I never thought I would find myself writing a bad review of a Dario Argento movie. I have been a fan of his films since the beginning and have every one of them on video, laserdisc or DVD.<br /><br />I just purchased the DVD of "Il Fantasma dell'Opera," however, and I must say that I regretfully agree with those who feel this is an all-time low for the director. This movie is so basically bad that it makes me wonder if I haven't been making excuses for Argento for some time now. It's hard to believe that in this day and age, with a significant amount of resources and first-class collaborators like Ennio Morricone, Gerard Brach and Julian Sands, the picture still manages to completely fail in any kind of dramatic sense.<br /><br />While credibility has never been a big thing for Argento, here he pushes the limits and trips himself into complete absurdity. The film opens with a sewer rat single-handedly saving a basket with child from the edge of a waterfall and goes all the way down from there. Are we supposed to even remotely accept that sewer rats could possibly save a baby from death and raise him like, say, the apes raised Tarzan? The bond between the Phantom and the sewer rats, which is central to the rest of the picture, comes from this scene. Unfortunately, this set-up is so ludicrous that every time the issue of "love" between the Phantom and the rats resurfaces (and it does, often and ineptly) you cringe because there is no way you can dispell the absurdity of it all. Why, did a tiny female rat breast-feed the Phantom until he was of age to feed himself? Puhleeze!<br /><br />The story meanders hopelessly from one ridiculous scene to the next. One man dies and those around him react as if he had only burped. A woman gets her tongue ripped out of her mouth for no other apparent reason than the fact that nobody else in a Dario Argento movie had that happen to them before. Another man's hand is gnawed at by rats and he just leaves it there while the hungry little beasts go to work on it, just so that we can get a good look at it. Loyalties come and go for no reason whatsoever. The climactic "crash of the chandelier" scene looks cheap and completely unimaginative, with some gore trying to compensate for a total lack of spectacle. And even Ennio Morricone's music, unbelievably, seems oddly purposeless as it plays monotonously against every scene.<br /><br />And then there's Asia Argento, who hysterically missacts every line and botches every shot of herself lipsynching to what is undeniably and all-too-obviously somebody else's singing. Would it have cost a lot to rehearse until her lipsynching looked real? Never mind. Asia has yet to prove, in my view, that she is anything but a one-note actress who plays every part and every scene as a possessed nymphette, and this script doesn't help. The script, in fact, never delivers any information about Christine or anyone such that we could even intuit what she finds so spellbinding about the Phantom (after all, he is a murderous sewer ratboy!) But Argento seems satisfied that Asia's lunatic-like expressions are enough for his audience to get the story. Well, they aren't, and the story is a bust.<br /><br />The most perplexing thing about "Fantasma" is that Argento did not need to make it because he had already made his Phantom movie. It was called "Opera" and was filled with classic Argento bravura pieces. If you want to see the master's touch, take a look at the (and this is very important!) widescreen version of that film. Not this.