Director: Dario Argento
Original title: Opera
Year of release: 1987
The curse of Macbeth apparently also stipulates that horror movies which use Macbeth are worthless. "(Terror at the) Opera" is one of the most boring horror giallos ever made. The usual display of Argento themes are present again, this time accompanied by a novelty (the needles on Betty's eyes) just to make it more exciting and gory.
Opera is quite evidently Argento's take on 'Phantom of the Opera', but it's more of a bad rip-off. In the scene where the maniac is identified, Argento even tries to rip-off Hitchcock. The scene is a mix of The Birds and Young And Innocent (the scene where we see where the killer is). And shouldn't the identification come at the end of the movie? No, of course not. Why not prolong the movie? Let the killer follow Betty around in the opera building. As if nobody could notice he was the killer and stop him. After all, how many heavily wounded people could there be in the house? Notice, by the way, that the killer touches his bleeding face and then the opera singer, but that there aren't any traces of blood on her. Did Italy have a ketchup shortage in 1987? It's an amazing gaffe in a movie which tries to have as much gore as possible.
Apparently it wasn't bad enough that the plot was stupid (including scenes explained for morons: after a scene where Betty has a bad dream about something that happened in her childhood, we hear a voice-over explaining this in detail). No, the dialogue accompanying the plot is horrible too. I'm not sure what Argento wanted to do in "Opera", but one thing is clear: at first there were a few good ideas, but then they needed the rest to get to a full feature length. Which means more needles. This however is an interesting movie for anyone who wants to prove that Argento is not a good director and that his decent movies were just lucky shots.
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