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Phenomena (1985)

10/31/2012

 
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One part giallo stalk-and-slash, one part dreamy, supernatural coming-of-age tale about a girl who can communicate with bugs, and 100% off-the-wall, batshit crazy, Phenomena is a moviegoing experience you aren't likely to forget.

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Yet another weird offspring born from the demented mind of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, the man who brought the world such Eurocult classics as Suspiria, Deep Red, Inferno, Cat o' Nine Tails and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Phenomena bears many of the hallmarks of the typical Argento film: an innocent in over their heads, a psychotic murderer on the rampage, plenty of shots from the killer's POV, moments of serene beauty punctuated with startling, extreme violence - all set to a pulsating, nerve-shredding rock soundtrack. It has these things, but it also veers off into its own, oddball territory.

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The movie sets its creeptastic mood from the start. On a remote country road somewhere in the mountainous foothills of Switzerland, a yellow bus pulls up at a lonely bus stop. A gaggle of tourists emerge from a nearby forest path and get on the bus, which then pulls off and drives away. Soon after, a lone 14 year-old Danish girl runs after the bus, but is left behind. She shivers in the cold wind blowing down from the hills and looks around her uncertainly. Spying a lone house nearby, she walks up to it and knocks on the door.

Big mistake. She's picked the worse possible house to go poking around in. Something peers at her from inside. We see something chained up inside, ripping itself free. The girl enters the house and is soon viciously attacked by its now-freed prisoner. It chases her outdoors and through a neighboring waterfall park, where it stabs her with a pair of scissors and then decapitates her, her head cascading down the waterfall to be washed out to the lake below.

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Things flash forward eight months later, to the lab in the house of wheelchair-bound entymologist Dr. John McGregor (Donald Pleasence). He's using his expertise on insects and decomposition to assist the police in catching the same killer, who has not been idle since the opening murder. The killer is targeting schoolgirls around the area, and the detective on the case, Inspector Geiger (Patrick Buchau, later seen in TV's The Pretender), vows to catch him.

Next, we meet our young heroine, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), being taken to the Richard Wagner School for Girls by school manager Frau Bruckner. Right away we see Jennifer's special facility for handling insects: a bumblebee buzzes around the car but calmly alights on her palm. "Insects never hurt me," she intones calmly. "I love them."


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The daughter of a famous actor, Jennifer immediately impresses her French roommate, Sophie, who has a crush on her dad, and clashes with the young, beautiful but icy cold headmistress. Jennifer learns of the killer stalking the area and no sooner does she fall asleep then she establishes some sort of psychic connection to the latest victim. Jennifer sleepwalks outside the school and comes across the unfortunate girl, just as she's stabbed through the back of the head in highly grisly fashion. Still sleepwalking, Jennifer runs away from the scene, eventually waking up in the woods near Dr. McGregor's house. His chimpanzee "nurse," Inga, takes her by the hand and leads her into the house to safety.

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McGregor and Jennifer hit it off immediately, and find a shared affinity in their fascination with insects. In the coming days, Jennifer retreats from the callous pupils and hostile staff of the girls' school to frequently visit McGregor, eventually revealing to him her peculiar talents.

When her roommate Sophie is the next murder victim, Jennifer is enlisted by McGregor to use those skills to work with a carrion-seeking fly - a species named the "Great Sarcophagus" - to track down the location where the killer is hiding the bodies, with fateful results...

Phenomena straddles the two separate strands in the Argento filmography. It has many giallo elements (a murder investigation, a gloved killer preying on young women), coupled with supernatural overtones - in this case, unlike Suspiria, the powers are not on the side of evil, but belong to our heroine.

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Per usual, the dialogue is frequently clunky, the acting (other than Connelly and, to a lesser extent, Pleasence) wooden and stiff, and the plot nonsensical. Fans of the Argento's work know that none of this really matters, as his particular skill set is on prominent display here. Argento's films have style to burn. He excels at visual flair, of presenting a series of meticulously-composed shots of simultaneous beauty and ugliness, married to a soundtrack that moves from slowly escalating, eerie suspense to a driving, pounding aural assault of jangly guitar rock. Argento movies follow their own kind of fairy tale, dream logic. It's best just to go with the flow of events and not concern yourself too much with whether they make a lick of any "real world" sense.

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Phenomena is fun and lively enough for most of its length (though perhaps overlong at 110 minutes in its uncut form), but really kicks it up a notch in its absolutely nutso cuckoo, insane final 20 minutes. It's a crazy quilt, all-out gonzo horror movie bonanza, featuring, among many other scenarios, an attempted poisoning,  crawling around narrow dirt underground tunnels, a fall into a slimy pit full of rotten corpses and maggot-ridden body parts, a confrontation with the killer on a rowboat in the middle of a lake, a massive swarm of flies eating the flesh off someone's face, a man breaking his own thumb to get free, a fiery explosion, a surprise decapitation, and a vengeful, razor-wielding chimp.  My jaw dropped at the overdose of awesomeness that I had just witnessed.

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Daria Nicolodi as Frau Bruckner
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Dalila Di Lazzaro as the headmistress
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Donald Pleasence for some reason attempts a (not bad) Scottish accent, and spends most of the movie staring at bugs and looking somber. Still, even a somnolent Pleasence acts circles around most of the cast. Jennifer Connelly, only 14 years old at the time of filming, is a bit raw around the edges but gives a pretty impressive, sensitive performance overall, in only her second feature film (after Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America). Argento shows surprising (and rather uncharacteristic) restraint  in how he presents the budding sexuality of Ms. Connelly. The camera lingers on her beauty but in a mostly chaste manner that never quite crosses the line into exploitation territory. Instead, he saves the queasiness for his brutal murder sequences, typically well-staged but featuring much younger victims than usual (most in the 14 to 16 age bracket), which might come as a bit of a shock to some.

Though it shares some obvious parallels with the director's earlier masterpiece, Suspiria - young American girl goes to sinister boarding school in Europe and encounters murder and evildoing, winning the day through her own innocent powers - Phenomena is very much its own odd entity, much stranger and random.

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All the instrumental music, by Goblin and others, works a treat (though I found some of the vocal rock tracks, by Iron Maiden and Motorhead, less effective). While not as terrifying as Goblin's landmark score for Suspiria, the music here is still creepy and helps tremendously in creating a freaky, unsettling mood.

Worth seeing for its ending alone, Phenomena overcomes its lapses of logic and goofy, tin-earred dialogue to create a unique horror movie experience, yet another of Argento's triumphs of mood and atmosphere over substance.
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This is my contribution to the Italian Horror Movie Blogathon, an annual event hosted by Kevin at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies. Head over there to check out more wild Italian horror treats covered by other bloggers.
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Sergio (Tipping My Fedora) link
10/31/2012 07:22:22 am

This is, allegedly, one of Argento's own favourites, which I must admit I have always found much too much to stomach. As you say, it is such a heady mixture and the finale is just much too violent for me. I'm a big fan of Argento, but my affection pretty much stops with TENEBRAE, the film he made just before PHENOMENA.

Jeff
10/31/2012 03:37:58 pm

I hear you, Sergio...my cut-off for Argento ends with this film, pretty much. Not only has his tendency toward mean-spiritedness grown to a major focus in recent years, but even worse, he seems to have lost his mojo, as his recent films have been uniformly amateurish and ugly.

I got a real kick out of PHENOMENA, though. Thanks for the comments!

Rick link
10/31/2012 11:30:50 am

I think your review is pretty much on target--but it's still one of my favorite Argento films. I didn't see the original version for years. My first impression was a shorter, edited cut called CREEPERS. Even in that truncated form, it was interesting.

Jeff
10/31/2012 03:39:55 pm

Oh, trust me, Rick, I enjoyed PHENOMENA very much. I've never seen the shorter version...sounds like some good stuff was left out of it, though. Thanks for stopping by!

R.A. Kerr link
11/3/2012 02:42:17 am

You see, this is exactly why I follow your blog. I had no idea that there was a genre of Italian horror films, or an Argento cult following. However, thanks to your well-written reviews, I can learn about these movies without having the living daylights scared out of me. You're actually providing a valuable public service.

Jeff
11/3/2012 08:19:41 am

Heh. Thanks, Ruth! (You're too kind (and funny). Argento can be a tough sell, especially to women, who understandably might find the constant violence to women hard to stomach (although, to be fair, several men get killed is gruesome ways too in PHENOMENA as well as many of his other films).

If you ever want to dip your toe in the heady waters of Italian horror cinema (and it is a frequently visually stunning cinematic world), I recommend starting with the more subtle scares found in the earlier works of Mario Bava. His BLACK SABBATH and the anthology BLACK SUNDAY are fine "classic" Gothic horror films with much less gore (more akin to HAMMER films but with a more Continental sensibility).

Chaka Khan-Kim link
3/4/2015 09:29:28 am

Just wanted to mention, you DO realize, I hope, that you've confused the two titles of Maestro Bava's classic films, there was first 1960's LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO (BLACK SUNDAY) (1960) with Barbara Steele, followed by his omnibus film THREE FACES OF FEAR (BLACK SABBATH) (1961) with Boris Karloff, and NOT the other way around! Just thought I'd mention it! XOXOXO, Chaka Khan-Kim (the Korean version of Chaka Khan)

Ruth link
12/26/2012 11:04:46 pm

It's amazing how different [read: skinny] Connelly looks now. I think she looks much better with more meat on her bones, like she did here and in Rocketeer.

Jeff
12/28/2012 09:14:33 am

I very much agree, Ruth! Connelly looked wonderfully voluptious in THE ROCKETEER, THE HOT SPOT, etc. But ever since 2000's REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, she's slimmed down alarmingly, and now just looks like another standard Hollywood pretty face. Too bad. Thanks for the comment!


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