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Italian master Dario Argento returns with his first directorial effort in a decade, Dark Glasses, now on Shudder. His previous film, 2012’s Dracula 3D, was, to put it rather diplomatically, not one to remember him by, far from the glories of Suspiria, Deep Red and Inferno. So it’s good to see the now-82-year-old filmmaker return to the game with a to-the-letter giallo, about a high-class escort dodging a crazed killer with a penchant for slashing up sex workers. Is it a return to form for Argento? Or are we better off nursing our anticipation for his next movie, which reportedly will star the incomparable Isabelle Huppert?

The Gist: Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) is wearing a shade of lipstick best described as rrrrrrrrrRRRREDDDdddddddddd. She drives through Rome and notices people on balconies and in parks, looking up at the sky. She pulls over and wanders around looking confused and then stares directly at the sun, illustrating a conspicuous intelligence failure in our protagonist. Anyway, an eclipse is occurring, which is always at least kind of eerie, what with the unusually gloomy atmospherics, which go away and then you resume your day – unless you’re in a Giallo film, where an eclipse is something of ominous portent. Because little does Diana know that it will be one of THE LAST THINGS SHE EVER SEES.

see also Stream and Scream Horror 101: The Very Best Giallo Movies Ever Made A reaction to the American slasher cycle of the 1970s,... by Walter Chaw (@mangiotto) But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here – next are the opening credits, and we need to cheer a line that reads “special make up, prostetici e animatronici,” which tells us we’re about to see non-CGI gore, e.g., the following scene, which establishes that a maniac is on the loose. He jumps from the bushes, saws through a call girl’s neck with a piano wire and leaves her on the sidewalk to gurgle to death. Very gruesome and appalling, these actions. And they’re of even ominouser portent than the eclipse for Diana, because she, too, is in the business of sexual service, although it’s not going well lately: One client smells like dogs because he raises dogs, and she tells him as much, and it pisses him off. Another shares his violent kinks with her and she has to mace him and kick him in the nards and mace him again to get away. Actually, the first macing was probably enough, but the guy totally deserved the nard-kicking and second macing, and it’s something we find unsettling but nonetheless satisfying.

Now, what could possibly happen next to a woman staring in the face of so much portent of an ominous nature? You know the answer to that. The mad killer draws a bead on her and she speeds off in her car with his van on her tail and he rams her and she smashes into a family with horrific results in the front seat and a poor, newly orphaned boy named Chin (Andrea Zhang) unharmed in the back. The crash renders Diana blind. She subsequently befriends Rita (Asia Argento), the woman from social services who helps her learn to navigate the environment, and gets a guide dog that does double-duty as a guard dog trained to maul yer glutes into hamburger. It’s a lonely existence, and, what with one thing and another, Diana and Chin end up as mutual caretakers, which is a bad deal for him, since the mad slayer is still after her.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Dark Glasses is Wait Until Dark crossed with Hitchcock’s Frenzy crossed with, in one amusing sequence, Snakes on a Plane.

Performance Worth Watching: Um. The snake handlers? Sure, the snake handlers.

Memorable Dialogue: Visiting one of her regular clients, Diana still wears sunglasses because her eyes hurt from staring directly at an eclipse:

“Don’t worry, I’ll find your big ole pendulum just the same.”

Sex and Skin: Several instances of pointless female toplessness and/or lingerie modeling.

Our Take: Turns out the eclipse has nothing to do with the rest of this gory nonsense. Color me disappointed. Argento sets the ~vibe~ then lets it dissipate as he works through the plot – and oy, the plot, in which we have little vested interest, with its empty characters, crashingly obvious who’s-the-killer mystery and a tedious, dimly lit, atrociously edited third act in which Diana and Chin flee through the woods at night, where they stumble into a nest of water snakes. Water snakes! Bitey water snakes! Am I making it sound more hilarious and/or fun than it is? Yes. It’s not hard. I do it pretty much accidentally.

Yet there’s still that clearly identifiable Something that Argento brings to the table – the lurid tastelessness, the stalker-eye cinematography, the lingering closeups on life exiting bodies via bubbling wounds and deep-red spurts, a reminder of the quality craftspersonship from the special make up, prostetici e animatronici department. The squidgy fetishism the director brings to his best work is present, and continues to be his calling card.

But here Argento’s tactile sensibilities are muffled by an overall lack of intent and focus from both visual and storytelling perspectives. The seams of its budgetary restraints are frequently visible. At times, the film is barely comprehensible or insidiously silly. The performances are wooden, blasé to the point of unintentional comedy. The film doesn’t churn up much in the way of scares or dread fascination – it’s just a collection of murdery bits that Argento wants us to stare at until we feel uncomfortable, strung together in a perfunctory, boring plot as the harpsichords-harpsichords-everywhere-harpsichords score chimes away. One might charitably consider this a reiteration and reestablishment of Argento’s style, but more realistically, it feels like a master of the form ripping off his older, better films.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Dark Glasses has some enjoyably gooey displays of viscera and a campy moment or two, but it’s ultimately too marginal and dashed-off to recommend.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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