Warning! Spooky stuff with some blood and other goo.

Geometria (1987) dir. Guillermo Del Toro

Original version, mediocre transfer, but with English subtitles:

For the Spanish-speaking and/or second-time viewers, here’s a much better transfer with the original audio (though the above might actually be more accurately called the definitive version, more on that below):

This is some Halloween fun and a very early effort from the avuncular comedy-horror auteur. Del Toro spent, by his estimation, less than $2,000 on this film (“and that included catering and travel”). He cast his own mother and filmed in an open office space over the weekend. Post production was rushed so it could play at a local film festival alongside a more prestigious picture, and the reception at this screening, Del Toro notes, put him in a comfortable outsider position with the other filmmakers there.

Del Toro is a filmmaker who loves to talk about film, especially his own influences. Here he pays homage (i.e. rips off) Mario Bava and Dario Argento’s giallos and their use of stark colors, often using two deep colors against each other within the same frame. The movie’s script is based on a short story by pulp sci-fi author Frederic Brown, a writer with an O. Henry-like penchant for ironic twist endings. It’s a playful aping of his favorite artists and Del Toro speaks reverently in an interview years later with Criterion of the “raw power” of Bava’s work in Italian horror. He’s also typically self-effacing, pausing his reverie to cheerfully emphasize to the camera “you will find none of this in ‘Geometria.’ None! I am just expressing my love for it.”

He did go back to tinker with the rushed film festival version years later, fixing the music, futzing with the effects, and cutting it shorter by a minute and a half. He also redubbed all the voices himself in Italian just to underline the giallo connection, which is why the voicework in the top version is so hilariously weird. Here’s the original, longer version (in a bad transfer with subtitling) for the curious.