"SUSPIRIA" (2018 REMAKE).........CRAZIER.....ARTSY-SMARTSY-IER........BUT ANY BETTER?

Suspiria (2018)    Regardless of what anyone thinks of this film.........no one denies director Luca Guadagnin's visual creativity......

                ......and the fact that he somehow made his remake distinctly his own while still honoring the source.....Dario Argento's legendary 1977 gloriously unhinged bad dream horror film.

                       The Argento movie, which unfolds on the screen like a nightmare you've had after one too many slices of pepperoni pizza, really can't support the weight of all the art and exposition that Guadagnino piles on top of it........

                        There's political subtext, setting the remake in the midst of Germany's Baader-Meinhof uproars.......there's Nazi subtext, with characters tormented by the country's legacy of evil.....there's modern dance subtext in the ascendance of women through their fierce, dynamic choreography.......there's even witches' coven political subtext, with power-play elections between opposing witches.......

                         Jeez.....no wonder the goddamn thing takes 152 minutes to unfold......

                         Argento showed minimum interest in actual dancing at "Suspiria"s  witch-afflicted ballet school.....in that film,.the hordes of maggots dropping from the ceiling get more dance moves than the girls.......

                          Not so in the remake, where the witches cause one girl to dance herself into a literal bone-breaking, back-breaking trash-compacted human leftover............this bravura sequence, early on in the film, seems designed to keep you intrigued enough to hang on for the finale, which struggles like a son-of-a-bitch to out-do Argento in the batshit-crazy, loopy-doopy bloodspurt department.......

                          The overpowering artistic heft that Guadagnino layers all over Argento's simple little nightmare is duly impressive..........bur it doesn't make the film any more worthy or more entertaining than the original.

                          And it's a horror film, after all.  So even a critically-acclaimed auteur like Guadagnino, for all his meticulous skill, has to scream "Booga Booga!" to the audience and give 'em what they came for........rollin' heads, spewin' entrails, bitchin' witches and even the kitchen sink.....(this includes a cameo from Death itself and the Boss Witch, who looks like Pizza The Hut from Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs"......)

                         For movie buff's there's plenty of fascinating stuff to pick up on........Chloe Grace Moretz popping up briefly as a victimized dancer...... Tilda Swinton, in addition to her role as dance instructor, popping up as an elderly male German psychiatrist and that Pizza The Hut thing.......even Jessica Harper, the deer-in-the-headlights heroine of Argento's original, shows up as the long lost wife of Swinton's old German guy.......(at least she didn't end up smooching Pizza The Hut)

                        It comes down to this.........Argento's 1977 fever dream we'll always return to.....usually every Halloween. The 2018 heavily artistic remake? 

                         Once was more than enough for us......2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)