Inferno (1980)

Saw Inferno (1980), a sequel to Suspiria, made to expand the Suspiria-verse to include two other powerful witches.  I had seen and not really enjoyed the original, 1970s version of Suspiria and this one is similar to my recollections of that film: very lurid and colorful, fairly sinister but too otherworldly and strange to be really scary or even that interesting frankly.  I kept getting distracted by the clearly plastic sets, the strange way the killers all wear black and red gloves.  Sometimes it works, but other times it's just too mannered.

So, whereas Suspiria was apparently loosely based on Snow White (or, more specifically, on whatever Jungian archetype is exhibited therein,) this one is based on Hansel and Gretel.  Appropriately, it focuses on a brother and sister - the sister writes a letter to her brother begging him to come visit her in New York because she's convinced her apartment building is haunted.  He arrives to find her dead and the apartment building full of sinister and tragic women, either stone-faced or wilting, and the apartment house with walls of screaming red, trimmed with black.  It's so over the top!

Apparently this film was somewhat inspired by Last Year At Marienbad - a film whose idiot director believed that the setting, not the plot or the character, made the film great.  As such, that film spends many tedious minutes creeping over sumptuous wallpaper brocades and carvings and carpets and doorways and mirrors.  Like that film, Inferno also lavishes much attention on the building involved.  Its a gorgeous setting, but I got so bored watching the characters diaphanously glide down the hallways and the slow zooms on air vents.

I don't want to give the impression this is a terrible film, but it's challenging.  There's a scene near the beginning where the sister drops her keys into a puddle in the basement.  It turns out the puddle is quite deep and, diving into it, she discovers a whole submerged room down there, full of floating corpses, with a doorway leading off god-knows-where.  That's so evocative and fascinating to me.  What's down there?  What's going on?  We never find out.  The movie is full of stuff like that.  The trouble is it's very slow and oddly cold and inhuman.  The actors portray no emotion apart from fear which just gets dull after a while.  Sometimes I feel there's a gap separating me from the characters in the movie and this time the gap was present and quite large.

Fair warning to animal lovers by the way: there's a few scenes where cats are mistreated.  There's some scenes where they're clearly fake cats and all is well, but other scenes with some frankly unhappy cats.  I felt bad for one cat who did not want to be carried by its scruff, than you and for another scene where a woman just has cats pelted at at her from off-screen for a while.  Poor woman, sure, but poor kitties!

Anyway, the film is sort of slow and sort of ominous.  It's an interesting, oppressive film, but more interesting in retrospect.  It's so strange though - just bursting with slow strange imagery.