The seventh season’s opener celebrated the 100th anniversary of the original Phantom of the Opera that starred do-it-all horror legend Lon Chaney who literally suffered for his art.
Joe Bob and Darcy dove deeply into the silent film classic (the second one ever featured on TLDI after Nosferatu) that had gone through revision after revision and kowtowed to the vengeful tastes of 1925 movie audiences as to the Phantom’s fate.
As JB put it: “F— unconditional love — murder his ass!”
Course, the studio’s sausage grinder approach to the flick ended up working because it became Universal’s top-grossing flick up to that point. Folks just don’t like seeing ugly and they want the ugly to get punished.
During the breaks, makeup artist Shane Morton uglified Spencer Charnas and we also got a chance to check out the 100-plus years of various Phantom interpretations while musing about what ugly really means.
There were also sidebars going into how ginormous the Paris Opera House really was with its 17 floors, the sad fates of many silent film actors who could not make the transition into the talkies, the ease at which plot points can be added and excised in a silent flick and so many other topics that we had nearly an hour’s worth of insights and info on the groundbreaking Phantom of the Opera, which featured …
Opera
Of course, Italian maestro Dario Argento’s take on the Phantom’s story involved a lot more blood, breasts and beasts than the original version — and would we really expect anything less?
Between the ravens pecking out eyeballs, people getting shot in the eyeball and sharp needles threatening the “heroine’s” eyeballs, Dario was taking a page out of Lucio Fulci’s ocular trauma fetish as he put his own spin on the Phantom of the Opera story.
But first we got to learn about the extinct Italian sport Calcio Storico where guys whack a leather ball and each other around a stadium with wooden battle gloves, how Argento got fired from an opera festival from putting on Rigoletto and then got motivated to enact his vengeance by going a giallo-type take on the first flick he saw as a kid (the 1943 remake).
JB also went into how stuff might have been a bit happier in the 1920s and where we might be a little bit on the gloomier and pessimistic side of stuff. “We got lazy and whiny” in the last 100 years, Joe Bob said.
And speaking of history, he also got deep into the history of the Macbeth superstition (I’m not talking, just typing, so I can write it), the benefits of Supertechnicscope and why driving in England is so dang risky for Americans visiting — again another hour’s worth of time with JB and Darcy.
Also – new favorite phrase to describe the Swiss cheese aspect of many horror flicks (it’s not just the Eyetalians): “This movie has more holes than a bisexual orgy in a gopher field.”
It’s true, for sure, but for what a bunch of folks regard as Dario’s last really good flick, he did give us something to watch as evidenced by these totals.
Next up — Slasher Night!
