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The folks at Anchor Bay Video seem hell bent on putting bootleggers out of business. These guys are shameless: They will release ANYTHING. I mean, they are planning a boxed set of the Ilsa movies, fer chrissake. At first, this resulted in immaculate editions of a lot of crap. Does the world REALLY need a widescreen edition of William Lustig's Maniac or Disney's Unidentified Flying Oddball? Probably not. But the world DOES need widescreen editions of Halloween and Fitzcaraldo and A Woman Under The Influence. And Deep Red and Inferno. Anchor Bay lavishes upon these films the sort of extras that used to be the exclusive province of The Criterion Collection, but they aren't so picky about what films deserve the treatment. Everything, it seems, is deserving of the best showcase possible. There is something to this, I think. Certainly, it is a help in identifying films which have been harmed by previous video editions or by previous license holders who thought they knew better than the filmmakers what should be editted out of the movie. Dario Argento's movies have been the victims of both kinds of injury. Anchor Bay has been releasing them uncut and widescreen in America for the first time. The difference in quality is striking.

Inferno is the rarely seen sequel to Suspiria. It was produced by Twentieth Century Fox as a follow up to the success of Suspiria, but they never released it in the United States. It has been on video before, but it was severely cut and artlessly cropped for that edition. Bootleggers have issued editions ranging from the superb to the dreadful. The new edition from Anchor Bay is gorgeous, transferred from the negative itself.

The world is ruled in secret by "The Three Mothers," who inflict sorrow upon it with sighs, tears, and darkness. Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, was the witch in the basement of the Frieberg dance academy in Suspiria. The Mother of Tears, Mater Lachrymae, dwells in Rome and makes a brief appearance at the beginning of Inferno as a hauntingly gorgeous girl with a white cat. The Mother of Darkness, Mater Tenebrae, lives in an apartment building in New York. A woman discovers her there amid a sequence of bizarre incidences and writes to her brother in Rome in the hope that he will come to her aid. He flies to New York, but it is too late for his sister. He must unravel the mystery of The Three Mothers in order to save himself....

Inferno is a striking movie: it is gorgeous to look at and is packed with unforgettable images. Perhaps the most striking of these is the underwater ballroom from which our heroine must retrieve her keys, dodging corpses as she swims. Other sequences are similarly baroque. Inferno is a cruel movie, too, in much the manner that all of Argento's movies are cruel. The violence in Inferno is sudden and shocking, staged with the elaborate style that Argento developed while making his giallo thrillers. What Inferno is not is comprehensible. Like Suspiria before it, Inferno attempts to scare the audience with pure abstraction. To this end, Argento uses a lot of saturated colors, a loud electronic score, and the bizarre set pieces I have already mentioned. Unlike Suspiria, Inferno doesn't have a strong center with which to anchor the rest of the movie. Jessica Harper was the soul of Suspiria. Inferno has no comparable character. The central thesis of both movies is more or less the same: there is an irrational, utterly terrifying world hiding behind the curtain of mundane reality. Suspiria rips the curtain away after depicting the prosaic reality of a hoity toity dance school. Inferno presents no veneer of mundanity. The curtain of reality has already fallen in Inferno and unreason holds full sway from frame one. The downside of this is that Inferno makes no sense from the get go instead of letting the rational universe crumble around the viewer. And yet, the imagery is potent. To an extent, by ignoring verisimilitude in this movie, Argento has created something that is all of a piece. I'm not going to claim that Inferno is successful. It isn't. But Inferno is certainly watchable, for all of that. It is one of the most interesting failures anyone is ever likely to make.