PHENOMENA: Everything But The Lavandino Della Cucina

The '80s were the best time to be an Italian director of horror films. Even when budgets dipped at the decade's end, there remained an international interest for horror films that allowed their movies to travel around the world. The standard bearer during this time was definitely Dario Argento, who made the slickest and best-budgeted films of anyone in the scene. The most interesting thing about his kingpin position is that it did not influence him to dilute his work for mass acceptance. In fact, the further he went down the road, the stranger his celluloid output became.

Phenomena arrived at the midpoint of the '80s and it's a prime example of Argento in full eccentric flight with studio-caliber resources backing him up. The story begins with Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), the teen daughter of an American movie star, getting shunted off to a boarding school in Switzerland. Unfortunately, she arrives in the middle of a string of brutal murders targeting the girls attending the school. Her habit of sleepwalking enhances the danger she faces from this killer. However, Jennifer has an ace up her sleeve that the other girls lack: she can communicate with insects.

This endears her to local entomologist/police consultant Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance), who is confined to a wheelchair but assisted by a support chimpanzee. She uses her insect-friendly skills to assist him in figuring out the killer's identity. As she tries to evade her often-cruel fellow students and a domineering headmistress (Dalila Di Lazzaro), the killer takes aim at Jennifer - and her travails lead her to a mountainside cabin that contains a mysterious, monstrous presence that has something to do with the killings...

If that synopsis made you do a double take once or twice trying to make sense of it, well, that's just the way Phenomena works. Italian horror is known to its fans for its indifference to basic matters of plausibility or maintaining the audience's suspension of disbelief as it goes in for the kill. Argento doubles down on those attitudes here: he throws all his most bizarre notions into the pot and stirs it wildly, delivering a film that rockets from one wild notion to the next without concern for how it all hangs together.

Here's a quick rundown of things that commonly flummox first-time viewers of Phenomena. No one, not even the cops, seem terribly motivated to solve the murders that are whittling down the student population. The behavior of the students and staff at the school doesn't match up with anything you recognize from reality. Argento never quite figures out what to do with Jennifer's special insect-related powers - and he makes his odd film even stranger by throwing in random bursts of Iron Maiden or Motorhead on the soundtrack alongside his usual prog-rock electronic scoring.

However, griping about Phenomena's inability to work in a conventional manner is pointless because nothing is conventional about it by design. Argento is kind of like a pure-blood horror version of David Lynch here in that he creates an entirely self-contained world that operates on its own inner logic, one that he has no desire to explain to the outsider. You either accept it on its own terms and take the ride or you don't.

The adventurous souls willing to take that ride are treated to something that is weird in a consistently compelling way. The defenders of Italian horror will advise you that you should relax your grip on concerns of plausibility because the best of these films work on a dreamlike level. That's the approach that Schlockmania recommends here. Argento treats his storyline as a springboard for stylization, mixing delirious horror concepts (a giallo-style killer, nightmares becoming reality, a "thing" chained in a room, a family house with secrets, swarms of insects) with lavish visuals that utilize everything from swooping crane shots to underwater photography.

Along the way, Argento stacks up a series of setpieces that are as beautifully stylized as they are conceptually wild: the opening murder is capped with a shocking shot captured in extreme slow motion, there's a scene where the heroine sleepwalks into a giallo-styled stalking/murder that also throws in a high fall and pedestrian vs. car stunts and a jaw-dropper of a finale that plays like a four-way crash between a giallo, the Grand Guignol, a monster flick and a Brothers Grimm fairytale.

As for the actors, Argento largely leaves them to their own devices but Connelly is charming and poised here in her 'teen actor' phase and Pleasance is a warm, engaging presence as he works his Scottish accent and plays paternal with both Connelly and his chimp. They provide a nice oasis of humanity in the swirling maelstrom of Argento's dark fancies - that's ultimately what this film is about and it works if you can take it as a filmmaker leading you through a labyrinth of his obsessions as he works out his inner psychology via horror theatrics. He may not be laying it out in a way that can be easily explained but it's never boring.

Phenomena is also fascinating for those already with familiar with Argento's prior films because it's a uniquely self-reflexive piece of work that merrily romps through his cinematic past, lifting ideas and motifs from multiple places to reconfigure them in new, dreamlike ways. A heroine being sent to a sinister foreign boarding school recalls the setup of Suspiria, the faceless, black leather-clad killer evokes Argento's gialli, there are two(!) head through a plane of glass scenes that reference Deep Red, an underwater sequence recalls Inferno, etc.

By the time you reach the film's closing frames, you've had an experience that pushes Italian horror to its surreal limits yet makes sense in a strange, outside-the-box way for those accustomed to Italian horror. Either way, the journey is too distinctive to be dull and one must give Argento credit for merging his then-current fancies with his cinematic past to give his audience everything but the lavandino della cucina.

UHD Notes: Synapse has followed up their blu-ray editions of this title with a double-disc UHD set. Come back next week to read a review of the standard edition UHD release.