Synopsis: Italian Master Of Horror Dario Argento – the director of Suspiria, Deep Red,
Tenebre and Opera – returns to the thriller genre with this sly and sexy tribute
to The Master Of Suspense. Elio Germano stars as Giulio, a nerdy film student
and lifelong voyeur who begins to believe that two lovely young strangers may
have conspired to commit a brutal murder. But when reel obsession leads to real
danger, one question alone holds the key to terror: Do You Like
Hitchcock?

Elisabetta Rocchetti, Chiara Conti and Cristina Brondo co-star
in this bold giallo co-written by Argento and Franco Ferrini (Phenomena, The
Card Player), featuring a masterful score by Pino Donaggio (Dressed To Kill,
Carrie, Trauma), gore effects by Sergio Stivaletti (Cemetery Man, Demons), and
filled with the classic touches of two true masters!

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Ti piace Hitchcock? 5.0

eyelights: the Hitchcock film references – thematic, visual and musical.

eyesores: the “actors”. the script.

‘Ti piace Hitchcock?’ is a television movie that Dario Argento did in 2005 as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock – to whom he was favourably compared in the early ’70s. It features a few nods to the Master of Suspense’s films throughout, either in the plot elements, in the set dressing and in Pino Donaggio’s sometimes Herrmann-esque score.

But it’s a television movie. And it shows.

Right from the onset, we get a taste of what’s to come via an amateurish introduction to our protagonist and our movie: as a young boy, Julio is biking through the woods when he sees a pair of haggard young women meet up and go to a deserted cabin. He follows them and observes them taking part in a blood ritual, sacrificing a rooster for unknown reasons. They see him and he runs off.

The problems with the sequence are numerous. For starters, it’s extremely random – the kid is biking super far out in the woods, something that no kid would likely do. Where is from, anyway?  How far has he traveled like that? Secondly, who are these women and what are they doing there? And what impact does this have on the character or the story? As far as I can tell, none at all.

But, to make matters worse, the acting and the staging is horrendous. The way that Argento set up the sequence is awful, with inappropriate music cues to jolt the viewers. He has the boy peer at the girls  through the window in plain sight, but they don’t notice him until we’ve been shown enough blood. Then they chase him – but, even though they can’t possibly know which direction he’s taken, they immediately come out at him as if they knew where he was going. Duh.

And the acting… Geezus. It’s so bad. Even though the girls barely have any lines, their expressions are waaaay overdone and unnatural, like cartoon characters. This immediately put me off – which was likely a good thing, because the rest of the picture is rife with such abominable performances from almost all of the principal cast, and even many of the secondary players as well. Argento films are frequently weak in the acting department, but ‘Ti piace Hitchcock?’ truly scrapes the bottom.

I have to note that I watched the film with an English overdub because there wasn’t an original Italian track available on the DVD. This matters because the vocal performances were atrocious and they likely exacerbated already terrible performances. Why non-actors are allowed to do overdubs is beyond me, but it’s in no one’s best interest. No doubt that getting someone to do decent voice work for cheap would be easy enough – just go to your local high school and pick a few drama majors, for goodness’ sake!

Anyway, the voice work wasn’t the only thing that was subpar, performance-wise, so I can freely state that the actors sucked. All of them seemed like amateur material, all the way down to their body language. Seriously: the actors all seemed to have a hard time even walking properly! I mean, our leading man-ling walked like he just got a new set of legs, or just learned to walk. It was so weird. And most of the others walked as though they were trying to hold a butt plug. No joke!

As for the story, well’s nothing exception about it: it’s about Julio, who happens to take notice of his supposedly hot neighbour days before her mother is murdered. He then becomes obsessed with her, thinking that she has used Hitchcock’s ploy from ‘Strangers on a Train’ to get another girl to do her dirty work, and starts to follow her and the other girl around. Really, it’s all just convoluted crap with totally BS situations between the characters for most of the movie – no one acts rationally, and most of what happens likely wouldn’t take place in real life.

What makes the film remotely interesting are the Hitchcock references throughout.

There is the obvious, such as Julio’s posters adorning his flat, or the video store where the main characters all seem to converge, which has a major focus on Hitchcock films. Then there is the plot elements, such as the afore-mentioned ‘Strangers on a Train’, as well as ‘Dial M for Murder’, ‘Psycho’, ‘Vertigo’, ‘Rear Window’, and likely many others (I’m not enough of a Hitchcock fan to point out every nod to the Master). And there is the more subtle, expressed in Pino Donaggio’s score, as he lifts and incorporates music from Hitch’s films in his own compositions.

From that standpoint, ‘Ti piace Hitchcock?’ was fun: it was like playing ‘Where’s Waldo?’ but with Hitchcock (perhaps they should rename it “Where’s Hitchcock?”). It would be fun for the DVD to have a fact track on it that points out all these moments, every nod. At least, I would find it quite enjoyable. But, otherwise, the film is a mess: it isn’t all that coherent, the actors are virtually unwatchable, the direction is slipshod, and the production is el-cheapo.  It’s not one of Argento’s good motion pictures and I would be remiss to recommend it.

Date of viewing: February 4, 2013