Let me talk about a couple things not mentioned in reviews I've read.

After the opening credits, we are at a conference discussing psychic ability and the paranormal.

Later, when the Jazz pianist looks up at his apartment building, he witnesses his neighbor, the psychic at the conference, being savagely murdered. They seem to make eye contact.

I suggest a psychic connection between the two has been made and it is this connection which affects the pianists behavior and is the reason he must solve the murder before he leaves the city.

Later on he recalls when he ran into his neighbors apartment he believed he saw something, something which is later missing, he believes. Did he see anything at all, or was it a psychic impression which was implanted by his neighbor as they made eye contact?

He reacts to hunches, and seems to almost have some sort of psychic ability later on in the film, though he refuses to completely acknowledge it. He knows almost instinctively there is something about the old house which holds an important clue to the murder. He goes to the house, but at first he doesn't find anything. He's trying too hard. Thinking too logically. It is only later that suddenly he realizes, almost psychically what he's missed and upon examining the picture he convinces himself his hunch is right and returns to the house to uncover a hidden room. His alcoholic colleague speaks at length to him about how sometimes the most trivial of things are the most important and the most important of things are often trivial. His colleague is drinking himself to death, though not talking about the demons which obviously haunt him. The female reporter talks to him about his nervous habits, which Hemmings wonderfully explains away as him being a sensitive artist and full of quirks. . . but doesn't his artistic sensitivities lend themselves to psychic ones?

At first one might come away from the film thinking, why did they make David Hemmings a Jazz musician and then have him act like a private detective in trying to find the murderer? Why not have Hemmings be playing a burnt out former police detective whose hobby is jazz?

Yet Florence is a European center for Jazz Artists, and as a sensitive artist type he would be more 'sensitive' to emotional and psychic vibrations.

It's not important to your enjoyment of the film to share my feeling that Hemmings' character has discovered he is psychic without fulling being aware of it. . . butit might add an added depth to the film the next time you watch it.

Please note the version you should watch is the 126 minute director's cut of the film which has been meticulously restored and is now distributed by Anchor Bay. The DVD has several added features. This restored cut uses all of the available English dubbed feature , but 28 minutes of the film are in Italian with English subtitles and it's a bit awkward if watching the dubbed (rather than the Italian language with English Subtitle version) when it switches from English to Italian and subtitles and then back again within the same scene. The English dubbed scenes that were cut for the American release no longer exist which is why it was necessary to present it this way.

The previously U.S. released versions which run 98 minutes are to be avoided. The film does actually make narrative sense in it's full version, but will not in its truncated version. Part of the film plays on known fears. The violence shown is of a nature we are all somewhat familiar with and so has much more impact. We know what it's like to burn yourself with scalding hot water.... so a murder of a woman involving a bathtub full of scalding hot water is quite horrifying. Hitting yourself on the corner of a table, or a fireplace mantel is a sensation we know, so a scene where a man is slammed into several sharp corners is quite unsettling.

Chris Jarmick Author of The Glass Cocoon with Serena F. Holder....


An amazing movie   April 6, 2000
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

Unlike many who have posted here, I HAVE seen the full 126minute version of Deep Red, on a badly copied conversion inpan-and-scan - and let me tell you, even in this form it was still one of the most exciting movies I think I've ever seen. Although a couple of decades of film has probably blunted the shock and gore elements, and all those character moments might make it seem slow, I promise you that this movie will freak you in ways few horror movies will. Dario Argento's reputation rests entirely on this film and Suspiria, but this one is the superior. All the best elements of his previous films are combined here - the protagonist who's seen something important he can't identify, killers with a fetish for black gloves, vague hints of the supernatural, gender transgression..... and of coursre the gore. Believe me, you'll think twice about checking the door locks after dark when you see what happens to Helga the psychic. Argento was never this suspenseful again, probably because Mark (the protagonist), like the audience, knows he has to solve the mystery before the killer will ever leave him alone. The DVD release of DEEP RED is a real event, and Goblin's score presented in Dolby Digital would be worth it all by itself! I can't wait until release day...........


Where Death holds Full Dominion   February 1, 2005
 7 out of 9 found this review helpful

Let's talk about fear for a moment, shall we? Come, sit with me here on this cold bench, beneath the white, buzzing, utilitarian fluourescents---there's no one in this entire building tonight, so we'll have plenty of time to talk.

About Fear.

I don't mean the giddy, cozy shivers you get that makes you want to watch the cheap and banal slasher flick through your fingers, giggling like a fool the whole time. No, I mean Fear: Fear that comes floating into your brain at 3 in the morning, as you lie in your suddenly cold and vast bed, listening to the house creak and groan, wondering---well, God, it's silly, but still---didn't that creak, that shifting floorboard you heard just now, close to your bedroom door---well didn't it sound just a little too *stealthy*?

The fear that creeps over you and brands your naked back with a flotilla of goosebumps while you're taking that early morning shower, the outdoor blackness pressed close up to the house windows: the conviction that when the water and your fumbling hands wipe away the soap and lather, someone---something---else will have joined you in the shower. Something that wants to play and giggle and roll in your blood.

Yes. Now we're talking Fear, aren't we? Now you're with me: good.

"Deep Red" (the Italian 'Profondo Rosso') is Italian Grandmaster of Horror Dario Argento's masterwork of sick, revulsive, shudder-inducing Fear: it is gorgeous, jaw-dropping, ambitiously brutal, leeringly primal, as if Argento had furiously shoved a syringe straight into the pulsing, fevered brain of a serial killer, and drained the nightmares out of the creature's gibbering mind.

"Deep Red" is Nightmare made Flesh, and Flesh made Film.

American jazz musician Marcus Daly (the late, incomparable David Hemmings)is working in Rome: he composes, performs, dallies, drinks, and engages in bibulous battinage with sexually confused, angst-ridden friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia, channeling a little of Fellini's "Satyricon" for our amusement).

All of this is brought to a halt when Daly witnesses a woman---a Ukrainian psychic (Macha Meril, insanely overracting---and oddly, it works)---slaughtered in her home by a black-gloved maniac, butchered like a pig or a cow. He witnesses this rapine from a Roman courtyard, and arrives to late to save her---but soon enough to glimpse a portrait, forgotten in the insanity of theo moment, but recalled after events lose their immediacy and begin to gel.

Oh---and after the Maniac demonstrates its interest in Marcus Daly. It enters his Roman apartment, while he composes on his piano; he is saved by noting those stealthy noises typically heard by nervous insomniacs at 3 in the morning, and watching a long shadow fall across the threshold of his study. He manages to leap up and close the study door, even as the Thing whispers its hellish ambitions through impenetrable wood.

Argento is a wizard. He conjures up his necromantic magic through high style: watch the camera in the opening sequences, as it arcs down like a vicious, hungry bird of prey over the audience, summoned to hear the psychic: watch as it glimpses the Killer in a dingy, begrimed, fog-sooted restroom mirror; recoil as it follows---faithfully,like a staid documentarian---the brutal slaughter of a girl in an isolated country cottage, her death prescribed by immersion in boiling water.

Or, for sheer gut-clenching shrill terror, try out the lonely death of Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri), who dies a dog's death, death too easily imagined by those who have fallen against a sharp surface---a death pilloried, lampooned, by the twisted, robotic, dwarf creature that enters through the Professor's study door (anticipating, and doubtless inspiring, James Wan's nightmarish tricycle puppet in "Saw").

"Deep Red" is undeniably Argento's dark lodestone, a treasure gleaming and glimmering and seducing the unwary in the darkness, a brilliant accomplishment he rarely approached, even as his capacity for the craft grew. "Suspiria", perhaps, is as close as the Master came to this dark, poisonous, armor-piercing bullet of pure horror.

The delirious, dark delight of "Deep Red" is the intense, nearly sexual beauty, and intensity, of death and its Soldiers: the remastered deluxe edition merely underscores a movie astonishingly vivid in color and brutally ambitious in scope. From the moment the blood-red velvet opera-house curtains are parted, through the night-haunted cobblestones of haunted modern Rome, "Deep Red" is murderous---and glorious in its bloodthirsty frenzy.

Evil is whispering on the other side of the door. Escape---or talk to it. Flee the madness, or engage it: this is Argento's legacy in "Deep Red". Tremble.

JSG


Which version is this?   September 24, 2005
 7 out of 8 found this review helpful

There are two versions of Deep Red/The Hatchet Murder here but amazon has stupidly replicated the same set of reviews for both of them! Is this the uncut version with the italian language scenes that all the reviews speak so highly of, or is this the cut-to-crap not-even-worth-watching american version?