After watching the first few versions of The Phantom of the Opera that I have previously alluded to in my blog, I decided to try to watch as many variations of the film as possible. This version I came across on late night tv and I was intrigued.
With this version, we are treated to Dario Argento's vision involving the classic tale. The Phantom (played by Julian Sands) isn't disfigured at all. He's just a dirty creepy guy who was orphaned at a young age and raised by rats. As such he is protective of his "family". His enemy in this version is of course Ignace the rat catcher (played by Istvan Bubik).
The Phantom lives and creeps about the Paris Opera House and ,like the original, he doesn't want to be disturbed. He changes his attitude about having visitors after he sees and falls in love with the beautiful Christine Daae (played by Asia Argento). As in the novel (although with a change of title) Baron Raoul De Chagny (played by Andrea Di Stefano) is also in love with Christine. Christine finds herself torn between the two and so on and so forth.
Another variation in this version was that Christine actually seems to be more in to the Phantom instead of Raoul. This was the first time that I even heard of the idea of the Phantom and Christine having sex with each other much less actually seeing it displayed.
All in all this version was not horrible. It has the expected gore of Italian horror and the special effects were pretty good. The changes that were incorporated into this picture were a little silly at times but they didn't necessarily take away from the original story. The acting was ok. The chemistry conveyed between Christine and the Phantom was more believable than between Christine and Raoul. It seems to me that it would a little challenging to realistically appear to sing opera but unfortunately Asia and the voice that was used for Christine's singing voice did not remotely fit at all.
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