All the Colors of the Dark (1976)

Truly Dreadful Film

One of my all time favorites.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Finding The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh to exceed all my expectations,I started searching for other gialli by Sergio Martino to view this October. Looking round on eBay,I was thrilled to spot a Martino DVD on an auction about to end,which led to me getting out my paint kit.The plot:Losing her baby in a car crash, Jane Harrison has been receiving counselling with support from boyfriend Richard. During the counselling,Harrison begins opening up about her mum being murdered when she was 5 (what a cheerful opening!) Talking to her sister Barbara about recurring nightmares she is having of a strange man trying to kill her. Jane is advised that she can be freed from her troubles by attending a black mass. Taking part in the mass,Jane soon finds her nightmare to become living colour.View on the film:Given the challenge of carrying a one woman film,the super sexy Edwige Fenech gives an excellent performance as Jane Harrison. Chasing Giallo mystery and (loose) religious Horror,Fenech captures a fracturing of fear over Jane's face with a lingering of the sorrow just underneath the surface. Taking the traditional role of the girl in a Giallo, George Hilton reunites with Fenech to give a very good performance as Richard,with Hillton giving some rugged fear to the darkness.One of only two gialli to have the leads be parents who lose a child,the screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi/Santiago Moncada and Sauro Scavolini bend the mystery into devil worshipping yelps. Whilst the devil antics give the flick a trippy vibe,the writers never explain how it is helping Jane, (apart from the wild sex!) which leads to the masses distracting from the building unease.Delving into Jane's scrambled state,director Sergio Martino expands the psychedelic flourishes of Wardh a with dazzling,ultra-stylised spray of colours across the screen painting the blending of fantasy and reality in Jane's mind. Pulling the mask off the killer early on,Martino finds other mysteries for the Giallo thrills,via expertly framed reflecting shots, designed for the foreground to unveil the sinister slithering in the background of Jane's life,as Martino paints with all the colours of the dark.

When I think of Italian horror films, I think of messy and flawed scripts, semi-amateurish acting, an above-average visual style, dubbed actors (whether in Italian or English, they always dub it in the studio, or at least used to), and last but not least, typical Italian horror-movie music.ATCOTD has that typical Italian "la la la la" soundtrack. (Not all of it, obviously.) Literally - I mean a person actually singing "la la la la" on and on. You can't mistake an Italian horror film for any other country's movie; bad or good, Italian horror flicks are usually uniquely Italian. Sometimes goofy, sometimes effective (sometimes both), this la-la-la-la kind of music is usually catchy, making it difficult to forget that soon. The best example is Argento's "Deep Red" la-la-la-laing. I still have that melody in my head, in spite of having seen the film at least a decade ago.Considering how amazingly idiotic Italian horror/thriller films can be, especially those made by a certain overrated "master" Dario Argento that I just mentioned, ATCOTD has a fairly thought-out script, without any excessive plot holes or glaring logic issues. Everything falls into place in the end, although it isn't 100% clear whether the horroric goings-on were supernatural or not. I'd have to assume they were, because otherwise many things would be too far-fetched.A silly plot-device that was used over and over was Bella constantly being left alone, in spite of having hallucinations, nightmares, and generally getting depression or running into trouble whenever left alone. You'd think that at some point her boyfriend would have realized he should never leave her alone. Half the movie is various characters promising to her that they'll "be there straight away" to help her.The visual look of ATCOTD gets top marks, especially during the scenes in the various parks, which is when the movie looks excellent. Filmed in London, but decidedly un-London-like in the mood it creates. The movie creates a strange kind of London atmosphere; I couldn't get away from the strange feeling that everything was going on in Continental Europe. They could have aimed the camera squarely at Big Ben and held it there for five minutes, but still it would not have seemed like London.

This is a high-grade example of all of the movies that came out excitedly influenced by Roman Polanskis Rosemarys Baby, which should be seen before viewing this one. It's a very similar story, though the only baby involved is lost by miscarriage. Sergio Martino botches the satanic ritual scenes, Euro movies always seemed to have to make Satan into a goatish Baphometan pretty boy, and hes pretty weak here, but he beautifully expands the menace in the recruiting part and then the escape from the cult part of the basic story (both involving being stalked by Ivan Rassimov). Edwige Fenech (whom I found trivial and overly enamored of herself in Strip Nude For your Killer) is quite effective as a very troubled woman who actually submits to going to a Sabbath as if to therapy, and to being group groped and more by pastyfaced acolytes, but then balks disgusted at having to ritually kill her friend Mary, because in an interesting twist now that Mary has recruited her, she is free to leave (meaning this life). Fenech is apparently famous for her physique aka great sloping breasts but its mostly her Venus reclining profile that caught audiences eyes and she exploits that to the full here by appearing often reclining in bed or crouching in corners on floors, though there is only modest nudity. And yet she spends most of her time in bed suffering, sex with her husband is so unsatisfactory to her (except once) that one suspects him of not good things. Martino seemed most excited by Mia Farrows exclamation in RB that this is not a dream, this is really happening, and uses what the dumb American trailer called Chillorama otherwise known as wide angle shots to blur reality and paranoid fantasy in a way that does unnerve. He also makes great symbolic use of the old apartment bloc including its roof, a great English castle and its grounds (a chase scene reminiscent of Demon of the Night) and London (its interesting how the legacy of Hammer satanism from Witchcraft all the way to Satanic Rites of Dracula turned England into the land of horror so that even Italian directors felt they had to shoot there (see also Seven Deaths in a Cats Eye) to reinforce the blurring.

A pseudo-giallo, All the Colors... once again puts Edwige behind the knife, or rather in front of it and sometimes under it, when she stumbles(or is she lead?) into a satanic cult. Say it ain't so. Now, even on a rainy day when I'm all out of meth, I don't go in for satanic cult movies since they bore me. But, I started to enjoy this film in spite of myself, though I was expecting less devil and more giallo. If you are expecting the razor wielding sex maniac in black gloves to stalk beautiful girls to kick ass music, look elsewhere.What you get here instead is Jane, a poor gal suffering from nightmares and also possibly daymares. Her beau, Richard, is often away from their flat, leaving her to her nightmares since she refuses to take her vitamins or whatnot. So, a new neighbor offers to take her to a black mass to help rid her of this weird dude named Mark who keeps stalking her and feeling her up with his cool blue eyes. However, all is not well, since after she goes to the mass, she realizes Mark belongs to the coven. D'oh! And now he starts showing up even more, which means Jane was gang raped for nothing. I hate it when that happens. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm always up for a black mass when I'm having nightmares or if some weird person shows up at a couple of places I've been recently. I'm sort of surprised more doctors don't recommend it. Anyway, except for Mark and the mass ringleader, McBride(who looks like a devilish Robert Downey Jr.), the rest of the cultists look like rejects from a Wiccan ceremony held in a local park.Director Sergio has a few good moments of nice camera-work, lighting, effective music, but overall it struck me as rather average, if watchable. Obvious inspirations from Rosemary's Baby abound.