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Say Uh... Phenomena!
by Richard Glenn
Schmidt
[Please note: Reader beware.
There are major spoilers coming up. Just watch this freakin' movie.]
Whenever the wind is in the
trees, I think of
Phenomena and nothing
feels right or normal in the best way. Released in 1985, Dario Argento’s
twisted fairytale masterpiece has always had a strange effect on me. It is a
ridiculous world of tangible impossibilities with an atmosphere of doom and
insanity hanging around every corner. Imagine if your fantasy world had
brain cancer and then you were able to film it; the end result would look a
whole lot like Phenomena.
The film starts as Jennifer
Corvino (played by Jennifer Connelly), the daughter of a famous actor,
arrives at a Swiss boarding school. Jennifer has a sleepwalking problem and
one night while she is wandering around the closed section of the school,
she witnesses a girl being murdered by a psychotic killer. She meets
wheelchair bound Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasence), an entomologist
living with his helper chimpanzee who has been enlisted by the police to
help track down the murderer. He seems to think that Jennifer’s sleepwalking
is a symptom of burgeoning mental powers. McGregor’s hypothesis proves to be
true as Jennifer soon realizes that she can communicate with insects. They
decide to use her strange gift to catch the killer.
When the unlikely duo gets too close to discovering the truth, the killer
comes after Professor McGregor. Now alone against a sadistic psychopath,
Jennifer mistakenly takes shelter with Frau Brückner (Daria Nicolodi) who
turns out to be the mother of the deformed creature that has been doing all
the killing. With the help of a detective (Patrick Bauchau) and her insect
helpers, Jennifer just barely escapes with her life. Frau Brückner kills the
detective and comes looking for our young heroine. Jennifer’s ultimate
rescue comes in the form of John McGregor’s chimpanzee that gets revenge for
its slain master by taking a straight razor to the insane woman.
When I was 12 or 13 years old, I
was intrigued by the cover of a VHS tape entitled
Creepers:
a painting of Jennifer Connelly (“The chick from
Labyrinth!”
I thought to myself) holding a handful of flies and other insects. These
creepy crawlies were flying out of her half rotted face and I was completely
mesmerized by the sickening beauty of this image. At this point in my life,
my parents were allowing me to rent whatever horror films I pleased. They
had given me their old VCR to hook up in my room so I had absolutely no
trouble getting this particular flick by them.
Little did I know what awaited me on that tape.
Creepers
is actually Dario Argento’s giallo-fantastico masterpiece
Phenomena,
minus about 28 minutes of footage. A few very brief shots of gore had been
trimmed but most of the cuts had to do with the plot and Jennifer Corvino’s
character development. The most shocking moments in the film: the big reveal
of Frau Brückner’s murderous and hideously deformed child and Jennifer
falling into a pit of rotting corpses, remained intact on the rental copy I
watched back in the day.
I love Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini’s childish plot. Everything that
takes place in Phenomena,
no matter how ludicrous, made perfect sense to my young mind. Even now, I’ll
catch myself just nodding and smiling as the events unfold that would likely
cause most rational folks to start throwing furniture at the screen. How is
it that a girl with the ability to communicate telepathically with insects
just happens to become best buds with a crippled entomologist who just
happens to have been researching the psychic powers of insects throughout
his career? I guess that is a small concession in a film that also features
a dang chimpanzee armed with a straight razor that brutally savages his
master’s murderer.
I especially love the film’s minimalist set design. The brilliantly lit
monochromatic and sparsely decorated walls help focus the viewer’s attention
on the action and give it a stark bleakness and a hypnotic melancholy that
I’ve rarely found in American horror films. Similarly, Joe D’Amato’s horror
films often have little to no set design and I can’t help but feel this
perfectly communicated sense of claustrophobia and horror in my bones. I’m
sure one could assume these things were kept simple to keep production costs
low but so be it, I’m already smitten.
The music of Phenomena ranges from spectacular to totally inappropriate.
Simon Boswell and Goblin contribute the ethereal pieces and the horror
stingers. And though they sound great where they are placed within the film,
“Flash of the Blade” by Iron Maiden and “Ace of Spades” by Motörhead are
disruptive to the flow of the rest of the soundtrack. Now don’t get me
wrong, I was a metalhead during my early teens and the inclusion of these
songs only made me love this movie all the more. But even as a youngster, I
knew that “Flash of the Blade” is a song about duelists. How many duelists
are there in Phenomena?
Not a single dang one! Argento’s indiscriminate love of (often cheesy) heavy
metal rears its ugly head again in his next film
Opera
but with even less success.
A classic Italian horror film
needs a great cast and
Phenomena is certainly no
slouch in that department. Leading the cast is a young Jennifer Connelly
(who Argento spotted in
Once Upon a Time in America
and decided to cast her) and Donald Pleasence who was serving time in Italy
between Halloween sequels. Daria Nicolodi is totally batshit crazy as Frau
Brückner, one of my favorite villainesses ever captured on film. Belgian
born actor Patrick Bauchau (of
“Carnivale”)
plays Inspector Geiger, the detective who almost saves the day but who dies
horribly (off camera).
Sadly, Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly has since distanced herself from
Phenomena
and her time spent in Italy. In a 2004 interview with Vogue, she disses the
film and her performance in it saying it was little more than an excuse to
vacation in Europe. I can’t help but laugh at this because this is best
thing Connelly has ever done or ever will do. No, I’m not kidding. As far as
I’m concerned, Jennifer Connelly’s career tanked in 1986 with only a few
minor points of interest since (Mulholland
Falls,
Dark City
and the Dark Water
remake). There is still a chance for her to redeem herself but only if she
returns to Italian horror.
One of the greatest character actors of all time, Donald Pleasence, delivers
his performance of Professor John McGregor with his usual morbid sincerity.
Pleasence is totally convincing as the renowned entomologist even while he
is dishing up the corniest dialogue. He easily mesmerizes the viewer into
believing his every word. In an interview in Profondo Argento, the actor
mentions that Phenomena
had one of the silliest scripts he’d ever read. I find this very curious.
Perhaps Paganini Horror
and Fatal Frames
(two fairly worthless Italian horror films that Pleasence lent his talents
to) didn’t have any scripts at all.
Near the end of the film, we
have traveled with Jennifer through windswept Sweden, been knocked with her
into a pit full of carrion and squirming larvae and joined in her desperate
psychic cry to her insect brethren to chew the face off her diminutive
tormentor. Moments later, everything changes as Jennifer is swimming to
shore thus washing away the horror (and filth from the corpse pit) and we
are led to believe that the horror is finally over. For me, this scene is
the most resplendent of the film and is a transcendent landmark for Italian
horror. This ethereal moment is interrupted when Jennifer’s father’s lawyer
who shows up to take her home.
Next thing we know, Frau Brückner (who we assumed was dead) shows up with a
friggin’ piece of sheet metal and cuts off her would be hero’s head off!
This shocker is quite a showstopper. Where can the film possibly go from
there? Well, I’ll tell ya: Professor McGregor’s dang monkey shows up with a
straight razor to take care of business. In a chilling and completely
outrageous moment, Miss Brückner’s face and throat is mercilessly hacked at
with a sharp and deadly implement wielded by an enraged monkey’s paw.
Phenomena
is a feverish and gory maggot party that will always be at the top of the
list of my favorite horror movies of all time. I cannot stress enough how
badly you need to see this film. There is a whole lot of ugly, a whole lot
of weird and a whole lot of beauty packed into Argento’s whacked out beast
which stands very tall among the dozen or so horror flicks that had a huge
impact on my young brain.
Phenomena’s
somnambulistic evil grows as the years go by and every time I am drawn back
in, I get just a little closer to happily losing my mind.
Sources
“Look homeward, angel” by
Michael Specter, Vogue Nov. 2004
Profondo Argento by Alan Jones
Spaghetti Nightmares by Luca Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta
Dario Argento Wikipedia
Phenomena Wikipedia
Phenomena IMDB
Some Great Argento Links
Mondo Digital - The Films of
Dario Argento
More Mondo Digital Argento
Kinoeye - Italian Horror:
Phenomena
10,000 Bullets - Dario Argento
Doomed Moviethon - Argentophobia
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