At various points in his illustrious career, celebrated Italian horror maestro Dario Argento took his talents to the small screen, beaming certified Argento productions into the homes of millions of viewers complete with his distinct brand of macabre menace. In 1973, he produced an anthology miniseries called Door Into Darkness which featured four episodes of dark mystery and terror hosted by Argento himself in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Disc 1:
Disc 1 of this set begins with the first episode of Door Into Darkness titled “Il Vicino Di Casa” (“The Neighbor”) and was directed by Luigi Cozzi (Contamination, Starcrash), a protégé that Argento would collaborate with multiple times. “The Neighbor” involves a married couple with a small baby who moved into an apartment in the middle of the night. They begin to notice a growing water stain on their ceiling and start to suspect their upstairs neighbor is up to no good. While Cozzi isn’t as visually stylish a director as Argento, he knows how to inject fun and suspense into the proceedings, and this thriller definitely gives off a strong Hitchcock vibe at times, a common thread among Argento projects.
The second episode, also on disc 1, is another Hitchcockian giallo called “Il Tram” and is directed by Argento himself. It is about a woman who is murdered on a crowded train with no witnesses actually claiming to have seen it happen. It is then left to Inspector Giordani (Enzo Cerusico) to piece together what really happened on that fated day. While not as stylish as many of Argento’s best films, most likely due to its limited TV budget, Argento still applies subtle craft here to create a fascinating procedural mystery, and it’s quite thrilling to watch as Giordani slowly pieces together what actually went down.
The video and audio quality here is, as one would expect of a TV series from the early ’70s, not amazing. “The Neighbor” is for the first time transferred from the original 16mm elements and looks pretty beat up and a little washed out while “Il Tram” only exists now as a video master and has that fuzzy, damaged quality of many old video masters. The audio is provided in mono and sounds a bit muffled but is easily understandable. For extras on this disc, we have first a very nice, informative commentary from Mondo Digital’s Nathaniel Thompson and film book author Troy Howarth. Also included is the two parts of the Luigi Cozzi-directed documentary Dario Argento: My Cinema surveying Argento’s career up to Phantom of the Opera and is a very cool inclusion.
Disc 2:
Disc 2 kicks off with “La Bombola” (“The Doll”), the most atypical episode of the mini-series. This one, directed by Mario Foglietti (who came up with the original story on which Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet was based) with assistance from Luigi Cozzi (who from all accounts I’ve read seems to have directed the most interesting and dynamic parts of this episode, particularly the opening and climax), begins by following an escaped mental patient before jumping to follow an awkward couple on a date while the police search for the escaped crazy. Foglietti’s direction is most pretty flat and un-engaging in the only non-giallo in this series. Still, while this is considered by most to be the weakest episode of the four, I still found parts of it pretty interesting if a bit predictable.
The final episode “Testimone Oculare” (“Eyewitness”) has a bit rockier of a behind-the-scenes history. Originally assigned to Roberto Pariante (who had worked with Argento as Assistant Director on several pictures), Argento was disappointed with the dailies he was seeing and fired Pariante after three days and took over filming himself. He also recruited Cozzi to come on board and reshoot everything Pariante had already shot. So while Pariante is credited as director, by all accounts, he didn’t actually direct anything we see in the final product. Anyway, after the offbeat “La Bambola”, we are back in more comfortable giallo territory, complete with black gloved killer. This one involves a woman driving home one night who witnesses the dead body of a woman fall into the road, but when she returns with the police, no trace of a murder is left. As you can imagine, being witness to a murder paints a big ol’ target on her back. While not quite as tight as “Il Tram”, this one is still quite stylish despite its TV origins and has a nicely suspenseful story as well.
Like the first disc, the audio and especially video quality is pretty dodgy. But again, considering that we are dealing with a 50 year old TV series, it really doesn’t look bad. Plus all four episodes are a significant improvement in quality from the old Mya DVD of this mini-series (which I can finally get rid of… Hooray!). For extras on disc 2, we have another informative audio commentary with Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth with info on the aforementioned trouble production. The disc also includes another Cozzi-directed documentary, Dario Argento: Master of Horror. There is some overlap in content between this and My Cinema but this one is still worth watching for the more in-depth behind-the-scenes stuff on Phenomena (which was the film Argento was working on when Cozzi was making this doc). It was cool to see how a lot of the gooky effects came to be. We also get a 20-minute interview with Argento and a 30-minute one with Cozzi to top things off.
Disc 3:
In 1987, Argento returned to television, this time producing a series of what I call mini-gialli entitled Turno di notte (Night Shift). Each 15-minute episode focused on one of three taxi drivers embroiled in some sort of mystery, usually murder, sprinkling clues along the way so that the audience could also try guessing who the culprit is. Meanwhile a mysterious glowing cab keeps showing up, leaving the drivers perplexed until all is revealed in the final episode. The first six stories were directed by Lamberto Bava and feel on the whole more restrained and mystery-focused while the rest of the episodes, filmed by Luigi Cozzi after Bava left to go prep a feature, have a more sensationalist feel to them with more overt violence. And then of course the last episode goes completely off the rails when we find out what the deal with the ghost cab was (and I can assure you no one is going to be predicting this one). This is actually a fun little series that offers some quick whodunnits for the TV-going public while we revel in the sheer ’80s-ness of it all. Plus it’s pretty neat to hear music from Argento’s films crop up here and there too (as well as some copyright-infinge-a-licious stuff too).
Seeing the video quality of these Night Shift episodes definitely helps appreciate the restoration work done on the Door into Darkness series. These were all pulled from what look like old tape masters with all the fuzziness and scan lines that entails. They are certainly watchable and much appreciated for such a rare artifact, but don’t come in expecting pristine transfers. The extras includes a series of interviews with various people involved in the Night Shift series including Argento, Cozzi and Bava as well as screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti and actress Antonella Vitale. Lots of good info on how the series came about and what it was like on set.
Disc 4:
The primary feature on disc 4 is called Argento’s Nightmares and was another TV segment that Argento made in the ’80s. This one is a series of 3-minute horror shorts that Argento directed himself that were included as part of his segments on the variety show Giallo, created by Enzo Tortora, the show that Night Shift also aired on. Nightmares leaned pretty heavily into gory sequences which were surprisingly extreme for television at the time (I’m guessing Italy had far more lax standards than the US for sure). None of them are what I’d call essential viewing but they are a fun inclusion for die hard Argento fans. And speaking of Argento completists, the primary extra on this disc is basically a 90-minute compilation program of all of Argento’s hosting and interview segments from the Giallo TV series. It includes several behind-the-scenes segments showing the making of Nightmares as well as his films plus interviews with his daughter Fiore, Anthony Perkins and David Gilmour & Nick Mason of Pink Floyd for some reason.
When Severin calls this set Argento’s Deep Cuts, they aren’t kidding. In addition to the great Door Into Darkness mini-series that Argento produced, Severin has absolutely stuffed this set with so much obscure Argento goodness that true fans with absolutely go nuts over everything included here. Highly recommended!