'SUSPIRIA'..........STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.....

Suspiria (1977)   As it fast approaches its 50th anniversary, we still think of "Suspiria" as horror director Dario Argento's 'Citizen Kane'.......when he boldly switched from the sex-and-slashing 'giallo' mysteries that made his international reputation and plunged into dreamlike, hallucinatory horror, the likes of which, in widescreen, primal colors and ear splitting Dolby stereo, nobody had ever quite experienced before.

             50 years later, it's still a full fledged assault on the senses, a delirious waking nightmare with one unnerving, bravura sequence after another, all of it underscored with its legendary relentless music by Argento and his very own horror rock band, Goblin. (Unlike his Giallos, Argento doesn't abruptly stop the music for his gore-drenched kill scenes......in this movie, he pumps up the volume while a knife-wielding assailant goes about stabbing a victim's exposed, beating heart....)

             Plot? In a movie this demented, who needs it, really. A naive young American dancer (Jessica Harper) unwisely enrolls in a Munich dance academy run by a coven of witches......and ruled by the ghostly, evil Mother Suspiriorum.......a mostly invisible, wheezing, crumbling hag who torments, terrifies and sometimes shreds the student body with knives, maggots and barbed wire. It's a wonder this place, drenched in a melted paintbox color scheme, can find anyone left alive to pay tuition.......

             Argento populates his comic book horrorshow with precision casting choices.......the saucer-eyed Jessica Harper, plucked out of De Palma's "Phantom Of The Paradise", gives a thorough workout to her one signature facial expression.....a deer caught in the headlights.  And heading up the witch contingent......two aging cinema icons from America and Europe, Joan Bennett, alternately icy and maternal, and Alida Valli, with a permanent rictus grin more severe than Heath Ledger's Joker.

             Designed as the first film in a trilogy about three witches who run the world, Argento kept his crazy on for the followup film "Inferno" (about the witch triumvirate's  New York branch office).....but sadly, Argento's career in the last few decades found him increasingly drained of imagination and invention. He didn't just lose his Mojo......he buried it six feet under. By the time he got around to the trilogy's finale, "Mother Of Tears" in 2007, Argento was a pale, weak shadow of the wild 'n wacky young visualist  who directed "Suspiria". It made the film a painful horror to watch....and not because of its gore.

            But we'll always have the insanely loud, drippingly bloody, squishingly maggot-infested and gloriously technicolored asylum of "Suspiria", one of the greatest of directorial fever dreams in modern cinema...... (and we promise to deal with, in future posts, "Inferno", "Mother Of Tears", and God help us all, the expected "Suspiria" remake with Dakota Johnson and Chloe Grace Moretz....) We award a full 4 juicy squirming maggots....(****)......and don't forget to turn up the sound......