MovieChat Forums > Tenebre (1984) Discussion > I must be in the minority.

I must be in the minority.


Maybe I'm a thick-headed loser,but this movie bit the big one. The acting is quite bad & there are awfully long-winded scenes (like the crane shot outside the house). I do appreciate some of Argento's visual imagery,but that doesn't carry a movie by itself. Considering that "Suspiria" was a major letdown for me,I should have known better. I'm not saying Argento is any worse than 70s & 80s American horror directors. But he's just as bad. I know I'm trashing a "genius", but it's how I feel.

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I don't think you're in the minority, there are plenty of people who don't care for Argento or his films.

Personally I like Suspiria and Inferno, and that's about it. Opera was adequate but not brilliant. Deep Red and Tenebre are just inept. I wanted to like Tenebre, because it really did build up the tension very well...but it's clear he hadn't really edited the script enough, because it not only didn't make sense, it failed in stupid plot device after stupid plot device and ended as idiotically as possible, much like Deep Red. Although at least Tenebre wasn't as blatantly offensive as many of the themes in Deep Red, even if it was moronic.

To be fair, I don't think Mario Bava is all that either. Good director, not a good writer and doesn't choose his projects that wisely. I've seen exactly one of his films that I even came close to 'like' on.

A lot of these directors get overrated by people who want to seem like they're different, or that they know about something obscure or out of the ordinary they can hold over others, as if that makes them better people. It's great when one can genuinely appreciate something, but that's not all that often the case. People get worked up and jump on a bandwagon, and from that moment they cease to be capable of looking at something critically or logically.

In any case, there are good and bad directors in every genre and on every continent. Argento may be a good director, but his stories need serious work. So many of them make me think of a painter who works for months on a masterpiece and then, just when he's about to apply the finishing stroke, sneezes and unexpectedly then sprays the canvas with vomit, and then claims that was what he intended to do from the very beginning.

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