheesy dance sequences. But for lovers of the 1980s era of garish gaudiness and "hard body" films, this is a guilty pleasure. It is Sylvester Stallone's only directorial effort not starring himself (unless you count a minor Hitchcockian cameo), with John Travolta reprising his role as Saturday night disco king Tony, this time spending several months in the gym before filming. Stallone then made his physical transformation the main attraction of the film, which is largely a showcase for Travolta's chiseled physique. The funniest feature is the fact that Stallone essentially made the film a dance variation on Rocky. A lot of the plot unfolds in the kind of rhythmic montages that Rocky brought to eighties movies. In them, Tony, an underrated amateur dancer aspiring to become a professional, goes through dance trials and hard physical training while overcoming his insecurities and emotional imbalance to wipe out any doubters at the end. The strained relationship between him and the experienced dancer Laura then culminates in the final dance performance, which is de facto conceived as a duel. The final show is a perfectly overstuffed display of 80s music video aesthetics. And believe me, you'll only experience such an eccentric audiovisual massage a few times in your life.

The last, most conventional and cohesive film of Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy. The plot this time makes sense, but Fulci's flair for odd moments and bizarre stylistic excesses, such as disorienting camera swoops, jumbled refocusing and incomprehensible editing, are still evident. This time, though, there are slightly fewer gore effects. The most impressive moments mostly revolve around a mysteriously ajar or slammed cellar door, which plays a suspenseful role in key scenes. An insectoid zombie in a surgical gown, named Freudstein (apparently a fusion of the names Freud and Frankenstein), is a wonderfully bizarre villain. This time, a child character becomes the center of the supernatural events, and she goes through some surprisingly big scares (I wouldn't be surprised if her child actor took some trauma from the filming). Avoid the English dubbing, where this character is dubbed by an adult actor who tries to imitate the voice of a child, making the film an unintentional comedy.

Probably Fulci's most avant-garde film, often described by his fans as his best. The director himself said that he wanted to make an "absolute film" with all the horrors of the world, no story and no logic. There is no reason why any of what happens in the film should happen. Fulci exposes his characters to the cruel illogic of a strange world without any order. There is no escape from the horror. Everything the characters do is completely pointless and goes nowhere. Evil supernatural forces seem to attack the very cohesion of the film, which gradually disintegrates into utter chaos. Some will see this as a display of creative dilettantism, others as part of a dreamy irrationality. The Beyond is a difficult cinematic experience to grasp. But lovers of kinky gore effects will thoroughly enjoy it. Fulci's fixation on eyeball mutilation is on full display. As Fulci used to say: “eyes are the first thing you have to destroy because they've seen too many horrors.” The eyes are thus blinded, eaten and gouged out. I'm not too keen on this, but I'll always remember the film for its final scene, which represents the best of Italian horror at the time.

The first film of Fulci's so-called Gates of Hell trilogy, in which the famous Italian horror filmmaker completely broke away from traditional narrative conventions and gave a clear pass to his visual skills and macabre poetics. The lack of logic and a coherent plot may discourage many viewers, but some will be delighted. Indeed, Fulci makes great use of it to evoke an apocalyptic atmosphere of chaos and decay in a cursed city where the boundaries between the rational and supernatural worlds are being eroded. The gates of hell are opening, smoke and blood are pouring from the cracking walls, people are vomiting their guts and zombies are beginning to teleport around the city. Fulci deliberately plunges you into a world where nothing makes sense. Most absurd, then, is the very end, which feels like someone cut out the last crucial seconds. Even more absurd, however, is the story that the originally filmed ending could not be used because the editor spilled coffee on it in the editing room.

An entertaining B-movie playing with the well-known urban legend about sewer crocodiles. After being flushed down the toilet, the unwanted pet ends up in the sewer, where a local chemical company inadvertently fattens it with discarded animal carcasses they were testing growth hormones on. As a result, the little crocodile grows to gigantic proportions and begins to eat its way up from the lowest rungs of the social ladder to the highest. Surprisingly, John Sayles' script is not daft, in fact, it is a witty social satire. At first, the alligator feasts unnoticed on the sewer workers. Then it takes to the streets at night and starts having a middle-class dinner. And only when it takes on the ignorant elite in the suburbs does it literally come to light. Alligator is not a scary horror movie, but a horror movie with a sense of humor. If you've ever wondered with monster movies, for example, how come there's no monster excrement, Alligator vividly proves that even monsters perform a need. It's a self-aware B-movie that revels in genre clichés with great aplomb. When a racist and sexist animal hunter, a corrupt mayor, or a tormentor of small puppies appears on the scene, you know they won't be on screen for very long, but you look forward to the moment when they're in the alligator's mouth all the more. At the same time, the film entertains with subtle references for film buffs. For example, the graffiti in the sewer declaring that “Harry Limes lives” refers to Orson Welles' character in The Third Man who was killed in the sewer.