Too many fans seem to be blown away

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

An Exercise In Nonsense

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

I discovered the classic piece thanks to Twin Peaks: a mystery entrance in dark woods, saving love in hell and meeting dead people well alive... Then Dan Brown told his version and it was interesting and the adaptation of his novel was visually powerful. So here one century before, i didn't expected much but after a few minutes, i felt very bored: the captions failed to clearly present the 9 circles and visually they look finally a bit all the same: a river or a beach with naked people agonizing... On the screen, Virgil knows all and is so powerful that we can wonder why he needed Dante anyway.. and by the way, her lover Beatrice appears at the beginning and never happens again as Dante gets out from hell. There is some good costumes and special effects and that was like watching a Star Trek Classic but at the end, we are faraway of the power of words and art from Gustave Doré that inspired the movie.

L'inferno is a pretty early feature length film. In fact it's one of the earliest that still exists today. 1911 is more than hundred years ago and the impact of all that time shows in the movie. It's highly unlikely that they'll ever make something like this again. A Mayor production with a lot of naked people suffering the tortures of hell is a no-no today AND THAT'S A SHAME because this movies gives one of the best and most outright visualizations of hell there has ever been. The movie takes Dante's portrait of hell and puts it on the screen in big fashion and it's not so much the story that matters but the images. Broad lands of people suffering in hell and it looks absolutely believable even when souls fly around and the Devil eats people alive. The visuals are terrific and a one of a kind experience. So if you want a movie that portrays hell go with this one. It's not a movie you'll watch over and over again but it's a good idea to watch it at least once in your lifetime and let it have an impact on you.

Yes, it's important as an very early feature film that actually survives in something like its original form (the loss of much of a film t like The Kelly Gang is a tragedy) but L'inferno is pretty primitive.The story telling technique consists of an inter-title telling us what we're about to see, followed by a static shot showing it to us. The acting is of the roll your eyes and wave your arms around variety the actor playing Peter of Vigna is so over the top it's an object lesson in overacting) and the actors playing Dante and Virgil are, to put it politely, pretty porky. There are some great images here - the river of filth, filled with the flatterers, a decapitated man, holding his screaming head up high in his hand - but there's quite a bit that's laughable too. Cerberus looks liked a rather friendly three headed alpaca, and the harpies look like something out of a school play. And then there's one of the most inappropriate soundtracks ever imposed on a poor innocent piece of celluloid. Tangerine Dream... really? So as a historical film artifact... worth the watch, but only with the sound down

WARNING: This review contains explicit language which some people may find offensive.I attended a special screening of "L'Inferno" at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan; for this screening, the film's intertitles had been removed, and the movie's dialogue and narration were spoken live by the brilliant actors Len Cariou and Roberta Maxwell, accompanied by an appropriately hellish violin score by Gil Morgenstern.For all its considerable crudeness, this early film is still powerful. Much of its impact is due to the decision to depict the (male) inhabitants of Hell entirely naked. (A couple of them are wanting an arm or a leg.) The image of naked men desperately scrambling for room in Charon's cramped coracle is far more effective than the same image would have been with costumed actors. The film would have been even more powerful had it included female nudity, although I concede that this would have been too much to expect in 1911. Even the nudity which we see here is undercut by the fact that some of the men in Hell are wearing nappies. The notorious sequence in the river of excrement is cleaned up somewhat here, to feature merely a river of dirty water. The narration includes a reference to the famous sign at the entrance to Hell -- "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" -- yet we never see this sign; perhaps it was rendered in Italian in the original prints of this film, and was therefore cut out of prints exhibited outside Italy.The exterior scenes are shot against stark cliffs plunging perpendicularly to the sea, affording no shelter: the landscapes of Hell. Several flashbacks contain interior shots, featuring painted sets of the style which modern audiences will attribute to French film-maker Georges Melies.I try to perceive every film that I view in the context of its own time. Regrettably, most of the acting here is crude even by 1911 standards. The subject matter allows for some melodramatic overacting, yet these actors exceed the limits. The special effects, too, are crude by 1911 standards. Several of the double exposures are off-register, with visible "shimmy". The hell-hound Cerberus looks like a three-headed ostrich cross-bred with a poodle. Georges Melies was doing more convincing special effects in 1906. I did like the clever method of giving Beatrice a halo by placing a whirligig behind the actress's head. The costumes in the flashback sequences are impressive.For the screening which I attended, the original Italian intertitles were newly translated by Robert Pinsky of the Poetry Society of America. I feel that he should have been less literal and more colloquial: when Dante described a damned soul "making a fig", it wasn't immediately clear to the (mostly American) audience that this referred to an obscene hand-gesture.For all its crudity, this is an astonishing film with great visual impact. I wish that the same production company had tackled Dante's "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso". My rating: 8 out of 10.