Autopsy – 1975, Italy, 100m. Director: Armando Crispino.
Opera – 1987, Italy, 107m. Director: Dario Argento.
The Prowler – 1981, US, 89m. Director: Joseph Zito.
AUTOPSY (1975) (AKA: The Victim) A heatwave coincides with a series of suicides in Rome. A woman slashes her wrist with a razor, while a man sets himself on fire inside his car. Another man machine guns himself in the chest while his two children lay dying beside him. Nervous medical student Mimsy Farmer, who has the personality of a tick, investigates the recent string of deaths when her pretty neighbor turns up on the slab with a self-inflicted bullet to the head. Farmer is joined by the victim’s boorish brother (Barry Primus) who believes Farmer’s real estate mogul father had something to do with his sister’s demise. There’s a suggestion that solar flares are responsible for the mysterious deaths, but the screenplay shifts to a boring subplot involving a murder cover-up. Stiff and overlong, and Farmer is massively unappealing as the protagonist. D
OPERA (1987) (AKA: Terror at the Opera) A young opera singer (Cristina Marsillach) is terrorized by a demented fiend in this twisted take on the Phantom of the Opera scenario—as only Dario Argento could tell it. The night Marsillach makes her debut in Verdi’s Macbeth brings joy and terror after a stagehand is impaled in the head by a mad slasher who later kidnaps the singer and forces her to watch him murder her lover by taping needles under her eyelids. In a particularly gruesome detail, the killer’s blade slices into the man’s jaw and protrudes through the inside of his mouth. The next victim gets her throat cut open after accidentally swallowing a piece of evidence that belongs to the maniac. Most of the bloodshed is accompanied by a heavy metal soundtrack, although the best scene is done in slow motion as the bullet from a fired gun travels through a peephole and through the head of Marsillach’s agent (Daria Nicolodi). Other visual trickery includes close-ups of a pulsating brain, signifying the killer’s proximity to Marsillach. As with the majority of films in the Argento canon, character and plot aren’t as important as style, in which case Opera delivers. A good example is the discovery of the killer’s identity through the use of the opera’s live ravens, who earlier attacked the madman after he killed several of the birds. The overblown ending doesn’t do much other than prove to the viewer that the film should have ended ten minutes earlier. B–
THE PROWLER (1981) The return of Avalon Bay’s graduation dance 35 years after an unsolved double murder ignites a new series of slaying by someone in army fatigues. The film wastes little time in getting to the red stuff, which is dumped out by the gallon. A man getting ready for the dance is skewered through the head with a bayonet, after which his girlfriend is impaled with a pitchfork in the shower. The police check on an invalid in a wheelchair who lives next to the girls’ dormitory and discover the missing old man was the father of one of the victims from 1944. The prowler sneaks past the cops and slices open the class bimbo’s throat in the swimming pool—as her body sinks below the water, air bubbles escape from the open wound, giving the scene a chillingly realistic touch. The rest of The Prowler is standard slasher fair done with a level of professionalism many other slashers of the time lacked, including good acting and a few suspenseful set pieces. Tom Savini’s special effects are top-notch and Joseph Zito’s direction polished. B
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