Customer Reviews

Deep Red [VHS]

5 star:		(79)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

"Deep Red" is without a doubt Dario Argento's masterpiece. With a very clear (for Argento) storyline, absolutely dazzling camerawork and an unforgettable score by Goblin (which is bound to sound incredible in 5.1), "Deep Red" is a must for the horror aficionado, especially those with an interest in films that are historically relevant. "Deep Red" is the "Psycho" of Italian cinema. Back in 1975, when it came out, graphic gore was mostly relegated to ultra low-budget movies where carnage was the only point of the movie. With "Deep Red", Argento took gore in a completely new direction, mixing it with classy cinematography and a complex story, and unleashing it upon unsuspecting stars of the Italian stage and screen, people so prestigious in their own way you would never expect them to get it the way they do in a movie. The uncut widescreen version of this film, which has been long overdue in America, will reveal to those who have only seen it in pan-and-scan form the artistry and complexity of Argento's Technovision images. The previously unreleased footage, which I have seen and which was truncated from the version that has been in circulation in this country for decades, adds depth to the characters and the story. In my opinion, you should preferably watch this in Italian with English subtitles -- the English dubbing is atrocious and the Italian original is far more poetic-sounding and apropriate to the story and, besides, Anchor Bay is releasing the added footage in Italian because there is no English dub of those scenes, so you might as well watch it all in its original language. At any rate, this is a must for everyone who appreciates good scary movies, for anyone with an eye for truly spectacular filmmaking and especially for anyone who thinks European movies means Truffaut. An absolute must-have!

Unlike many who have posted here, I HAVE seen the full 126minute version of Deep Red, on a badly copied conversion inpan-and-scan - and let me tell you, even in this form it was still one of the most exciting movies I think I've ever seen. Although a couple of decades of film has probably blunted the shock and gore elements, and all those character moments might make it seem slow, I promise you that this movie will freak you in ways few horror movies will. Dario Argento's reputation rests entirely on this film and Suspiria, but this one is the superior. All the best elements of his previous films are combined here - the protagonist who's seen something important he can't identify, killers with a fetish for black gloves, vague hints of the supernatural, gender transgression..... and of coursre the gore. Believe me, you'll think twice about checking the door locks after dark when you see what happens to Helga the psychic. Argento was never this suspenseful again, probably because Mark (the protagonist), like the audience, knows he has to solve the mystery before the killer will ever leave him alone. The DVD release of DEEP RED is a real event, and Goblin's score presented in Dolby Digital would be worth it all by itself! I can't wait until release day...........

This is one of Argento's most brilliant films, and needs to be viewed in widescreen for its full impact. David Hemmings witnesses the gruesome murder of a medium who has previously sensed the presence of a psychopath at one of her sessions. Later on, like many a typical Argento hero, he thinks he has seen an important clue to the murder, but can't quite put his finger on what it is. There are further murders - a particularly nasty business involving someone's teeth, and a horrible scalding which leaves another clue. The trail eventually leads to a spooky old house, a deserted school and an extraordinary final showdown with the killer. The gruesome set-pieces are quite spectacular, the plot will keep you guessing, and the entire film is a splendid bravura example of Italian "giallo" cinema at its finest, with a great soundtrack by Goblin. I can't wait to see it on DVD.

Let's talk about fear for a moment, shall we? Come, sit with me here on this cold bench, beneath the white, buzzing, utilitarian fluourescents---there's no one in this entire building tonight, so we'll have plenty of time to talk.

About Fear.

I don't mean the giddy, cozy shivers you get that makes you want to watch the cheap and banal slasher flick through your fingers, giggling like a fool the whole time. No, I mean Fear: Fear that comes floating into your brain at 3 in the morning, as you lie in your suddenly cold and vast bed, listening to the house creak and groan, wondering---well, God, it's silly, but still---didn't that creak, that shifting floorboard you heard just now, close to your bedroom door---well didn't it sound just a little too *stealthy*?

The fear that creeps over you and brands your naked back with a flotilla of goosebumps while you're taking that early morning shower, the outdoor blackness pressed close up to the house windows: the conviction that when the water and your fumbling hands wipe away the soap and lather, someone---something---else will have joined you in the shower. Something that wants to play and giggle and roll in your blood.

Yes. Now we're talking Fear, aren't we? Now you're with me: good.

"Deep Red" (the Italian 'Profondo Rosso') is Italian Grandmaster of Horror Dario Argento's masterwork of sick, revulsive, shudder-inducing Fear: it is gorgeous, jaw-dropping, ambitiously brutal, leeringly primal, as if Argento had furiously shoved a syringe straight into the pulsing, fevered brain of a serial killer, and drained the nightmares out of the creature's gibbering mind.

"Deep Red" is Nightmare made Flesh, and Flesh made Film.

American jazz musician Marcus Daly (the late, incomparable David Hemmings)is working in Rome: he composes, performs, dallies, drinks, and engages in bibulous battinage with sexually confused, angst-ridden friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia, channeling a little of Fellini's "Satyricon" for our amusement).

All of this is brought to a halt when Daly witnesses a woman---a Ukrainian psychic (Macha Meril, insanely overracting---and oddly, it works)---slaughtered in her home by a black-gloved maniac, butchered like a pig or a cow. He witnesses this rapine from a Roman courtyard, and arrives to late to save her---but soon enough to glimpse a portrait, forgotten in the insanity of theo moment, but recalled after events lose their immediacy and begin to gel.

Oh---and after the Maniac demonstrates its interest in Marcus Daly. It enters his Roman apartment, while he composes on his piano; he is saved by noting those stealthy noises typically heard by nervous insomniacs at 3 in the morning, and watching a long shadow fall across the threshold of his study. He manages to leap up and close the study door, even as the Thing whispers its hellish ambitions through impenetrable wood.

Argento is a wizard. He conjures up his necromantic magic through high style: watch the camera in the opening sequences, as it arcs down like a vicious, hungry bird of prey over the audience, summoned to hear the psychic: watch as it glimpses the Killer in a dingy, begrimed, fog-sooted restroom mirror; recoil as it follows---faithfully,like a staid documentarian---the brutal slaughter of a girl in an isolated country cottage, her death prescribed by immersion in boiling water.

Or, for sheer gut-clenching shrill terror, try out the lonely death of Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri), who dies a dog's death, death too easily imagined by those who have fallen against a sharp surface---a death pilloried, lampooned, by the twisted, robotic, dwarf creature that enters through the Professor's study door (anticipating, and doubtless inspiring, James Wan's nightmarish tricycle puppet in "Saw").

"Deep Red" is undeniably Argento's dark lodestone, a treasure gleaming and glimmering and seducing the unwary in the darkness, a brilliant accomplishment he rarely approached, even as his capacity for the craft grew. "Suspiria", perhaps, is as close as the Master came to this dark, poisonous, armor-piercing bullet of pure horror.

The delirious, dark delight of "Deep Red" is the intense, nearly sexual beauty, and intensity, of death and its Soldiers: the remastered deluxe edition merely underscores a movie astonishingly vivid in color and brutally ambitious in scope. From the moment the blood-red velvet opera-house curtains are parted, through the night-haunted cobblestones of haunted modern Rome, "Deep Red" is murderous---and glorious in its bloodthirsty frenzy.

Evil is whispering on the other side of the door. Escape---or talk to it. Flee the madness, or engage it: this is Argento's legacy in "Deep Red". Tremble.

JSG

Deep Red-Dario Argento's masterpiece. Though it's not my personal favorite of his, I can really see why it's regarded at his best. Deep Red is a 2+ hour giallo epic. Argento has found his style now , so you can imagine the look and sound of this film(it was the first to use Goblin's music). It's not quite as wild, colorful and violent as Suspiria, but I really wouldn't suggest watching it on a first date. We got an English pianist living in Rome who's only friends seem to be another pianist and his mother(the prototype for the whole "engineer" joke that runs throughout Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man). He witnesses a gruesome murder by a guy in a hat and raincoat(of course), becomes obsessed and launches his own investigation(of course), and winds up pursued by the killer himself(of course). I still can't get over how Argento can keep using this plotline and give it enough twists and turns so that it never once seems tired or repetitive. It's all in the storytelling, people! Anchor Bay has done their best to restore this film. The picture is fantastic, but some of the english dialogue couldn't be saved, so be prepared to be reading subtitles practically midsentence when a character is speaking. You'll get used to this very fast though. I could say more, but if you're an Argento fan(which most likely you are), I'd just be preaching to the converted. If you're wondering, "what's the big deal with this Dario guy?", then Deep Red and Suspiria would both be excellent starting points for you. You don't like either of those, then Argento's probably not your bag, baby.

A title that cannot miss in your Italian thriller collection! A movie that cannot be left unseen. A soundtrack that whips your spine cord. The ultimate masterpiece of Argento is a mixture of gore effects (last Italian work by Carlo "ET" Rambaldi), bedtime lullabies, screaming queens, supernatural atmosphere and memory games, supported by a perfect plot and a series of great Italian theatre actors whose only function in this film is to be killed in sequence, in a crescendo of ultraviolence.
The DVD edition of PROFONDO ROSSO is presented in widescreen 2.35:1 enhanced for 16x9 TVs, giving the audience all but the impression of a movie directed 27 years ago. The audio tracks are in Dolby Sorround 5.1, in Italian and in English, but portions of the English soundtrack were either never recorded or lost. These scenes are therefore presented in Italian with optional English subtitles. The extra features show the Italian and U.S. theatrical trailer and a featurette, 25th Anniversary, with an interview with director Dario Argento, writer Dardano Sacchetti and the Goblin, the group responsible for the nightmarish soundtrack which is part of the worldwide success of Argento's movie. Watch it alone, in the dark...

Many years before Carpenter's Halloween and the Friday the 13th films ushered in the new wave of bloody horror slasher films in the United States; Italian film-makers like Mario Bava, and Dario Argento were re-inventing the horror genre. Argento updated and modernized the European horror film with a trilogy of films prior to Deep Red (Bird with the Crystal Plumage 1970, Cat O' Nine Tails 1971 and Four Flies on Grey Velvet - 1972). He was called the Italian Hitchcock with good reason. These films combined the horror and suspense of Hitchcock's The Birds - 1963 , Psycho - 1960 (and later Frenzy - 1972), with modern European attitudes, settings and generous amounts of gore. Like Hitchcock's Vertigo, the logic of many of these films' narrative plot were secondary to the emotional mood and visual poetry on display. The Argento films also explore psychology, parapsychology and/or cutting edge technology as well.

Let me talk about a couple things not mentioned in reviews I've read.

After the opening credits, we are at a conference discussing psychic ability and the paranormal.

Later, when the Jazz pianist looks up at his apartment building, he witnesses his neighbor, the psychic at the conference, being savagely murdered. They seem to make eye contact.

I suggest a psychic connection between the two has been made and it is this connection which affects the pianists behavior and is the reason he must solve the murder before he leaves the city.

Later on he recalls when he ran into his neighbors apartment he believed he saw something, something which is later missing, he believes. Did he see anything at all, or was it a psychic impression which was implanted by his neighbor as they made eye contact?

He reacts to hunches, and seems to almost have some sort of psychic ability later on in the film, though he refuses to completely acknowledge it. He knows almost instinctively there is something about the old house which holds an important clue to the murder. He goes to the house, but at first he doesn't find anything. He's trying too hard. Thinking too logically. It is only later that suddenly he realizes, almost psychically what he's missed and upon examining the picture he convinces himself his hunch is right and returns to the house to uncover a hidden room. His alcoholic colleague speaks at length to him about how sometimes the most trivial of things are the most important and the most important of things are often trivial. His colleague is drinking himself to death, though not talking about the demons which obviously haunt him. The female reporter talks to him about his nervous habits, which Hemmings wonderfully explains away as him being a sensitive artist and full of quirks. . . but doesn't his artistic sensitivities lend themselves to psychic ones?

At first one might come away from the film thinking, why did they make David Hemmings a Jazz musician and then have him act like a private detective in trying to find the murderer? Why not have Hemmings be playing a burnt out former police detective whose hobby is jazz?

Yet Florence is a European center for Jazz Artists, and as a sensitive artist type he would be more 'sensitive' to emotional and psychic vibrations.

It's not important to your enjoyment of the film to share my feeling that Hemmings' character has discovered he is psychic without fulling being aware of it. . . butit might add an added depth to the film the next time you watch it.

Please note the version you should watch is the 126 minute director's cut of the film which has been meticulously restored and is now distributed by Anchor Bay. The DVD has several added features. This restored cut uses all of the available English dubbed feature , but 28 minutes of the film are in Italian with English subtitles and it's a bit awkward if watching the dubbed (rather than the Italian language with English Subtitle version) when it switches from English to Italian and subtitles and then back again within the same scene. The English dubbed scenes that were cut for the American release no longer exist which is why it was necessary to present it this way.

The previously U.S. released versions which run 98 minutes are to be avoided. The film does actually make narrative sense in it's full version, but will not in its truncated version. Part of the film plays on known fears. The violence shown is of a nature we are all somewhat familiar with and so has much more impact. We know what it's like to burn yourself with scalding hot water.... so a murder of a woman involving a bathtub full of scalding hot water is quite horrifying. Hitting yourself on the corner of a table, or a fireplace mantel is a sensation we know, so a scene where a man is slammed into several sharp corners is quite unsettling.

Chris Jarmick Author of The Glass Cocoon with Serena F. Holder....

What would we do without the internet? Ok maybe what would I do without it. With "Unsane" (the heavily edited version of "Tenebre) and "Suspiria" being the only Argento films I was able to see for many years I was always disappointed I couldn't find his other works. Especially this one as, I'd heard it to be his "masterpiece". Luckily now, I was able to see what everyone was talking about.

Deep Red is a visually stunning film as are all of his works. Arguably the best Argento film, shot in glorious widescreen with some incredible screen compositions . Very effective scares throughout featuring great murder scenes typical to the director. Dario Argento's rare visions and a creepy score by "Goblin" make for a truly chilling, moviegoer experience. I guess people condsider it to be Argento's masterpiece because the plot seems to come together with more fluidity than his other works. All and all it is a great work of art and a definite classic.

The only flaw that I saw, and luckily I rented this first, is not with the movie but with the DVD itself. Maybe it was my version but there were parts that switch back and forth from English dubbing to Italian with English subtitles. I hear that's the way Anchor Bay transferred onto the DVD. I read a review that said if you can stand subtitles to watch the whole movie in Italian as the voices dubbed over don't catch the mood of the actors. I will rent it again and do exactly that. Then, most likely, will add it to my collection. No Argento fan will be disappointed with this phenomenal giallo masterpiece.

"Deep Red," if nothing else, serves a reminder that horror films were once considered art and were made by people who actually knew what they were doing. The film is directed by Dario Argento, a celebrated director of Italian horror films. I'm no aficionado on Argento and this film serves as my introduction to his material. What we have here is not only a horror film that will inspire lovers of that genre, but a horror film that can be appreciated by those who enjoys the art of movies as well. Argento knows how to direct and he has a distinct visual flourish that makes this film the sort of pseudo-horror equivalent to the film "2001: A Space Odyssey," certainly in the sense that it's style influenced many later horror films in the way "2001" did with science-fiction. Released in 1975, this film has been largely influential with both its style and technique; and many shots in the film seem like mirror images of later films in the genre.

Before the opening credits finish rolling, there is a brilliant shot of two shadows appearing to be in a violent scuffle before a bloody knife falls to the floor. This scene sets up the visual tone of the rest of the film and instantly grabs your attention.

The film's plot is relatively familiar, with a protagonist that does everything the police should be doing and does it better than if the police were doing it. The protagonist of this story is Marc Daly, an English jazz pianist living in Italy. One night, from the street below, he witnesses the murder of his neighbor Helga Ulman, a clairvoyant. Due to a mysterious painting he know he saw in the woman's apartment that disappears moments later, Marc is drawn to investigate the murder with the help of persistent reporter Gianna (Daria Nicolodi, who plays the role in a way so that we're never really sure about her).
Of course, along the way, Marc risks his life tracking the killer while more bodies pile up. You've all seen a horror film.

The film's script (by Argento and Bernardo Zapponi) in the hands of a lesser director could've been a tedious bore. This script in the hands of most horror-film directors would've been a tedious bore. Argento is smarter than that though. He knows that it's atmosphere and suspense that make a great horror film, not just gratuitous violence and nudity. "Deep red" has plenty of violence, blood, and gore...But it also has style.

One of the most brilliant examples of great horror filmmaking is a scene in which a woman is drowned in a bathtub filled with boiling hot water. This scene is horrifying despite little gore and blood. Argento relies on editing, music, and cinematography to build suspense that leads to a horrifying payoff.

The musical score of the film, composed by Giorgio Gaslini and the band Goblin, is unusual for the genre but fits the material perfectly and punctuates every scene with the exact tone needed. Although, parts of the score are reminiscent of the original "Halloween" film (released three years later).

Creative editing techniques and wonderful cinematography are also what contribute to this film's greatness. Much like Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now," it's a horror-film that has many of the ingredients of most panned horror films but is photographed and edited by people who know what they're doing...And visually, "Deep Red" is fascinating and quite possibly the high point of this film. It's cinematography that is so memorable and so noticeably good that people who don't know anything about cinematography will say "this film has great cinematography." The key ingredient that the average horror film of today is missing is talented filmmakers which Argento, cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, and editor Franco Fraticelli are. The juxtaposition of the inspired directing, memorable cinematography, creative editing, and unique musical score all contribute to the film's greatest appeal. Unlike many films of this genre that age overnight (remember this year's remake of "Friday the 13th" that dropped from #1 at the Box office to not even in the top ten two weeks later), these things give "Deep Red" a timeless quality.

If more horror films were made this way, horror could actually gain some respectability...Unfortunately in the thirty-four years since this film was released, this genre has turned into an outlet for untalented filmmakers to produce their unoriginal, predictable drivel.

Now for the ending...The ending of this film is neither predictable nor entirely surprising. It works however, because it's these last five minutes of "Deep Red" where Argento concludes his film with a summary of why it's so great...The juxtaposition of an inventive death, terrific photography, and the recurring children's song theme that makes an ending that could've been nothing special wonderful.

Grade: A

Italian horror is often an acquired taste, a good way to incliment yourself to the genera is the film "Deep Red". The director, Dario Argento, is a true master of the confused, gore-soaked plotline, and "Deep Red" succeeds in this respect in spades. This is a film, as is most Italian horror, that the jaded American film viewer should see, as it opens up new arenas of terror and a unique presentation of it's subject. Without a doubt, European horror is vastly different than the American counterpart. "Deep Red", at it's core, is a murder-mystery, as is most of Argento's films, and the story unfolds to reveal one macabre incident after another. The DVD presentation is interesting: in their quest to provide the most complete version possible, Anchor Bay has released the film uncut. This means that certain scenes are in Italian and or German with English subtitles. This is indicated on the box, (Except for the German part), but not indicated is the amazing frequency at which they occur. Some scenes begin in Italian and then slide into English....one second you are reading subtitles, the next the actors are speaking in English. This is not a criticism, but it is kind of weird, especially when the actors are in German and the subtitles are both Italian and English. The picture quality is excellent and the soundtrack by horror fave Goblin is spectacular, especially on a superior home theatre. If you are a fan of this kind of stuff, check it out. If you are not a fan, try Argento's "Phenomena", it is, in my opinion, a better introduction into this unique form of film.