Films That Witness Madness

review

PHENOMENA

SUSPIRIA, Argento's widely acknowledged masterpiece and best film to date, is a supernatural tale told through a standard giallo narrative. Everything is in place: the amateur detective, the foreign environment, the unseen assailant. PHENOMENA tries to work in the same way. All the essentials of SUSPIRIA exist within the film. But where SUSPIRIA soared, PHENOMENA crashes with a thud.

A young American girl, Jennifer, arrives in Switzerland for her stay at the Richard Wagner International School for Girls - we are even treated to a droll voice over in the same vein as SUSPIRIA: "And so Jennifer arrives in Switzerland..." - and quickly learns about a nasty spate of unsolved murders that have occurred near the school grounds. Jennifer, played by a rather disinterested Jennifer Connelly, is a head-strong and outspoken young woman with a few personality quirks. First of all, she's a sleep walker. Then there's her ability to communicate with insects. After sleep walking her way to a murder scene, Jennifer panics and, no thanks to a couple of guys who first hit her with their car and then try to take her for a ride, makes her way to the home of John McGregor, a wheelchair-bound entomologist who lives alone with his trained chimpanzee. Once Jennifer's roommate falls victim to the killer, she and McGregor decide to find out who the killer is.

With the help of a goddamned fly.

There is no easy way to say this. PHENOMENA is a mess of a film, overlong with too little action in the narrative to help pass the time, sloppily constructed and poorly written. Interestingly, Argento is credited twice with writing this film. The first at the start of the main credits - 'Written, Produced, and Directed by Dario Argento' - and then later in the credits where he shares the 'Written by' credit with Franco Ferrini. I wouldn't have been that proud of it. While Argento has never been the greatest dialogue writer working in Italian cinema, here he is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Take the scene where McGregor, played by genre great Donald Pleasence, and Jennifer are discussing ESP and McGregor tells her "it's perfectly normal for insects to be slightly telepathic". Really? Or how about this little philosophical nugget: "What is this association between insects and the human soul? Is it because of the multifarious mystery of them both?" While Pleasence had to utter more than his fair share of groaners in HALLOWEEN, one has to wonder how he kept himself from laughing while muttering these lines.

While Argento's films may sometimes falter narratively, they are always a treat to watch. Unfortunately, PHENOMENA is shot in a bland, detached, straight-to-video style with no tell-tale traces of the visual brilliance of it's director. While I have often taken Argento to task for his nasty habit of 'dolly masturbation', a little bit of variation would have been welcome here. Even the murders, a nasty signature of Argento's brand of filmmaking, are restrained and unimpressive. For Fulci fans, there's a knife through the mouth scene taken from HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, but everyone else craving the red stuff will be profoundly disappointed. Things ratchet up a notch during the closing 30 minutes but not enough to warrant the mind-numbing 80 minutes it takes to get to that point.

The most violent deaths are saved for the films killers. Frau Bruckner, played by Daria Nicolodi, was raped in a mental asylum - through the bars, no less - and has given birth to a hilarious looking bastard of a child. Looking like a cross between a bulldog and a Cabbage Patch kid, this little monster is the one who killed several of the girls, leading mommy to cover his tracks by offing anyone she deems to be getting to close. Junior is besieged by Jennifer's horde of flies before being set on fire and drowning. Mom, meanwhile, has the displeasure of making the acquaintance of a very pissed off chimp and her straight razor. There seems to be some sort of ill will being worked out in the film as Argento not only has his ex-wife brutally carved to pieces, but also decapitates his own daughter, Fiore, in the opening segment of the film. Giallo as therapy? Maybe. Toss in a dip in a pool full of rotting corpses and a man breaking his own thumb to get out of a pair of handcuffs and you have an ending which would have been a truly memorable one had it not been attached to such a stinker.

The actors on display in PHENOMENA are a real mixed bag. Pleasence is his usual charming self and Nicolodi revs things up well when her true nature is finally exposed. But Connelly is so incredibly boring to watch that she drowns her capable supporting cast in her ineptitude. This might have been one of her first films, but that's no excuse for not having any emotion whatsoever behind your line readings. Argento also manages to give the film a slightly creepy edge by sexualising her way too much, filming her with her clothes hung seductively off one shoulder, walking around in short and semi-transparent night gowns. She was only 14 at the time of filming and she looks it. That questionable sexuality would rear it's head yet again in TRAUMA, for which Argento filmed his daughter Asia's first topless scene.

PHENOMENA remains a true one-off in Argento's filmography. Too weird, dull, and passive to be even remotely interesting, it shows that even the most talented of directors can produce subpar work. It's a lifeless film with a bloody, goofball ending but not much else.

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