TENEBRAE aka SOTTO GLI OCCHI DELL'ASSASSINO SHADOW TENEBRE UNSANE (1982) 101 mins SIGMA CINEMATOGRAPHIA ; ITALY

This review first appeared in Starburst Magazine and does not bear any relation to my own views. Best-selling author Peter Neal comes to Rome to promote his latest thriller, Tenebrae, with the help of his agent Bulmer and two assistants Anne and Gianni. As he arrives, killings occur in the city which appear to copy events in the book; photos of each corpse are then sent to him anonymously with a quote from his own writing. Neal and Gianni investigate the home of television journalist Cristiano Bruni, who has shown a strangely eager interest in perversion; Gianni glimpses Bruni being axed, while Neal is knocked out. Both Bulmer and Inspector Germani advise Neal to leave Rome, but Bulmer is then stabbed at a rendezvous he has secretly arranged with Neal's unstable fiancée Jane, with whom he has been having an affair. Gianni is later garroted when he returns to Bruni's house in search of clues, and Jane is hacked to death after inviting Anne to a meeting at which she promises to explain everything. Policewoman Altieri, whom Anne has summoned, is also felled. Germani and Anne find Neal, totally deranged, huddled beside the bodies; he slashes his throat as they watch. The Inspector subsequently explains that Neal was humiliated by a girl in his youth and had been taking revenge in his novels ever since. The spate of murders started by Bruni was continued by Neal as a way of disposing of his faithless fiancée. But Neal's suicide proves to have been faked: Germani is killed; and as he prepares to deal with Anne, Neal is accidentally transfixed by a steel sculpture. "Cut out the boring bits and you've got a best-seller", advises urbane novelist Franciosa, provoking the immediate and easy response to Tenebrae that without the boring bits you wouldn't have a film. To do reluctant justice to Argento, it must be admitted that visually the film is seldom boring; the sense of tedium comes partly from its catalogue of explicit blood-lettings in which the camera, and consequently the subjectified spectator, hunts down one cowering girl after another, and partly from the daft motivation finally offered - a lurid combination of Dressed to Kill and Tennessee Williams. Not a prolific filmmaker, Argento seems to save up his favourite sequences from other directors until he can string them together to justify his own massively convoluted narratives. As many potential victims as possible are assembled so that they can be messily pruned down, and Tenebrae is thick with ill-explained, short-lived and oddly indistinguishable characters. Among its pretensions (and Argento can be relied upon never to film things the simple way), Tenebrae offers two major scenes of calculated artifice: the attenuated camera crawl up the side of a building in which two girls are about to be killed, and the sequence in which John Saxon, also about to be killed, sits waiting at a shopping precinct, watching the passers-by. Both sequences contrive to mingle Antonioni (The Eclipse, The Passenger) with Hitchcock (Rear Window) in accordance with Argento's declared allegiances, but they add little to his penny-dreadful participants. One is made all the more aware of the director's inability to match visual flair with anything worth watching.

reviewed by Philip Strick

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