Review of Phenomena (1985) by Cassandra M — 13 Apr 2011

If you can get past the initial weirdness of the concept - which includes a teenager who can communicate with insects, a chained-up murderer prone to driving a spike through its victims head's, a monkey wielding a razor blade and more red-herrings than you can shake an Agatha Christie box-set at - then you might just find Phenomena to be a greatly entertaining piece of Argento horror/schlock. The plot, as per usual, is nonsense, and yet, Argento seems to instil it with an almost unbelievable sense of conviction, creating a strange hybrid of Tenebrea's amateur sleuthing style of narrative deconstruction and the warped fairytale fantasia of Suspiria, alongside the more familiar Giallo elements of black-gloved assailants, buckets of blood and an almost pornographic obsession with gleaming, silver, implements of death.

The initial set-up and the opening scenes are fantastic, demonstrating Argento's keen eye for location and composition, as his script finds a young Danish tourist (played by Argento's eldest daughter Fiore) stranded in the middle of the Swiss countryside after missing her last bus back into town. Attempting to find solace, she knocks on the door of the only cottage in sight. When there's no answer, the girl foolishly enters, with Argento brilliantly cross-cutting between the traumatised tourist desperately asking for help, and the thick chains of an unseen foe slowly breaking away from the wall on which they've been bolted. The rhythm and the sense of unease (and later, tension) that Argento creates in this opening scene is phenomenal (sorry!), and is really all the more impressive given the fact that the whole sequence takes place during broad daylight *and* amongst some of the most beautiful and tranquil scenery you're every likely to see!!

From here, the story begins to take shape. There's a killer on the loose with a penchant for dismembering teenage girls. When the head of the Danish tourist turns up after an eight month period of decomposition, the chief of police enlists the help of wheelchair bound entomologist professor John McGregor to study the various insects and secretions that may have collected within the skull to help them define the exact time of death and the possible location of the murder. Across town, Jennifer Corvino, the spoilt daughter of a famous Hollywood superstar, is sent away to the Richard Wagner Boarding school (there's even a disarming Suspiria-style voice over to announce this ten-minutes in), where, on the first night, she enters into a somnambulistic state and inadvertently witnesses a murder. When the school authorities and the other kids find out about Jennifer's sleepwalking episode - and, more alarmingly, her apparent connection with insects (developed during an earlier scene between Jennifer and the school's administrator Frau Brückner and a bee during the drive up to the school) - they chastise her, and subject her to a bizarre medical examination that bring about some alarming subconscious revelations about the night before. Later that day, another girl is killed.

Like Argento's early masterworks, Deep Red (Profondo Rosso), Tenebrae and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Phenomena hinges around the notion of a potential victim having seen more of a murder/murderer than they can fully comprehend. In this case, Jennifer's bout of sleepwalking brought her face to face with the killer and its victim. And, although she remains oblivious to the actual identity of the murderer until much later in the film, she has, by this stage, already seen their face obscured behind a pane of broken glass. Her relationship with insects and her hatred for the school eventually brings her to McGregor, who believes that Jennifer's special bond with the insects could hold the key to discovering the killer's identity, and together, the two hatch a plan to use the insects to retrace the Danish tourist's steps, to, eventually, lead them to the home of the killer.

All of this sounds like complete and utter nonsense when looked at in print (which, to some extent, I suppose it is), but Argento clearly believes in his concept and somehow makes the whole thing plausible... by toning down his usually mind-bending visual style (the baroque colour schemes, cinema-scope compositions and atmospheric camera movements are put aside, with the director going for a much colder visual look, with soft blue hues and black and white production/costume designs captured by a camera that tends to observe from a distance, only rarely getting involved in the action) to give the fantasy a baring in reality, and to somehow, make the whole thing seem a little more believable. Where the film does falter, slightly, is in areas of performance and dialog... the main cast are fine, with the young Jennifer Connelly creating that right balance of bratish adolescence and other-worldly awe as the young girl with the baffling gift, whilst Donald Pleasence brings the same gravitas and sense of overriding authority that he brought to films like Death Line and John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, but the majority of the supporting players are virtually characterless, one dimensional ciphers, handicapped by atrocious dubbing and the director's heavy-handed exposition.

That said, there is fine support from Argento's former partner/fixture/muse Daria Nicolodi in a pivotal role... and although she's subsequently stated that Phenomena is the performance of hers that she likes least of all, I think she creates a truly memorable and quite sympathetic character, who, it must be said, looks surprisingly attractive with glasses and a bad perm!! Perhaps another shortcoming of the film is the dated visual effects, which, quite honestly, were probably dated even by 1985 standards (the swarm of insects' looks like it was crudely photo-shopped in, whilst the point of view shots from the insects are as cheesy as can be). However, these criticisms are quite tenuous, with Argento (for the most part) managing to overcome these minor set-backs to deliver a uniquely bizarre, beautiful and unbelievably violent collage of fairytale/horror/fantasy/schlock.