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With this unambitious but entertaining giallo, Argento proves he can still thrill an audience.
The consensus among fans and critics seems to be that Dario Argento’s glory days are behind him, and after the embarrassment that was PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1998), one could hardly blame long-time followers for abandoning him completely. Yet the new millennium [...]

This oddball artifact from the ’80s is so bizarre it almost demands to be seen, whether it is any good or not: it’s a Spanish production that combines elements of American slasher films and the Italian giallo genre while offering more than enough sleazy graphic violence to qualify as one of the world’s all-time outrageous [...]

It’s a busy week for DVD and Bluray releases, with titles from such classic and cult genre names as Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Barbara Steele and Tod Slaughter arriving in stores.
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Last House on the Left (MGM/UA DVD)
Wes Craven’s landmark 1972 shocker gets a second DVD go-around with a much more comprehensive [...]

Having just released an international smash with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, Argento must have felt the usual pressure to follow it up with something similar (an issue that his occasional stylistic mentor, Hitchcock himself, had to deal with often). His subsequent two efforts would form a so-called “animal trilogy” – films [...]

Though its antecedents stretch back to the early ’60s output of Mario Bava, Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is almost universally acknowledged as ground zero for both the Italian “Giallo” thriller (so named for the yellow coloring used on the wonderfully lurid covers of the Italian crime novels that inspired them) and [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: As Cole, the reluctant time traveller played by Bruce Willis in TWELVE MONKEYS notes, time changes our perception of movies. When you re-view a film, it seems different, but it is the viewer, not the film, that has actually changed. This observation prompts our posting of this review. Dario Argento’s directorial debut, The [...]

The Blood-Spattered Scribe points us to the first trailer for GIALLO, the new horror-thriller from director Dario Argento. Judging from the preview, the film pulls off the neat trick of looking like classic Argento while also seeming completely contemporary. Argento’s golden period was all the way back in the ’70s through the early ‘80. Since then, [...]

This is a misleadingly titled giallo thriller in the tradition of Dario Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, and CAT O’NINE TAILS. Director Antonio Bido also borrows several stylistic tropes from Argento, particularly from DEEP RED: harsh violence; point-of-view shots; a repetitive, insistent main theme performed with a pop music arrangement [...]

BAY OF BLOOD is one of the least reputable films from the late Italian cult figure Mario Bava, a genre specialist best known for the black-and-white horror classic BLACK SUNDAY (1960). There is a tendency to compare Bava’s later horror films – which utilized colorful photography and lurid subject matter – unfavorably to his early masterpiece; this [...]

Italian maestro of horror Dario Argento reaches his peak with this modern thriller about a mystery author whose latest book is serving as inspiration for a series of brutal murders that take place while he is on a promotional tour in Rome. The film synthesizes all the familiar Argento motifs (psycho killers, bloody violence, convoluted [...]

A few days ago, we mentioned GIALLO as Italian director Dario Argento’s next project, pointing out that the title refers to a genre of mystery-thriller typified by outrageous plot twists and violent deaths inflicted upon beautiful women. Now, journalist Alan Jones writers in to Dark Dreams to clarify that the title has a more specific [...]

Reuters reports that Dario Argento’s upcoming thriller GIALLO – starring Argento’s daughter Asia, Ray Liotta, and Vincent Gallo - will mark the Italian filmmaker’s English-language debut. This comes as something of a surprise to anyone who saw Argento’s episode of TWO EVIL EYES (1990) or his feature-length film TRAUMA (1994). In fact, most of Argento’s films have [...]

[Editor's Note: This review, written by Jeffrey Frentzen, originally appeared in the Fall 1975 issue of Cinefantastique (4:3).]
By Jeffrey Frentzen
Mario Bava’s ANTEFATTO (”Before the Fact”), produced in Italy in 1970, was picked up for domestic release by Hallmark in 1973, playing second-feature to other Hallmark bloodbaths like MARK OF THE DEVIL and LAST HOUSE ON THE [...]