The Stendhal Syndrome

The first seven minutes of this Dario Argento slasher are inventive and riveting.  Argento's daughter Asia, playing a Rome policewoman, hunts for a serial rapist in Florence's Uffizi Gallery and thereupon falls victim to the film's eponymous syndrome, hallucinating under the influence of the gallery's magnificent art work.  Any cinematic sequence that ends with the leading lady making out with an ugly fish has to be given credit for its bizarre originality:

Unfortunately, the remaining one hour and fifty-one minutes are not nearly as interesting, and this one falls far short of Argento's earlier giallo gems Deep Red and Suspiria.  Like most Argento films, The Stendhal Syndrome has a spontaneous generation plot: shit just happens, for no apparent reason.  Also like most Argento films, young women are raped and mutilated in vivid detail (though directing his own daughter in two violent rape scenes does seem a bit extreme, even for a celluloid sadist like Argento).  But unlike vintage Argento, this one is largely missing his trademark moody style, the intense colors, bewildering camera work, and carefully composed and ultra-lurid faces of death.  There are bits of it here and there, but also long stretches of pretty mediocre slasher nonsense, most of it in the film's absurd second half, when, after dispatching the serial rapist and finding relief from the Stendhal Syndrome, Asia Argento's character suffers an entirely different sort of breakdown and the film meanders on for another hour pursuing a second mystery to its pretty predictable conclusion.  The only really interesting moment in film's second half occurs when post-Stendhal Syndrome Asia tries to rape her wimpy cop boyfriend, other than that not much happens except for Asia wandering around in a cheap blonde wig and initiating an obviously ill-fated romance with a French boy named Marie (don't ask).  The longer the movie goes on, the farther away the first seven minutes seem, and the disappointment grows and grows.