Um Vulto na Escuridão

I'm a brand new Dario Argento fan, having only seen 4 of his films (Phenomena, Tenebrae, Suspiria, and this). But I'm definitely planning to see more (my copy of Stendhal Syndrome is preordered and should be here next week). I bought this simply because it was Argento, and I was actually surprised. I was told that this was his worst film, and some even called it his swan song. I rather liked it, myself. If it is made by Dario Argento, it will be good. Dario took a few liberties, making this more of his own instead of yet another adaptation of the novel. I have to applaud him for that, even though some of it hardly makes sense. And there is the fact that electric light was not around at the time. But if you spend your life analyzing movies and hating them for the smallest detail, what's the point of watching movies? I watch to be entertained. The visuals aren't nearly as great as Suspiria, and the special effects are hardly special (you can smell a CGI shot from a mile away). Not to mention some performances. But I still liked it, because it had that Argento touch that all of is films have. Besides, Argento's worst films are still better than most of the 'horror' America has, today. I'd probably give it 3 out of 4 stars if I had to grade it. Check it out.

It is not the best movie ever made but it is watchable, mainly due to Morricone's Music and the opera selections. Asia Argento plays the main heroine, young talented opera singer Christine. I don't think she was bad and her face is unbelievably beautiful - she reminds Olivia Hussey of "Romeo and Juliet" (1968) and Uma Thurman if Uma ever decides to dye her hair dark. Production values, costumes, special effects, decorations, and the singing voices are very good. I noticed that I laughed a lot during the film - perhaps Argento made a dark comedy of the familiar story?

I did not like Julien Sands as a non-masked Phantom. He looks a lot like the creatures that raised him.

The film has an orgy scene that is so funny it could've came directly from "Caligula"

Overall - I had a lot of fun, and and can call it one of my guilty pleasures.

'Suspiria' was scary. 'Tenebrae' was good. 'Trauma' was silly but all of Argentos movies were good. This film still proves that point. The actual plot for the movie is a lot like the book. Julian Sands is great as the Phantom and the other characters are creative. There are people who get killed which really deserve it. A paedophile. A thief. This movie is a lot better than your average slasher movie. 'Scream' was rubbish! A must see for Argento fans. 8 out of 10.

'The Phantom of the Opera' is one of those books that is impossible to film. part of this is to do with the grandeur of the set-pieces - in one scene, a massive chandelier is dropped on an opera audience; the book's setting, the Paris Opera House, is full of completely realised floors and basements, with a near-magical world of tarns and rocks as its substructure. That Dario Argento, working on a relatively low Euro-budget, cannot approach the novel's visual audacity, is not his fault, as his attempt is always inventive and entertaining.

A more difficult problem lies in the story's magic, in Erik's musical genius, and his bestowing on Christianne a voice of unearthly beauty - this can be easily imagined when reading, but is impossible to realise on screen - one good opera voice is as good as another, not helped here by having to sing what sound like hyper-ventilating scales; while the Phantom's organ-musings are more reminiscent of Sesame Street's The Count than tragic Baroque strains.

The most serious gap between book and film could have been averted by Argento. The book is called the 'Phantom' of the Opera, and although the anti-hero is revealed to be all too human, the first half compellingly records the subversive effects of this ghost, his inexplicable immateriality and omniscience. As the book goes on, the spirit becomes a body, and what was horrible becomes understandable, even sympathetic. Julian Sands is a body from the off, even given a bizarre back-story involving rats, and is thus robbed of his power, just as the narrative is denied its power to chill. There is no transformation, no sense of the body becoming a body, or conversely, no sense of the magic inherent in the real.

I say this could have been averted by Argento. The fact that it wasn't is surely a deliberate directorial choice. Because this is a very strange version of Leroux's tale, rescuing it from the mawkishness it has drowned in since a certain musical. Although constantly alluding to his previous work, especially 'Suspiria' (the ballet girls, the chases, the gynaecological interiors), the film is rarely scary, as if Argento is deliberately working against horror. Just as the film is at its darkest and most gory, Argento deflates the horror with his recourse to pantomime, Grand Guignol, farce, grotesquerie; alternating, as in a Shakespeare play, the high-flown love story with earthier nonsense. The rats bare more than a close resemblance to Roland, and yet, with gleeful viciousness, feed on the rat-trapped hand of a yokel ratcatcher.

Argento is attuned to the political ironies of Leroux's text. The film never leaves the world of the Opera, and still offers a rich, comic microcosm of contemporary French society, including Degas repeatedly sketching the little girls, and Verlaine and RImbaud hilariously brawling at a sauna-orgy. More seriously, the chasing of a gluttonous servant-girl by the Phantom is mirrored by the much more disturbing chase of a young ballerina by a paedophile bourgeois.

The Opera was built as the supreme edifice of bourgeois France, a monumental erection to vulgar taste, which the affronted Italian director mockingly exposes; it was a demonstration of prosperity, pretension, but above all positivism, the progress of science, the idea that the world could be empirically known. Like all great Gothic novels, this modern hubris is in conflict with lingering residues of the past, a material building haunted by phantoms, its very materiality (the chandelier scene) vulnerable, the modern architecture on a prehistoric substructure, like a palimpsest, home to a man raised and pleasured by rats, an affront to contemporary Darwinism.

This breadth was taken further by Leroux into the realm of the metaphysical, avoided by the strictly somatic Argento, although the opening scenes brilliantly play with the idea of absence and presence that form the thematic basis of the book. This is by no means vintage Argento, but his use of interiors and light and shade remain quite inspiring, and there is a hilarious scene involving the ratcatcher and the fate of his dwarf assistant.

Yet again, a Dario Argento film that is absolutely horrible the first time, but somehow fantastic the second time you watch it. This phantom is pretty much different from the 1989 effort,starring Robert Englund, that also aimed for gory shocks and mayhem....and failed miserably. Argento's version is much better, never taking itself too seriously and telling a romantic tale that you actually care about. Julian Sands is good as the Phantom, when he learns that his lover Christine loves someone else, he listens to them kiss and he starts to sob, his acting is so good that it almost breaks your heart. Asia Argento is also a nice actress, I didn't care for her much in Trauma (and I've yet to see The Stendhal Syndrome) but her acting here has improved, she is a talented and beautiful actress. Now back to the movie itself, it's the best adaptation I've seen of the story yet, it is violent, but not too much. There's also a great sense of humour. "You will not play in Romeo and Juliet. If you defy me, I will hurt you. Do you understand me you fat cow?"

"How dare you-a speak-a to-a me-a like-a that!"(Italian accent)

The movie is really a lot of fun and I think I have a crush on Kitty Keri, but it's too bad she has her tongue ripped out.