Dark Glasses (2022) - Movie Review

What do you get when you take a legendary director at the absolute rock bottom of his career, scraping and crawling to regain a decades lost relevance and give him the ability to put a film onto the best streaming platform in the horror genre?

A sad Zach, that’s what.

Dario Argento is my favorite filmmaker. Does that make me a homer? No, because I expect my heroes to maintain their greatness or at least know when to bow out gracefully.

Argento is the antithesis of that. It’s as if he keeps making these steaming piles of film to upset me.

I mean, sweet Jesus… it’s been over 30 years since he has had involvement in a good film with 1990’s Two Evil Eyes and even then, he only handled one segment of that film. If you discount his contributions to The Church and Opera, which I do, because they are both bad, redundant regurgitations of previous works—you’d need to go all the way back to 1986 to find an enjoyable film in his catalog with the better-than-the-original Demons 2.

Since then we’ve gotten many films starring his daughter Asia Argento, usually nude and/or being sexually assaulted *see Trauma, The Stendhal Syndrome, Dracula 3D etc.

At least in this film, Asia only plays a small role. Which, after her exile from Hollywood is not surprising. I wondered while watching the lead actress perform multiple nude scenes in this film if Asia would have been the lead if not for the allegations that got her chased from the industry.

Although, Asia would have been a massive upgrade to the star they landed. While Illenia Pastorelli is gorgeous and her breasts are outstanding… her acting is stilted and completely unconvincing. Asia would have been a much more believable protagonist. And any outrage that may have been present with her being cast as the lead could have added some much needed publicity. As it is, this movie was released on Shudder to no little fanfare other than, Argento is back!

Spoilers… he’s not.

Dark Glasses is a 2022 horror / thriller brought to us writer / director Dario Argento and writer Franco Fellini.

The film focuses on Diana, a high-end escort / sex worker who is living an extremely comfortable life. She has a good client list, a beautiful home, and few, if any worries. That all changes when a serial killer starts murdering escorts around Rome. When he can’t kill her with his favored weapon, a cello string, he pushes her into a high speed collision that makes an orphan of the child in the back seat. Now blind due to the accident and saddled with the guilt of ruining the child’s life, Diana becomes unraveled. To make things worse, the killer isn’t done with her yet. Will Diana survive the deadly game of cat and mouse, or will she be the next victim of The Cellist?

It was extremely difficult to write a description of the film, because there is no plot. Things just happen in this film. Diana is a smoking hot, milf-escort who gets in an accident that takes away her sight, but leaves her beautiful. If they’d wanted to make this compelling, it would have been more impactful to have her looks ruined and have her have to struggle with not having her main asset. Or even worse, she’d need to go into the dark world of fetish escorts.

Instead we get a super-lame re-hash of one of Argento’s great works, The Cat of Nine Tails.

Except The Cat of Nine Tails had good acting, a compelling story, and characters you cared about. No one in this film, outside of Asia Argento, seems like they’ve ever even attended an acting class.

The killer’s identify is almost immediately revealed, removing any mystery from the film. Not that it would have mattered as there is no build-up to the killer before he reaches Diana. We get to see one kill and then BOOM, we’re supposed to know the guy has killed multiple women—even though it’s never shown. Even though press for the film names the killer the cellist and says he kills women with a cello string, this is never explained in the film. There’s no mystique to the villain. His van gets more build-up than he does. The cello string also is just a throwaway as the killer has nothing to do with the symphony or a cello. He’s an animal control worker and his motive for killing is that the sex workers asked him to shower because he smells bad.

Seriously, that’s it.

Spoilers?

Really?

Like you were ever going to watch this piece of garbage….

Don’t support this film. Don’t watch it. It’s awful in almost every respect.

If you do want to see this inane train wreck, it’s streaming exclusively on Shudder.