BROKEN MIRRORS, BROKEN MINDS: THE DARK DREAMS OF DARIO ARGENTO
BROKEN MIRRORS, BROKEN MINDS: The Dark Dreams of DARIO ARGENTO. Maitland McDonagh. University of Minnesota Press; 2010 -- expanded edition. McDonagh takes an interesting look at the Italian maker of horror films with an academic approach. Dario Argento has garnered many fans of his work, although he's never been taken that seriously by U.S. mainstream critics. Some of that is due to what may be seen as over-the-top violence, a few weak screenplays, an adherence to visual effect over logic, and so on. Despite this, some of his films are quite creepy, exhilarating, and yes, artistic in their way. McDonaugh won me over with her fond [?] look at the Times Square movie houses of yesterday (where she first saw Argento's early films), where often there was more drama going on in the audience than in the picture, writing of one theater that it was "a shoebox of a grindhouse, so dirty, claustrophobic and relentlessly seamy that I remember it more vividly than the movie...