OPERA (1987) *1/2 You certainly get the idea that Dario Argento is trying to live up (or down) to his reputation, but the overall effect is more of a slightly better than average Hollywood B-horror director working in Italian. There are several artistic shots but not that many, the blood and gore is served up regularly but is so overplayed as to be rendered nearly inoffensive, misogynism is nearly ubiquitous but only hints at its outer limits-at this point in history we've seen it all anyway, even the willful and characteristic disregard for rational plot conventions is of a lesser value than might be hoped. I like the musical dialectic of opera and bad speed metal, and the pulsating brains used to Pavlovian effect-which is played well enough to complete the conditioning cycle and then even extinct it before the closing credits. None of the characters are all that great, or even particularly interesting, but an Argento flick is always about Argento anyway: the problem is ultimately that postured and superficial psychosis isn't always all that interesting either. He may have had some grand design on constructing and destructing tabboos, but he seems a bit too fond of impurities to stray too far down the road to homogenization.
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