Susperia, 1977, dir. Dario Argento. Trylon Cinema, Friday, October 14.

I’ve been waiting to see Susperia in theaters for years. Weirdly enough it hasn’t screened here recently, or at all–maybe 25 years ago I wouldn’t have looked for it, but for all I know this is the first time it’s screened in the Twin Cities since I moved here in the early 90s.

Honestly, I was struck by how absolutely stupid this movie is. The set design is gorgeous and the music, by Goblin, is fun. But Susperia is dull (first big problem), and I found the movement of characters through these sets really sluggish and uninteresting, a failure of a director to know how to set up his cameras and block his people so they drift through scenes in a way that fascinates. Argento seems to have wanted this movie to take place at what is regarded as the best dance school in Europe, by extension the world. But the few dancing scenes clearly reveal actors who don’t know how to dance and a director who obviously doesn’t care about that. So why set it there? All of the characters are dull and bad actors (and if your actors aren’t good, maybe get good dancers who can’t act?), Jessica Harper stumbles through this story, literally half-asleep or wacked out with fear like Shelley Duvall in The Shining. The plot is on her shoulders and she appears uncomfortable with that. The evil is far from palpable or immersive–plot spoiler, it’s witches!–and if this is supposed to be a bad-ass coven, why don’t the rest of the student body seem to feel anything? The school has a lot of students, we see them (not dancing, of course) and none of them, with the exception of two who are killed and our very passive hero (Harper) seem to notice or care about the strange goings-on). When I say “stupid”, I don’t mean that I find stories of witches stupid, I mean that none of the scenes in this film are well thought out, and many of them, the ending in particular, are so freaking silly it feels as though they were written quickly in order to move the story along or bring it to a close. The whole thing feels made on a first draft of the script, and a bad first draft at that. What a disappointment.