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"Let me speak to you about the anatomy of terror." Medieval Italy accommodates the summit of Roger Corman's Poe cycle, and a decade later there's Salò. The plague arrives, there are those inside the castle and those outside, immortality is the presiding delusion. Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) welcomes the craven aristocracy for the masquerade, for entertainment he raids a local village and abducts the pious peasant (Jane Asher) and her beau (David Weston) and father (Nigel Green). A fête of diseased lushness, the more depraved the better, "sacred thoughts" are to be banished. One's faith is tested in such times—the lord of the manor is as unyielding in his belief in Satan as the maiden is in her Christian credence, the jealous disciple (Hazel Court) seeks a demon lover and ends up a gory carcass. "This is the day of your deliverance, remember?" Humiliations for the pure and arrows for supplicants, not even the incendiary revenge of the jester (Skip Martin) on the cruel nobleman (Patrick Magee) is enough to curtail the festivities. The Sixties Party (La Notte, L'Année dernière à Marienbad) ran to its limits, Danse Macabre, Corman's fusion of Bergman and Bava lends it the necessary delirium. (Don't Look Now profits mightily from Nicolas Roeg's apprenticeship as cinematographer.) The poisoned dagger, the flaming gorilla suit. "I give you a sign." "What does it mean?" "Mankind." Hell is a chamber of many colors, purple and mustard and white, the camera tracks from one to the other (cf. Kubrick's metaphysical blinking eye in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Red suits the cloaked stranger with neither name nor master, a wave of his hand is enough to choreograph the Grand Guignol ballet. Sic transit gloria mundi... The implacable freakout in due time bleeds into The Trip.
--- Fernando F. Croce |