cult film freak: LARA WENDEL GETTING STALKED IN DARIO ARGENO'S 'TENEBRAE'

Lara Wendel in TENEBRAE Year: 1982 Rating: ****

Between his most famous, groundbreaking horror flick SUSPERIA from the exploitation 1970's to the less intense genre vehicles of the latter 1980's like PHENOMENA, Italian auteur Dario Argento made his best and by far most conventional slasher in TENEBRAE...

Using the familiar plot of a horror writer who, in this case, has a desperately faithful fan killing vulnerable women, leaving behind pages of the titular (his latest) novel...

Mirella D'Angelo in TENEBRAE

Starring the always intense American import Anthony Franciosa, looking a hybrid of James Franciscus and Rod Serling, backed by literary agent John Saxon and Daria Nicolodi, the most faithful of several other lovely dames, most becoming body-count victims of a faceless ax-wielding menace...

Stalking by means of Argento's usual first-person perspective that foreshadowed John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN steady-cam, the deaths are violent, cunning and creative...

Mirella D'Angelo in TENEBRAE

Each ingenue (and a few males) getting picked off, one after the other... without much of a buildup to their characters: they just happen to be around the central writer minutes before their demise...

The most creative being gorgeous feminist critic Mirella D'Angelo and lesbian lover Mirella Banti, the camera spanning their apartment building like if Orson Welles's famous CITIZEN KANE nightclub-rooftop sequence was thrust into modern time terror... and the most intense death features giallo child starlet turned gorgeous teen Lara Wendel...

Lara Wendel in TENEBRAE

Nightmarishly isolated and (almost) alone, stalked and chased through dark nighttime exteriors into randomly creepy interiors is like its very own FRIDAY THE 13TH style vignette with a beginning, middle and end...

In fact, most of what's not an underline mystery/neo-noir investigatory thriller, TENEBRAE feels like pioneering Argento's deliberate attempt to not only mirror the popular American slasher trend, but, by adding the usual plush giallo colors (without being overly artistic), signature Goblin synth soundtrack and only faltering with some bad English dubbing (particularly with the starlets), he excels at while overall peaking at his very own game.