This year's MOTHER! AWARD goes to Luca Guadagnino's re-imagining of SUSPIRIA

After this past Tuesday's South Florida critics' screening of SUSPIRIA -- the remake/re-imagining by Luca Guadagnino of the 1977 Dario Argento movie of the same name -- several of us were chatting about the film, and mentioned how it reminded us in some ways of last year's uber-divisive movie, Mother! This current Suspiria, we agreed, is as likely to be nearly as divisive, with the negative feedback perhaps stronger than the positive.

There are a lot of reasons for this, starting with the remake's enormous and uncalled for length. The original ran 97 minutes, this one lasts 152.

Both films' plots send a young and talented dancer to a famous European dance academy that doubles as a witches' coven. But Signore Guadagnino, pictured at left, has used all that extra time to gussy-up his movie with a bunch of themes and ideas that go nowhere and never add up to more than mere poorly-thought-out excess.

The director, along with screenwriter David Kajganich (based on the original by Argento and Daria Nicolodi), tosses in everything from family dysfunction, Baader-Meinhof terrorism, psychotherapy, guilt and shame to World War II and The Holocaust, some sort of coming apocalypse, a modern dance recital, satanic rites, and enough guts and gore to fill a dozen so-so slasher movies.

Worse, none of this ever really coalesces. It just piles up rather conspicuously, as the two-and-one-half-plus hours wear on. "What the fuck was he thinking?" may frequently occur to you along the way, about the fellow who earlier gave us much better movies, including I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name.

Guadagnino does possess a visual eye, at least, so there are compensations to be had now and then. And he has rounded up another first-rate cast -- even if he uses them rather poorly. Almost no characterization can found anywhere here. Even the usually fabulous Tilda Swinton (above) can barely bring to life Madame Blanc, the school's choreographer. Swinton fares much better playing the role of Dr. Josef  Klemperer (below), credited to Lutz Eberdorf but now known to be Swinton in some excellent make-up.

Although the leading role and main draw would seem to be Dakota Johnson (below), who plays the "star" student, Susie Bannion, you may find yourself, as did TrustMovies,

more interested in Mia Goth (below), who plays Susie's friend, a plucky but unlucky young dancer named Sara. Ms Goth works wonders with very little, while Ms Johnson proves pretty drab and one-note throughout.

In the film's opening, Chloë Grace Moretz (below) gets a nice scene as one of the academy's more frightened students, but then disappears from the proceedings until returning a good deal later as pretty much a corpse.

Yes, there's a bunch of meaningless scribbles and symbols, and eventually that maybe longed-for ritual so the blood can spurt and splatter.

The weirdest and most effective scene (for those who appreciate extremes) is probably the one early on in which a dancer (Elena Fokina, below) alone in another room is somehow pummeled, jerked, beaten and scrunched to death via Ms Johnson's oddball dancing. Go figure.

Some of us older viewers might take pleasure in seeing a few of Europe's noted actresses -- Germany's Angela Winkler (below, left),  France's Sylvie Testud and Holland's Renée Soutendijk (below, right) -- playing supporting witches. Winker gets the most screen time, while Testud and Soutendijk are utterly wasted.

Fans of the original film's star, Jessica Harper, can see her do a small cameo as the good doctor's dead wife. Otherwise, wait for all the climactic blood-letting and see what you think. I could only roll my eyes and mutter, "Oh, please" and then "So what?" All this is not just grueling but noticeably ugly, just as is the junky-looking poster for the film, at top.

From Amazon Studios, the new Suspiria opened in our cultural coastal cities last week and hits South Florida this Friday, November 2, at some of the local venues. To find the theater(s) nearest you, try clicking here, and I think some of these may appear....

Anna Biller's THE LOVE WITCH: a bizarre original that takes us back a half-century

What an amazing "look" has the new indie pic, THE LOVE WITCH, written, directed and just-about-everything-elsed by Anna Biller. From the first frame onwards, we're transported back into the 1960s and 70s via the appearance of the men and women here -- their hair styles, make-up, beards, cars, clothing and more -- it is all so redolent of that creamy, voluptuous time period, right down to the copious full-frontal on display. The acting especially, seems to come right out of of the glossy, soft-core porn films of the day. Radley Metzger would plotz, then kvell!

Over the past couple of decades, Ms Biller (shown at right) has been building a reputation, though this is the first of her films that TrustMovies has actually seen. It's bizarre but also, in its way, memorable, so it may be a good place to begin. Set a half-century ago, it details the connivings of a young woman who doubles as a "witch" (this sort of thing was a tad more de rigeur back in that day) and is moving from one California town to another, after the demise of her unfaithful hubby. Our gal, it seems, has major love problems.

From the movie's outset, as its "heroine," Elaine (a knockout non-performance from the gorgeous Samantha Robinson, above), unveils to us via voiceover her recent love history, this character comes across as somewhat narcissistic and irresponsible. You think so? Just wait. The dialog, plotting and performances all seem equally strange and "off," and yet so often drop-dead-gorgeous is the movie -- that Victorian era tea room (shown above) is just one of the visual wonders here -- that any real film buff won't want to look away.

From man (Jeffrey Vincent Parisse, above) to man (a very funny Robert Seeley) to man (the fellow who seems to be most perfect, played by Gian Keys, shown below, leading that horse), our Elaine hypnotizes, seduces and then disposes of the poor guys who cross her path and always fail to deliver on her expectations. How and why this keeps happening provide the meat of the movie.

The film is full of philosophizing, and if most of the philosophy here struck me as second-hand, at best, it is often accompanied by visuals that are either ravishing or hilarious. This is most apparent in a scene in a burlesque night club in which a warlock and his witches, below, sit at a table having a "deep" discussion about men and their needs, as the burlesque dancer simultaneous struts her stuff, serving the men in the audience with their immediate needs. My spouse and I have not laughed this hard or this long in some time.

The movie takes us back to a time of modern-day apothecaries and Renaissance Fairs and to a world of unhappy husbands and wives and police departments in which cops get into fist fights over a snide remark about a girlfriend. Everyone plays it absolutely straight, with no hint of camp or condescension. Which of course turns the whole thing into a kind of wonderfully high-toned camp.

The movie runs two full hours and yet -- shockingly enough -- it does not seems a minute too long. It is too much oddball fun: If, that is, you can manage to get onto its wave-length.

I do have one big quibble. Toward the end of the film, we're see a cell phone in use, and then suddenly a modern-day automobile. This cannot be an unintentional continuity problem, as Ms Biller has exercised way too much control over everything for that to happen. Is the filmmaker trying to bring us into the present day in order to show us that nothing much has changed over time? If so, this was probably not the best way to do it.

Otherwise, The Love Witch is an unusual treat for those of us old enough to remember the good old movie-going days -- or young enough to want to know what they might have been like. After viewing the movie, I went to the press kit provided and eagerly perused it all. Turns out that Ms Biller really did have a huge amount of control, extending to everything from writing and direction to performances, sets, costumes and more. She tells us that she worked with her lead actress for a full year to nail down character and such.

This surely has to do with the unusual performance given by Ms Robinson, which may remind you, in its almost complete lack of anything approaching real "behavior," of the films of Robert Bresson. Here -- and in certain other performances, too -- behavior seems to have been trounced in favor of the kind of non-acting that will better get across the points Biller want to make. This ends up being something of a trade-off, really. But it does result in a movie that rather stands alone. Think of it as Besson meets Metzger.

The Love Witch, from Oscilloscope Films, opens this Friday, November 11, in California (in Los Angeles you can see it at Landmark's NuArt and elsewhere around the state) and in Texas (at the Drafthouse in Austin). Next Friday, October 18, it will expand all around the country. In New York, see it at the new Drafthouse in Brooklyn; here in South Florida it will play the Bill Cosford Cinema in Miami. Click here and scroll down to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.