wilvis-93963 Anyone who has knowledge of the Phantom of the Opera and thinks this is one version of it.Think again this is just toilet paper turned into film.It is just sick.I watched it once and threw it away in the garbage which is where it belongs.Julian Sands must really have needed money to do this movie.

MartinHafer If you are looking for "Phantom of the Opera", I suggest you look elsewhere. This film in very few ways seems like the original Gaston Leroux novel--and even less like the famous musical. It's obvious that one of two things occurred to the folks making this movie. Either they were cynical jerks who simply didn't care about the original story and willfully injected MASSIVE amounts of depravity into the story...or they were smoking crack when they wrote the screenplay!! Yes, it is THAT bad--a repellent and downright stupid film.In many ways, the film looks a lot like "Batman Returns" when the movie started. Out of nowhere, you learn that a baby fell into the sewer beneath the opera house and was raised by rats!! But, unlike the other versions, this one stars the relatively normal looking Julian Sands and not the usual disfigured phantom. This makes you wonder two things: why does he remain in the sewer if he looks quite normal AND is there a film Julian Sands feels is beneath him (after seeing this and "Boxing Helena", you can guess my answer!)?Soon, you see that the 'Phantom' is probably one of the only semi-normal persons in the film. Sure, he lives in the sewers and kills folks, but everyone seems to have it coming, so to speak! Either the victims are deranged dwarfs who delight in murdering the poor rats in VERY grisly ways or they are complete perverts. Yes, I said PERVERTS. Now I don't remember the novel or previous versions of the movie having orgy scenes (complete with LOTS of gratuitous nudity) or pedophiles, but everyone seems sexually obsessed and just plain nasty in this film. I honestly think the film would have been better if they'd just made it a soft-core porn film--then at least audiences would have expected it had little to do with the original.If these were my only objections about this film, I might still see some value and be able to look past the countless flayings and the like in the movie. But, underneath it all, it suffers from something even worse than gratuitous writing--it's not very good otherwise. It's not fun, the acting is bad, the story is stupid and there are so many stupid clichés (I loved the lady suddenly getting her left caught in the rocks while fleeing from the Phantom!). And, it's almost bad enough to be a guilty pleasure for bad movie buffs--it's THAT bad. Apparently Dario Argento is NOT a genius when it comes to horror films--just horrible films.

nastia-estate One of the worst films i have ever seen. Empty, not coherent, Asia Argento is just a plastic doll opening her mouth on the music. Nobody is saying that the story itself is a drama example but from any story one can make just a film or just a thing. I consider that i really lost my Saturday evening watching this film! Do you remember th scene when the phantom scratches's the breast of the diva? He scratches the left one but in the next scene she has scratches on the right one... Then all those pseudo erotic scenes!!! Horrible and badly filmed. The secondary characters play better than the main ones. The diva and the two underground outcasts look pretty great.

Gunnar_Runar_Ingibjargarson Leaden horror costumer that takes its tenuous starting point from the classic Gaston Leroux novel of the same name. The twist in this variation is that the Phantom was raised by telepathic rats in the subterranean caverns beneath the opera house. Thus our feral Phantom (Julian "Ratboy" Sands) develops an obsessive love for up-and-coming diva Christine (Asia Argento), and sets about to seduce her to his dark, rodent existence. Although beautifully photographed, with lots of ornate period detail to catch the eye, this is largely a by-the-numbers supernatural horror story with scant gory set pieces as diversions. Fans of Dario Argento will yell "Rats!" and all else will merely shrug. And why are the rats telepathic, anyway? Screen writing credits go to Gerard Brach, best known for his many collaborations with Roman Polanski, most notably Repulsion. However, none of his absurd sense of humor comes through in this film, which really needs it. A shame all around. The DVD includes a short interview with the film's star, Julian Sands, as well as a photo gallery, some dispensable making-of clips, spliced together to appear as a featurette (mostly in untranslated Italian) and a very informative article from Fangoria Magazine.