Cheap Opera (DVD) (Cristina Marsillach, Ian Charleson) (Dario Argento) Price

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Customer Reviews of Opera

Don't look through the peephole!
This is truly a gorgeous masterpiece by my favorite director, Dario Argento. If you haven't seen this movie, I can guarantee you'll love it for the brilliant camerawork alone. The other reason to see it is to experience the tensely paced, smoothly elegant action firsthand - it is masterfully timed and even the first few minutes will leave you feeling as if you've been swept up into a whirlwind. The overwhelming flurry of activity is almost percussive in itself - if you have any sense of musical timing you'll know exactly what I mean.

The main reason to buy this limited edition disc is to own the soundtrack - it's one of my favorites. While many people have criticized the jarring heavy metal music used in certain scenes, I think it strikes a perfect audio parallel to the brutality it accompanies, considering that the film is otherwise filled with lush, haunting opera music. After all, how can one know beauty without also knowing of the beastly underbelly?

I highly recommend this DVD to anyone who can appreciate unique, stylish horror that doesn't need to resort to self-deprecating humor to be edgy.

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Full of Sound and Fury
Argento is often praised for his lavish cinematography and the inventive staging of graphic murders, obviously his main interest. While I certainly agree with the former I don't agree with the latter, actually many of his cinematic murders are quite ugly and clumsy, but that's not the case with Opera. The title suits the style of the movie well, it's pompous and showy and the "Peep-hole Murder" could be the most well-crafted murder scene this side of Psycho, certainly Argento's finest moment since Suspiria (1977). The story is as usual quite absurd, but we've come to expect that from an Argento-flick. Reasonable continuity and minimum sense are apparently too much to ask from him or else he just doesn't care, which would be rather strange, since his genre is the Giallo - detective-stories are usually based on precision. The allegorical voyeurism is handled quite well, but the main attraction is of course the visuals and Argento is more mannered than ever, displaying his various fetishes and phoebias with a lot of devotion and style. This is perhaps his most visually striking work since Suspiria.
The ending is disastrous.
The DVD looks great.

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Marvelously warped
After watching Dario Argento's 1987 film "Opera," I have moved into the final phases of seeing his entire body of work. It was easy to claim ignorance of many of this Italian director's films until a few years ago because it was difficult to find them anywhere, let alone in an uncut form. Fortunately, DVD arrived on the scene and eager film fans with dollars to spend inspired numerous companies to start churning out any movie they could get their hands on. It wasn't too long before practically every Argento film arrived on store shelves, many of them in uncut, unrated formats. Unfortunately, most viewers have likely never heard of Dario Argento. These days, more people know about the director's beautiful daughter Asia than the horror maestro himself. What a shame. Argento's films, at least the ones I have seen, are masterpieces of style injected with truly cringe inducing violence. For a few years in the 1980s and 1990s, Argento drifted away from his tried and true giallo formula, only recently returning to some semblance of form with "The Stendhal Syndrome" and "Sleepless." "Opera" is one of the films bridging the gap between films like "Phenomena" and his later giallo efforts.

Betty (Cristina Marsillach) is an understudy who must step onto the stage after an accident leaves the opera's star in the hospital. The theater is staging a version of Verdi's "MacBeth," an opera often considered by artistic types to carry a curse for those who work on it. Despite these concerns, Betty knocks 'em dead on her first night in the lead role. Theatergoers laud her performance, as does the director Marco (Ian Charleson), since she overcame several obstacles. A lighting fixture crashed to the floor and the live ravens used as stage props acted up, but Betty kept on hitting the high notes. Mira (Dario Nicolodi), Betty's pushy agent, raves about her and begins mentally tabulating future opportunities. Marsillach's character shrugs all the compliments off with a sort of aw shucks sensibility. Besides, she soon has a lot more to worry about than her singing career. You see, yet another one of Argento's black-gloved lunatics is slicing and dicing his way through the theater troupe. For some reason, the killer takes a liking to Betty. He follows her home, ties her to a pillar in her house, sticks pieces of tape with needles on it under her eyes to force her to pay attention, and makes her watch him dispatch her boyfriend.

This same situation plays itself out over and over again-the killer sneaks up on Betty, forces her to keep her eyes open with the tape and needle prop, and dispatches a friend or colleague. The gore in these incidents reaches heights of over the top insanity, even for Argento. You get an incredible knifing from an intriguing point of view, a scene with a pair of scissors that will leave you gasping for breath, and an incident involving Mira's character that is probably the best murder scene ever invented by Argento. A bullet through the keyhole, through the eye, through the head, and into a telephone had me standing up and cheering. And like all of Argento's films, the violence onscreen is shot in extreme close up. Moreover, it goes on and on for what feels like hours. He's one of the few directors who can actually make me avert my eyes because the carnage becomes too much to watch. While there may not be much in the way of plot, acting, or a decent script in the film, the gore will keep you coming back for more. This is brutal stuff.

Of course, the gore isn't the only attraction here. Once again, the usual Argento style is in full display. The point of view shots come fast and furious, with the unfolding proceedings seen, at various times, through the eyes of the ravens flying about the opera house or through eyes clouded by eye drops. Camera tricks look great, too. At the start of the film, we see the opera house reflected in the eyes of one of the ravens. We sometimes see an image of the killer's throbbing brain, accompanied by a heartbeat, seconds before he preys on his latest victim. The real trick in "Opera," as it is in all of Argento's films, is to try and figure out who the madman is. Is it Marco? Mira? The odd Inspector Alan Santini (Urbano Barberini), a cop assigned to the case that shows up to investigate each of the crimes? You will suspect each of these people, along with a few others, at various times during the film. No matter. The end of the movie sets it all straight. Expect the usual multileveled twists and turns before the truth outs in the end. The conclusion has taken some flack from fans that think it has a tacked on feel. I agree, although that does not mean it fails to work in the context of the film as a whole.

More annoying is another issue others pointed out, namely the heavy metal music that swells as the violence unfolds. Argento should have stuck to classical music and the creepy Claudio Simonetti music score instead. As for the "Opera" DVD, it gives us the obligatory Dario Argento biography, a music video, a widescreen transfer, and a fascinating discussion about the film called "Conducting Dario Argento's Opera." In this thirty-minute documentary, Argento discusses locations, the violence, the cast, and the difficulties in making the film. He explains in minute detail how they rigged up a camera to create the bird's eye point of view shot in the theater. The only drawback to the documentary is Daria Nicolodi whining about her failed relationship with Dario and the difficulties of staging that keyhole effect. Argento fans must pick up "Opera" immediately. It's one of his better films.