Rarely has such a brilliant film been so full of terrible flaws. Rarely has such an terrible film had so many flashes of brilliance. It's not that Four Flies on Grey Velvet is so bad it's good; more that it's so good, that it's such a shame that it's simultaneously so bad. Case in point: what is Mimsy Farmer's brilliant, sensitive, nuanced performance doing in the same film as God & Prof (a big bearded comedy fisherman and his diminutive, Bible-quoting sidekick)? The less said about the limp-wristed portrayal of the gay private eye, the better... and yet he's a wholly lovable character and it's sad when he's killed. There's some inventive editing, yet the film could've done with some judicious…

Argento's Four Flies is a definite improvement over Cat o Nine Tails. I wouldn't say it's more cohesive story wise as its all over the place but that's part of the fun with Argento's films. The scenes that he creates are fantastic and some of the shots make you giddy as to how he composed them. We get slow motion bullet shots 30 years before the Matrix, cameras attached to heads falling down stairs, unbelievable slow motion shots (man that ending!) This movie concludes an Argento marathon that has seen me watch all of his films over the past couple of months. The man has an astonishing talent and is one of the worlds greatest directors in my humble opinion.…

I recently watched the re-mastered, extended HD edition. It's the 3rd film in the Argento "animal trilogy" from 1971.

It's a thriller about a guy in a band who notices he's being followed. Upon confronting the stalker, he apparently stabs him with a knife by accident, but someone else photographs it and uses the pictures to harass/blackmail him.

It didn't really have the same problems as Bird With The Crystal Plumage in that it was very patchy, instead, it was the opposite; it was just very flat. It had more arty shots, which worked quite well in the context of the film, but the humour (the gay characters especially) didn't really work at all. I didn't really get on with…

Dario Argento's third movie looks like something where he is still experimenting, still trying to find his own signature. That's not necessary a bad thing and I appreciated most of his attempts at being original and different, but even then I was surprised at how much comedy he decided to put in it, some of it very broad. Most of it it fails, but I kind of loved the gay detective he wrote into the story - at first appearing as a ridiculous caricature and slowly developing into the most sympathetic character in the whole film.

Story is typical Argento. Not much of it makes sense and the reveal of the killer is so crazy you can't help but appreciate…

Rarely has such a brilliant film been so full of terrible flaws. Rarely has such an terrible film had so many flashes of brilliance. It's not that Four Flies on Grey Velvet is so bad it's good; more that it's so good, that it's such a shame that it's simultaneously so bad. Case in point: what is Mimsy Farmer's brilliant, sensitive, nuanced performance doing in the same film as God & Prof (a big bearded comedy fisherman and his diminutive, Bible-quoting sidekick)? The less said about the limp-wristed portrayal of the gay private eye, the better... and yet he's a wholly lovable character and it's sad when he's killed. There's some inventive editing, yet the film could've done with some judicious…

Argento's Four Flies is a definite improvement over Cat o Nine Tails. I wouldn't say it's more cohesive story wise as its all over the place but that's part of the fun with Argento's films. The scenes that he creates are fantastic and some of the shots make you giddy as to how he composed them. We get slow motion bullet shots 30 years before the Matrix, cameras attached to heads falling down stairs, unbelievable slow motion shots (man that ending!) This movie concludes an Argento marathon that has seen me watch all of his films over the past couple of months. The man has an astonishing talent and is one of the worlds greatest directors in my humble opinion.…

The opening credits unspooling over a rock band jamming in the studio lays out Dario Argento’s intent bare - he’s merely riffing with this film, following his visual imagination to its strangest, wildest places to see what it gets him and damn the plot ‘cause the plot don’t matter none no how. Had he made this in 1991, it’d likely be awful and uninspired; at this time, though, Dario was still an unbeatable stylist who could spin amazing setpieces like they just fell out of his head while he slept and all he had to do was scoop them off his pillow in the morning and paste them onto celluloid like so many moth wings.

So yeah, there’s a plot…