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WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Every film that has been both excellent and unique enough to make it onto the List of the 366 weirdest films of all time has been guided.

Acidemic - Film: July 2. The critics say they're indebted to Hitchcock for their tropes, obsessions and subjects, but what I really see in Italian horror director Dario Argento and Italian- American suspense director Brian De Palma is a bizarre split- subject psychic twin connection, a shared reptile dysfunction that springs from Catholicism, ancient Rome, and scopophilia- driven sexual obsession mingled into a love story linking across the oceans and continents from Rome to the USA; a round trippy immigrant passage between the mammalian higher brain's compassion and the reptilian cortex of unsocialized pre- empathic killer. De Palma has made a few films exploring this sort of split- subject psychic twin connection (SISTERS, THE FURY, RAISING CAIN) while Argento oomphs his dark fairy tale sensationalism with it. Argento even wanted Jessica Harper for SUSPIRIA after seeing her in De Palma's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE. He said so. And I didn't even know this when I started this post, but they were born the same month (September) of the same world war- ridden year (1.

They are both Virgo, sign of the virgin, sign of obsession, poring over film strips and sound boards with the repressed energy of a thousand unreached orgasms! Both have been accused of objectification and misogyny due to their detailed gruesome violence against the female body.

I used to agree with that diagnosis, but now I blame their reptile sadistic killer instincts on intense Italian mother- love and Catholic guilt (Hitchcock, too, was Catholic). The Devouring Mom's giant hydra apron strings cling to their minds no matter how much their onscreen avatars hack at them, each new woman's body a tendril- tentacle. I've come to feel my own feminist ire is founded in that same struggle, coupled to the unbearable level of anxious dread and soggy liberal arts guilt that being a man is all about - -the compulsory mammalian instinct to protect the women vs. When a camera doesn't look away from the horror wrought by our helpless positions as observers on the opposite side of the screen, caught like a masochistic spider in a sadistic web, then real horror can begin. Feminists like myself blame the camera, the director, for our intense discomfort. Better we should have our eyes gouged out than see such traumatic butchery! Rather than examine this response, we lash out, labeling the directors misogynist in a vain attempt to scrub the horror from our eyes.

Clara Calamai, Jacopo Mariani - DEEP RED. But Argento and De Palma will not let us look away.

Even if we gouged our eyes out they'd find a way to reach us with these images. Argento and De Palma also use similar post- modern effects, deconstructing their own misogyny and their audience's demands for blood; each goes deep into the human eye, ever searching for what lies past the inscrutable inky black roundness of the pupil. Cameras, mirrors, photographs, film sets, stage sets, plays, taxidermy, and elements of performance- within- performance, masks behind masks, abound. I generally don't like dream sequences, they're like vents in which to dump cheap manipulations and sudden shocks without the burden of context, but De Palma melds and mirrors the dreams and reality together so completely that this harsh judgment doesn't apply; Argento does away with waking life altogether. Occasionally an Argento character wakes up in some exterior, drops by an outside a parapsychology conference for some exposition (as if a glass of water, or a quick trip to the bathroom), then it's back down into bed, the pillows, the mattress below it, the floor below that, the floor, the floor below.. Freudian nightmare murk. Interesting too is that Argento's work has by critical consensus really sucked since 2.

SLEEPLESS, while at the same time De Palma's been pulling himself out of a sucky period (with 2. FEMME FATALE). It's as if these aging auteurs are sharing a pair of traveling genius pants. De Palma's been returning to his old haunts, where cheap raincoats, razors, masks, split screens, double cross media- blackmail- stalk- and- snap PEEPING TOM post- modern media theory coupled to a PSYCHO- style cross examination, circular staircase POVs, and a psychiatrist's explanatory monologue wrapping the catalog of kinks back up in its brown wrapper before a final gotcha which often ends up being a dream within a dream, or was it (as in his recent PASSION)? Without those traveling pants, Argento is floundering; he's become just another late night Cinemax director paying more attention to disturbing gore, gaudy sex and no art- as- violence fairy tale tricks for which we love him.

Maybe it's because De Palma is making smaller movies that suit his fancies, while Argento seems laboring under the pressure of his name (and his refusal for example in MOTHER OF TEARS to go with his ex- wife's fairy tale script which might have rocked, and instead some nobody American guy's, one can only imagine it was because his had less art and more gore which is all he cares about these days, don't get me started). Either way, and as an aside, this does not betray my grand theory that they are twins linked by some strange telepathy, like Jennifer Connelly with her flies in PHENOMENA (1. Amy Irving with Andrew Stevens in THE FURY (1.

None of this is to accuse either Argento or De Palma of being a mama's boy, a misogynist, a copycat, or a potential murderer. For better or worse (mostly better), the critical backlash against their movies has helped usher in the PC- era. With feminist ire building in nearly everyone, the blatantly phallic drill, endless softcore strutting and groping in De Palma's BODY DOUBLE (1. In Argento's similar films, sexual fetishizing is never an issue, except as far as elaborating on the madness of the mother or father fixation which then (usually) triggers a schizophrenic break with reality.

Now that I'm older though, I see the misogynistic violence of De Palma and Argento through this same schizophrenic prism, and realize only by expressing these wormy fantasies can we temporarily- cathartically expel them, or at least depressurize them so they don't explode and cause real- life damage. How many hydra apron strings were severed or unstuck in American families thanks to PSYCHO (1.

It made such a splash on its initial release that the ripples haven't ceased in fifty years. It changed the way America went to the movies and gave armchair psychologists a gold standard for the dangers of maternal suffocation. Who knows how many closeted or overprotected men would still be living at home and doing their mothers' toenails on a Saturday night if not for PSYCHO as a warning? You better move out before you end up like Norman Bates." Who knows where De Palma or Argento would be without it? PSYCHO snapped the 6.

De Palma and Argento were waiting with their celluloid nets. Color- coded patterns from top (alternating De Palma/Argento): FURY, SUSPIRIA, RAISING CAIN, INFERNO,UNTOUCHABLES, SUSPIRIA, PASSION, DEEP RED, FURY, 4 FLIESMUSIC. Naturally these psychic twins are not identical: Argento's psychoanalysis is perhaps deeper while De Palma is more into politics (Italy wasn't as mired in Vietnam). Argento's connection to music is more wryly contrapuntal than De Palma's, making innovative use of children's songs, whispering, percussion and even electric bass- driven funk from Goblin and Ennio Morricone. In DEEP RED, particularly a real break with convention is begun: swooning pop balladry as heads get slow motion sliced by shattered windshields- -the glass a pop art snowstorm- -and rattling nerve- grating, plastic cup echo- drenched percussion that stops when David Hemmings steps on a bottle, then resuming just as abruptly when a shade falls. This approach is the total opposite of the usual emotional- telegraphing of Hollywood, of which De Palma is part, preferring the usual overwrought orchestras.