Hello, my name's Justin the Clue, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club, the final shocktober edition.

I was trying to think of a new sound effect I could do, and I couldn't.

We haven't done a scream like that before.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Toho's going to come after us.

The true terror, Godzilla.

Okay, so we decided to take two titans of the Italian horse scene and pits them together against each other.

A death match.

If you will.

To the death.

Bare knuckle boxing.

Luchel Fulci versus Dario Argento.

As Will has said before, not a big fan of Dario Argento.

No, although I think I've come to appreciate him slightly more this week.

I used to think that Lucho Fulci, the man who directed Zombie 2, City of Living Dead, was a crazy hack. Like that he didn't know how to make movies, people just liked it because of the gore. I was completely wrong. I'd like to say that right off the bat right now. And just to contextualize these two filmmakers, I would say that Dario Argento, with the

possible exception of Mario Bava, is the most critically lauded of the European horror directors.

Still making movies today, I'm sad to say.

Is he?

Yeah. Luchio Fulci, you know, for many years dismissed as a hack by most people. And I would say only in the last 10 or 15 years has he had sort of a critical reappraisal. But even then, it's been a tentative critical reappraisal. I wonder when it started that Dari Argento kind of got taken by the academics as the horror filmmaker we're going to talk about and kind of deconstruct. Boy, I don't know, but I mean, I think his stuff got good reviews at the time, though. Like stuff like Syspia. And Bird with the Crystal Plumage got like three stars from Roger Ebert. So for people that don't know, Dary Argento is kind of from a cinematic family. His brother produces, so does his father. He started as a film critic. And also, who is his

daughter? Asia Argento. Yes, a very prominent actress. A land of the dead. Scarlet Diva. Other

movies. The heart is deceitful above all things. A film she directed. Yes, lots of movies.

And Dario Argento kind of started as people would call him the Italian Hitchcock. He made a bunch

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