Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Loui Blair It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

moonspinner55 Deluxe giallo from writer-director Dario Argento, with a presentation so stylish it threatens to overwhelm the plot. Dedicated husband and drummer for a rock band angrily confronts a mysterious man who's been following him; they scuffle and the stranger ends up stabbed with his own knife. No one is around to help the shaken musician, but there is one witness: a person in costume with a camera. This isn't a blackmailer--they don't want money--but the musician is quickly taunted with photos and notes...and soon, the people closest to him start dropping like flies. Argento shows an uncanny grasp of character here, and his roster of victims and suspects is delicious (there's also a scripture-quoting con-man who acts as a lookout, a terrified postman afraid of delivering the mail and a gay gumshoe hired by the protagonist who hasn't solved one case in his last 87!). Argento is a cinematic madman; his screenplay might not hold up under close scrutiny, but it's hard to nitpick with the small details when the end results are this tantalizing. *** from ****

qmtv The story is garbage. The acting is horrible. The main actor cannot act, it's like they just took some dude from the street and put him in front of the camera. And his character is a dirtbag. Who sleeps in his jeans? Who takes a nap with a fully loaded gun in his hand? The wife, cannot act, not pretty, just a plain face, nothing to look at, just plain nothing. When she got the call that the maid was dead and told the husband, nothing, no shock, no oh my god, just plain nothing. Nothing. What's the story with the bum friends? The best line is when one of the bums asks for a light and switched the cigarettes! The comedy sucked. Some of the killings were OK, nothing great. The maid in the park idea was good, but seriously poorly executed. The rock music was horrible, Truly horrible. Some mentioned that Deep Purple was thinking about doing the music. I am glad they didn't get stuck in this garbage movie. The rest of the music sucked too, especially the drum/bongo crap towards the end. Truly annoying. Then we get to the part of the dead eyeballs capturing the last thing the victim saw. Was this supposed to be sc-fi? What the hell was that? Then the wife comes in with the medallion of the flies. Oh, now it all makes sense. She's crazy, so she concocts this elaborate scheme to torture and kill her husband. Then she tries to take off, and for dramatic effect, crashes her car into a truck and gets decapitated, with poor effect. After the car crash a head is shown rolling in the street, no blood anywhere. Very poor. Give me a break! Characters are show telling boring stories. Some of these characters are shown before the big reveal, a red herring. Editing is crap, real choppy. The scene where the main character is shown confessing to his wife about killing someone, and the wife's cousin casually walks in and he does not stop talking. Does this seem realistic? No! So, what we have here is someone who got a budget with no talent, and hired a bunch of people with no talent to produce a film, for all the no talent film viewers to see and say, "It's art". It's not art, it's crap.Inferior story, acting, cinematography, lighting, sets, editing, music, you name it, it sucks.I've watched enough giallo films and understand that not all the story is supposed to make sense. But at least the good ones present decent cinematography, acting and music. I recommend Don't Torture A Duckling by Fulci, or All the Colors of the Dark, by Sergio Martino This movie should be the basis of a semester in film studies. Scene by scene should be torn apart for what should not be done. To be fair there are some parts, like the park scene that had good ideas, but bad execution.I've read some of the IMDb reviews and most like or love this movie. I hate it. And I hate Argento. This is only the 2nd movie I've seen from him. First was Suspira, a complete garbage of a movie. Color gels for lighting and that's his set design. I can only guess that fans of Argento might be looking at his movies and disregarding the story and the acting. And they praise the cinematography and scenes. Sorry, he fails on all fronts. He does not produce art, or abstract art, it's just garbage. If you watch a film with black screen and no audio, you would have a better time, use your imagination and produce your own abstract art film.I've read most of the critic reviews. So far only Entertainment Maven and Bloodcapsules have given it a low or negative rating. So, I can only conclude that most reviewers here are deaf and blind and ignorant of true art. Most state that the story is lacking and the acting is amateurish, but disregard these important elements of movie making by giving it a positive review. So, I guess you need to make up your own mind. Please, do not be fooled by garbage disguised as art.

MirarchiJ Dario Argento, master of slasher-surrealism, made the interesting Four Flies on Grey Velvet in 1971 … and it combines the low-key elements of his early Giallo period with the more colorful visual experimentation of his later films.Roberto, a drummer in a psychedelic rock band, is being stalked by a man in fedora and sunglasses. When Roberto eventually tracks down and confronts him in an empty confetti-strewn opera house, there is a struggle: his stalker immediately wields a switchblade, but Roberto defends himself and somehow ends up accidentally stabbing the man, causing him to fall into an orchestra pit. SEEMINGLY dead! Meanwhile, some person with a camera, wearing an impish mask, is taking pictures of all this from the opera house balcony.Obviously afraid that he'll be incriminated in the murder, Roberto avoids going to the police. It is not long before someone else begins toying with him, slipping into his home to plant a photo of the killing. This person even sneaks in while he's asleep and kills his cat. Roberto first assumes that he's being blackmailed, but it soon dawns on him that he is now the victim of some sick cat-and-mouse game designed to drive him bonkers. As he sorts through all the suspects (maid, wife's cousin, mailman, etc.) with the assistance of his earthy bohemian friend and a swishy gay private investigator, the culprit does (not surprisingly) turn out to be right under his nose.Like in all of Dario Argento's work, it's the filmmaking style that is the true star, not the actors. Argento rarely pays much attention to his performers, and this film is no exception, but there are a few treasures among the actors to be found here. Michael Brandon is apt (in that he's not very expressive) playing the vapid, macho, and boring Roberto. Mimsy Farmer, who plays his wife, Nina, does eventually come alive at the end of the film (although in an overreaching manner) when she has her big meltdown/confession scene - otherwise, she's pretty bland playing the "dedicated wife." In many ways, you can't blame Farmer since her character is so one-dimensional. A few of the supporting actors, however, stand out. Bud Spenser as Roberto's comical friend, Godfrey, and Jean-Pierre Marielle as Gianni, the overly broad, flaming private investigator, are both very engaging.While Four Flies is not as elegantly garish as Argento's subsequent Suspiria, it's still visually playful enough to give you a hint of the baroque direction Argento would soon take. Charming moments include an opening montage of Roberto jamming with his band (its highlight is a witty POV shot taken from inside a guitar, looking out into a recording studio, as its strings are being strummed) intercut with a pulsating heart over a silent black screen and Roberto being surveyed -- in his car and in the park -- by his stalker. As Roberto drums away, a fly vexes him, which he eventually squashes between his drum cymbals; the build-up to the park murder of Roberto's inquisitive and opportunistic maid stands out with its New Wave jump cuts (think Jean-Luc Godard making a thriller) where late day suddenly becomes night and a populated playground suddenly becomes empty, all within a split second; the climactic scene where the killer's car accidentally collides (in super slow motion) with a truck – we see the killer's stunned face through a crashing sheet of twinkling windshield glass, poetically juxtaposed with Ennio Morricone's haunting lilting music. Four Flies' naturalistic photography is also a charmer, focusing on earthy colors, unlike the much lauded theatrical look of Argento's best known works.Four Flies' script is moderately interesting with odd touches throughout: Roberto's recurring nightmare of a public execution/beheading washed in white sunlight, directly influenced by his friend's grisly party anecdote; a goofy mailman constantly misdelivers Swedish pornography to the wrong addressee; Roberto and Godfrey attend a coffin expo that showcases ornately designed (some - futuristic) caskets; Roberto's cute and cuddly bathtub romp with Nina's cousin, Dalia; an implausible sci-fi device that can record the last image retained on a dead person's retina, possibly revealing who the killer is if a murder is committed. Despite all this nice stuff, the script still has its weaknesses: basically, its flat lead characters and eye-rolling conclusion where Nina reveals herself to be Roberto's stalker. Nina explains her motives in an overly broad monologue that sounds as Freudian as the explanation given at the end of Psycho... and its theory of gender psychosis. She reveals that the reason she is torturing Roberto is because he reminds her of her macho dead father with whom she hates – her father always wanted a son, and would dress her up as a boy when she was little and put her through constant male endurance tests, etc. It's also interesting to add that Nina sports a boyish haircut, where her husband, the manly Roberto, has long locks.For a Dario Argento film, Four Flies' violence is pretty soft (it is PG-rated) except for a few nauseating close-ups of a jumbo needle penetrating a hairy chest's spongy layer and a thick wire being entwined around a man's coarse neck, its leathery skin in rolls. The murder that stands out the most, however, is when Dalia gets sliced on the forehead (an elegant slash like the mark of Harry Potter) right before falling down a flight of stairs (head-first, face-up) her skull plopping musically and cartoonishly against each step as she descends backwards. The coup de grace to this scene is when Argento's camera tracks the killer's perfectly vertical knife, dropping midair, disembodied, like a torpedo, silencing its victim's scream.As I stated before, the style is the most striking thing in a Dario Argento flick -- often, the skeletons of his films just aren't very impressive. Again, it's all in the way he dresses them up!

p-stepien Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon), a rock guitarist married to a beautiful and rich wife, is being followed by a peculiar man in dark glasses. Roberto decides to confront the stranger, but unfortunately for him he ends up killing him in an opera house with a masked individual making photos of the whole debacle. After deciding to hide the matter he starts receiving weird phone calls, letters and pictures of the murder show up in his house during a party. Someone he knows is trying to blackmail him, but unable to seek help from the police he involves Godfred (Bud Spencer), a quirky fellow living life in solitude and poverty on a diet of fish. He in turn has Roberto hire a gay private investigator. All to find out the identity of the mysterious stalker...As triumphant a movie as all his other three animal movies Dario Argento hit a home run with his artsy murder mysteries. And I must press that Argento really has made murder and death into art - I believe no one ever has made such telling and beautifully terrible death scenes as the master. Add to that the relatively good dialogues, acting plus some very odd humour (focused on a select bunch of weirdo characters populating this thriller) and this is movie that is a must see for any horror fans. Two killings are of extreme note - the first murder in the garden and than the final death scene.Naturally as always not all is well with the Argento movie. Some of the acting is off and the plot/script has a lot of holes with much room for improvement. Also character building is almost non-existent as Argento typically for him focuses on the atmosphere (to great effect). The camera is as always stylish plus we have some great score from Enrio Morricone to really punctuate the whole feeling of the movie.