Say Uh… Phenomena!

[Reader beware. There are major spoilers coming up.]

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 fairy-tale masterpiece has always had a strange effect on me. It’s a ridiculous world of tangible impossibilities with an atmosphere of doom and insanity hanging around every corner. Imagine if your fantasy world got caught in the kitchen disposal 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’s 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 a segment on an MTV show called “Stephen King’s World of Horror” about Dario Argento. It talked about a film called Creepers and I sought it out. The cover of the VHS tape entitled Creepers really blew my mind. It features 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 young 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. There was a mix-up at the video store and the film Creeper (AKA In the Devil’s Garden AKA Assault from 1971) was in the Creepers case by mistake. Once that was resolved, I finally had the film in my hands.

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 of the finale. The brilliantly lit monochromatic and sparsely decorated walls help focus the viewer’s attention on the action and give it a stark bleakness. Phenomena also has a hypnotic quality, a morbid melancholy (a little something which I call “The Vibe”) 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 “Locomotive” 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” has nothing lyrically that fits with what’s happening onscreen. Argento’s indiscriminate love of (often cheesy) heavy metal rears its ugly head again in his next film Opera but with less or more success depending entirely on your taste in metal.

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’s 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 he’d forgotten about Paganini Horror and Fatal Frames of hadn’t made them yet at the time of the interview. Those two totally wacko Italian horror films are easily sillier than Phenomena.

Near the end of the film, we have traveled with Jennifer through windswept Sweden, entered a girls’ school with almost no discernible curriculum, 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’re led to believe that the horror is finally over. For me, this ethereal scene is the most resplendent of the film and is a transcendent landmark for Italian horror. This peaceful moment is interrupted when Jennifer’s father’s lawyer who shows up to take her home. No easy denouement here as Argento has one more showstopping setpiece tucked up his sleeve.

Phenomena is a feverish, outrageous, 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 or see it again if you’ve already taken the plunge. There’s a whole lot of ugly, a whole lot of weird, and a whole lot of beauty packed into Argento’s whacked out beast. This film 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.

My Doomed Moviethon

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I first became hooked on horror movies watching Elvira’s “Movie Macabre” when I was a kid (around 9 or 10 years old). She was making fun of Flesh For Frankenstein and I was totally flipping out. I was laughing at her gags (and oggling her goodies) but I was also really enjoying the movie (despite the fact that it was cut to ribbons for television). After that night, I tuned in every weekend to catch her shtick and I always ended up enjoying whatever movie she hosted.

Soon after, my parents gave me their old TV and I started up staying up all night to watch whatever was on the local channels. Some of you who remember the 1980s may also remember that there used to be horror movies on ALL THE TIME on late night TV. I have this vague memory of catching the creepy mannequin-filled Tourist Trap just before dawn. Good or bad, damn it, they were always on.

There were two films which aired in the middle of the night that caused me to slip over the edge and become completely obsessed with horror movies. The first one was Zombie 6: Monster Hunter (AKA Joe D’Amato’s Absurd) and the second was Girls Nite Out (a dull yet atmospheric slasher flick with the killer wearing a bear costume circa. 1984). Granted, neither of these are the best examples of horror but these two movies totally blew me away. I can still hear the announcer’s voice saying “We now return to Zombie 6: Monster Hunter” in a laughably menacing voice. I know George Eastman is out there somewhere stuffing some babysitter’s head into an oven.

Although I’m sure she has no idea, my sister Lora also had a hand in altering my filmic fate forever. While she was babysitting me one night, her boyfriend came over with a copy of Nightmare On Elm Street. Before they started the tape my sister told me the story of their “friend” who still sleeps in the same bed with her mother after watching the film. That didn’t scare me and neither did the first Elm Street flick. Later, my sister and her boyfriend took me to the local drive-in for a weird triple feature: Hot Pursuit (John Cusack, huh?), Cut And Run (yep, the Ruggero Deodato flick), and Creepshow 2. “Thanks for the ride, lady!”

By this time, my parents and I were renting 4 movies every weekend. Well, that all changed when I caught the horror bug. When I was 11, my parents gave me my own VCR. They had just purchased a new VCR, so, once again, I got the hand-me-down. Lucky for me the old one was in terrific shape and soon the thing was running nearly every time I set foot in my room.

There, at the video store (a Video-X-Tron before Blockbuster bought them out) was something that thrilled me: the HORROR section. There is something devious and alluring about an entire set of shelves full of dead teenagers, dark places, unholy incantations, and severed heads. Oddly enough, my parents had no problem with allowing me to watch whatever I wanted (sure, blame the parents!) so I had no trouble getting started on my mission which was to rent every single horror movie in the store. Nowadays, this would be easy since it is rare to find a decent selection of horror titles anywhere.

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My family’s rental program changed one weekend. Two movies for my parents, one for the whole family, and four horror flicks for me. The ones I remember loving the most were Evil Dead 2, the Friday the 13th series, Halloween, The Masque Of The Red Death (1964), Rabid, Night Of the Creeps, Hellraiser (both 1 and 2), From Beyond, Critters (both 1 and 2), Night of the Demons, Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Ghoulies, Warlock, Creepers (aka Dario Argento’s Phenomena), Munchies (terrible I know but I must have watched this one 4 or 5 times), Lamberto Bava’s Demons, Forever Evil (actually scared me!), April Fools Day, Dario Argento’s Trauma, Revenge Of The Dead (AKA Zeder) and many, many more.

Several years later, my buddy Scott (the original Moviethoner) and I started renting enough movies and buying enough junk food to get us through the night. Scott introduced me to Peter Medak’s The Changeling starring George C. Scott. We often tore through the entire Omen trilogy (yes, I still like to pretend Omen IV: The Awakening never happened) as well as Phantasm and Phantasm II before the night was through.

Then, I just stopped watching horror movies. I have no idea why I gave up on them. Perhaps films like Pulp Fiction and Clerks steered me into Indie land. Or maybe it was the sixth entry in the Halloween series or Hellraiser: Bloodline. I could just as easily blame the Leprechaun series or The Mangler for ruining horror movies for me.

I was still a film buff, watching tons and tons of artsy cinematic masterworks. I would sit through Last Tango In Paris, Rashômon, A Woman Under The Influence, Touch Of Evil, Amacord, etc. I was always searching for something with meaning and depth. Then one day (about three years ago) I was watching Fellini’s Satyricon and I just snapped. Sure, it’s a disturbing film filled with frightening characters and some gory moments but it (like Fellini’s other films) is half an hour too long. I didn’t want to endure the lofty and pretentious any longer. I wanted something fun and something gory that I could ingest in 90 minutes or less (preferably less).

One day, I was talking my friend Nafa about horror movies. He was a former moviethoner who had stopped watching horror flicks years ago but had been quite a connoisseur in his own time. Charged from the conversation, I decided to start renting horror movies again. My first surprise: I was appalled at how little horror Blockbuster Video actually carries nowadays. The company is reducing their VHS stock to make room for DVD but not restocking their shelves with the DVD versions. This corporate giant had bought out nearly all of the ma and pa video stores but it didn’t keep the one thing that gave them their strength in the first place:, their selection.

Frustrated, I went on the internet and started to poke around for horror facts and trivia. I suddenly noticed just how many of those old horror flicks I used to love had been censored long before I ever got a chance to watch them. As a child of the 80s, I absolutely despise censorship (thanks to the PMRC), so I decided to track the uncensored versions of these flicks down. No easy task, especially considering that I wasn’t into collecting. Yet.

Nafa told me about this horror/eurosleaze/porn video store across town and decided to check it out. Well, the situation looked grim. The place, Unique Video, as cool as it is was way out of my jurisdiction and had a 24 HOUR return policy. The duder wanted the movies back by closing time, THE NEXT DAY and I’m 20 or 30 minutes (of shitty Tampa traffic) away.

Figuring that I’d never see this type of selection again, I bit the bullet and rented four (only four! I was such an idiot) movies: Zombi 2, Phenomena, The Stendhal Syndrome, and Ms. 45, albeit not a horror movie but a classic piece of trash if ever there was one. This is one of the reasons why Doomed Moviethon extends its reach into the cult genre as well. So, I watched Ms.45 first to get it out of the way. That isn’t to say it wasn’t a perfect film to start my moviethon with. Next, I jumped into the horror with Zombi 2, Phenomena, and then finished everything off with The Stendhal Syndrome (not a fan favorite but one of my top 10).

So, I returned the tapes on time (barely) and made a decision not to return to the place. It was just too difficult to get across town every time I needed to return a tape. This decision was painful because none of the video stores I’d ever been to had this kind of selection. Hell, I had never even heard of Lucio Fulci before that night. The seedy looking covers of the Italian horror, German gorefests, and Giallo VHS tapes pulled the trigger in my brain. I was sold. I wanted my own horror movie library.

Of course, staying a horror purist is impossible with so many genre jumping directors and films (so yeah, Takashi Miike), one gets lead into other territory so easily. The yakuza film has ruined the American gangster movie for me forever. I even find myself craving the occasional spaghetti western, kung-fu flick, or even some trashy exploitation garbage. Also, I found that it takes a lot of fact checking and reading up to find the uncut versions of films and that it is easy to get bogged down in “Special Editions” and “Director’s Cuts”.

And that’s my horror story. My collection is now past the 500 mark and I’m loving every gore-soaked and scream-filled minute of it. I’ve almost located everything that inspired me to start this here website. However, I keep uncovering forgotten movies buried in the recesses of my brain. As more and more obscure as hell titles start coming to DVD, I’m sure I’ll be able to put all the pieces of my horror film geekhood together. Anyway, I’ve already spent too much time writing this and not watching something. Thanks for reading, moviethoners.

That Freudstein House!

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Let me go ahead and show my hand here. Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (from 1981) is my favorite film of all time. It’s not just my favorite horror film. It’s my favorite film. Period. Exclamation mark. While The Beyond is a bigger spectacle and Don’t Torture a Duckling is a better film, the tale of Dr. Freudstein, for my money, represents the best of Fulci’s gory golden age. I’m also particularly attached to this film because it reminds me so much of autumn. You see, I live in Tampa and fall around here just means more summer so anything that can jumpstart my autumnal heart is essential. Think of this as Fulci’s It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown except the pumpkins are rotting corpses and Linus Van Pelt is Bob Doyle, the most irritatingly dubbed kid in the history of Italian horror cinema.

In the film, Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco of New York Ripper) is called to continue the work of Dr. Peterson, a colleague who killed himself while researching old houses in Boston. Norman, his wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl of City of the Living Dead) and their young son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) relocate to Boston for six months so that he can finish his work. Almost immediately, Bob meets and befriends a little ghost girl named Mae (Silvia Collatina) who warns him not to go into the house? What house? Why the Freudstein house, of course!

A crooked realtor named Laura Gittleson (Dagmar Lassander of The Frightened Woman) sets up the Boyle family for a whole mess of trouble by putting them in the former home of Dr. Freudstein, a place where people have been dying violently and/or disappearing. It turns out that Norman’s former colleague was so obsessed with Dr. Freudstein, a mad scientist who was exiled from the medical community 80 years prior, that he committed suicide. In walks Ann the babysitter (Ania Pieroni), apparently sent over by Laura to look after Bob. Lucy can’t help but notice Ann’s bizarre demeanor but Norman can’t be bothered.

Strange noises echo throughout the house and Lucy (who is already hopped up on mood stabilizers anyway) begins to lose her grip on her sanity. In order to help his wife keep her shit together, Norman agrees to go into the basement that has remain locked the entire time. While Lucy and he are down there, they are assaulted by a bat that looks like turds and fur with a pair of wings. The bat latches onto Norman’s hand; he then rushes upstairs and starts stabbing the thing with a kitchen knife. He appears to be taking great joy slaughtering the thing and flings blood all over the place including Bob (who looks just a tad shell-shocked by the spectacle).

That evening, while the Boyle fam is at the doctor, Laura the shitty realtor shows up when everyone is out and gets royally killed to death by an unseen Dr. Freudstein who drags her body down to the basement. The following morning, Ann is wiping up the blood but nobody notices because… um… the coffee is ready. As it starts to look like she may be in on the conspiracy of murders, Ann gets her friggin’ head chopped off which Bob sees rolling down the stairs. Of course, Lucy can’t find any evidence of the babysitter’s decapitation and convinces him it all just in his imagination.

To make sure that his college fund is a complete waste of time, Bob decides to head down to the basement that night and search for Ann (or at least her head). This time, Bob comes face to face with Dr. Freudstein and the charnel house that he has made of the basement. Norman, armed with proof that Freudstein is alive and using human remains to recharge his cells, and Lucy, armed with a mother’s love, rush to Bob’s rescue. But are they too late to save their irritating little boy? And more importantly, just who will save them?

Seems pretty straight forward, right? Well, it ain’t. There is so much more to this moody gorefest that every time I watch it, I have to wonder what planet it came from. Frequent Fulci collaborator, Sergio Salvati, is a fantastic cinematographer and doesn’t miss a beat here. The man knows how to pick up the minutest details and knows when to slap on the old fish eye lens to distort the truly terrifying sequences. Salvati is also complicit in feeding Fulci’s eye fetish and there are many, many close-ups of peepers. He also captures the amazing Freudstein house in all of its exterior Massachusetts glory (interiors filmed in Rome). It’s such an amazing house, I want to live there- oh fuck me, is that a tombstone built INSIDE the house? I still want to live there.

You’d think that child actors would get dubbed by child voice actors but no, that’s too expensive. Bob and Mae’s voices are provided by adults pretending to be children and they are both outrageously irritating. Bob wins out as the most annoying dubbing job in Italian horror history (his only rival is Marco in Mario Bava’s Shock). But screw the dubbing, all that matters is that Catriona MacColl’s trademark scream comes through loud and clear in this flick. Oh, I better mention the soundtrack by Walter Razatti. The House by the Cemetery has the quintessential early 80s horror score with a bevy of eerie synthesizer and piano pieces.

Lapses in logic and obtuse exchanges between characters make for a confounding viewing experience the first time around but after you let the magic set in, it all makes sense. Okay, maybe ‘sense’ is too strong of a word. The embodiment of incomprehensibility is Ann the babysitter. Ann is played by the captivating Ania Pieroni whom you may remember from Dario Argento’s Inferno where she played another weird role as the Mother of Tears. What the hell is the secret that Norman and Ann seem to share? Why does Norman deny that the Freudstein house looks exactly like the one in the photo hanging in his office? Why is Lucy on crazy pills? Can we trust her? Why doesn’t Bob get run over by a car in the first five minutes of the film and spare us the pain of listening to his ass-feather voice? The answer to all of these questions comes in the explanation of how Dr. Freudstein has stayed alive all these years: “He needs human victims to renew his cells.” Well, aren’t you satisfied?

As soon as we see down in that basement with all those chunks of people scattered all over the place, my eyes light up like it’s my 10th birthday forever. While I did pick this flick up in a bargain DVD bin for chump change back in 2003, the basement sequences feel so strangely familiar that I keep trying to convince myself I’ve seen this before. Some of my favorite childhood memories are fighting insomnia by catching horror movies in the small hours. Two of the most important were Joe D’Amato’s Rosso Sangue AKA Horrible and Girls Nite Out (the one where the killer wears a bear costume). Could it be that I tuned in just in time to see Bob and his mom desperately trying to evade the rotting grasp of Dr. Freudstein?

Well, if I first discovered this film when I was just a pup or not until my mid-20s makes very little difference. The House by the Cemetery has a zombified mad scientist, a grand old haunted house, a ghost with psychic abilities (is that special or do they all have them?), numerous gore setpieces, and a plethora of themes and hidden meanings to explore and dissect. Add all that up and you’ve got one seriously essential piece of Italian gore-art. The house awaits you; creaky doors, an inch of dust, cobwebs, intestines, and all. Come for the splatter but stay for the intangible horrors and the unmistakable Lucio Fulci-ness of it all. And I tell you, good people, that gory and bleak finale is one of the most satisfying in all of horror filmdom. If you call yourself a horror fan, then check this one out. Or else.