Suss-piria

The tagline reads "the only more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film... are the first 83". This is supposed to be the uncut version, so why is it shorter than what IMDB reports?

A new student arrives at a ballet academy just as a previous student leaves and is then killed. Strange things seem to happen while she is there, including her friend disappearing. She hears tales of witches, but what is it the teachers are really up to?

This is the first Argento film I've seen, and is it typical of him? Certainly, from the trailers, it isn't an Argento film unless someone is getting their head shoved through glass. This film has large blocks of colour, usually red, green or blue... but I'm not entirely sure what the significance of the colours are. The blurb calls this a "hallucinatory horror movie", and that is true enough, with the colour and the surreal soundscape and the strange characters. However...

I didn't find the first 83 minutes terrifying. And definitely not the last 12. Did people in the 70s get scared by people standing in rooms? And yes, there are deaths, but not so much as the killer being nasty, more that the women do stupid things and basically kill themselves.

I don't know if it's a cultural thing (either of language or the time), but this just doesn't work as a horror movie for me. I suspect it's more because they did things differently thirty-five years ago, but this supposedly scare movie is now just a meh.

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