Census Flashback: Girls School Screamers

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

This week, we are anticipating Annabelle: Creation, a spinoff prequel about a group of young orphan girls being menaced by a haunted doll. In honor of that film, we’re reviewing an 80’s slasher that pits another group of hapless schoolgirls against a deadly menace: Dario Argento’s Phenomena.

Year: 1985

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasence, Daria Nicolodi 

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Dario Argento is the Robert De Niro of Italian horror directors. Although he made some masterpieces in the 70’s, his career began to wobble a bit after a decade and a half, before flying completely off the rails into a creative decline that turned his name into a punch line despite still producing the occasional success. Whether it’s Dirty Grandpa or Dracula 3D, you wonder what could have possibly happened to the cinematic giant. Then you take a look at their late 80’s work, where the first whiffs of rot began to set in, and you’re on the road to understanding.

1985’s Phenomena, which was released in the States as Creepers, came out in the five years between Argento’s more respected works Tenebrae and Opera. It is one of those whiffs.

Clothespin your nose, we’re about to dive in.

Even the plot of Phenomena is a little ragged and patched, sampling Suspiria so thoroughly that it might actually count as a cover. Instead of a ballet school in Germany, it’s a boarding school in Switzerland. Instead of awkwardly shoehorning in Udo Kier for an exposition dump, we get a wheelchair-bound Donald Pleasence as an entomologist with a chimpanzee best friend. And instead of a doe-eyed Jessica Harper, we get a very young Jennifer Connelly, packed to the gills with guileless earnest.

The plot is altogether too simple, despite its unusually elaborate window dressing. Connelly is Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a famous beefcake actor. She arrives at the Swiss girls’ school smack dab in the middle of the reign of terror of a serial killer who targets young girls using a knife fixed to a metal pole. She has nightmares about these killings and attempts to use her telekinetic power to control bugs to find out who’s behind them.

Yeah, that sounds pretty normal for… wait, what?

Yup, the protagonist has a bug-controlling superpower, and it just barely factors into the plot. It’s about as tossed-off a character detail as her famous father, who figures into the story not one whit despite the massive amount of lip service the dialogue grants him in the first act. As far as I can tell, the bug thing was just intended as an excuse to torture Jennifer Connelly, because from the evidence of this film it seems like Argento hated her guts. 

She’s the Bruce Campbell to his Sam Raimi, forced through a gauntlet of onscreen misery, including being dunked in water filled with rotting corpses, smacked in the face by a jet of sewage, at one point actually sent to the ER because the chimp tried to bite her finger off, and at any given moment being covered in beetles, flies, or maggots.

Phenomena is the director’s vocal tirade against little girls (the victim in the opening sequence is played by his own young daughter) to the point that everything else – including his typical phantasmagoric approach to filmmaking – seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Parenthood, am I right?

Even without the weird kid angle, Phenomena is a spectacularly spotty entry in the Argento canon. He’s never really been great at crafting murder mysteries that make a lick of sense (“style over substance” is the mantra of the Italian giallo movement), but this one is especially muddled, so completely failing to introduce anything resembling a suspect that I just figured the monkey did it (yes, I know apes and monkeys are different – do I look like I care?).

And fankly, the monkey gives the best performance of the whole lot. Pleasence just sits there and sputters a bunch of dotty insect mythology, bringing neither the inspired manic energy of his Halloween role nor the gravity he was certainly capable of, and Connelly is flatly uninteresting in a role that asks nothing of her other than plaintive suffering.

Certain critics have called Phenomena “dreamlike,” and they’re not wrong. Dreams are pretty incoherent. I watched the cut of the film that fans of this sort of thing tend to agree is more legible, and even it was a jumbled mess. Scenes crash into each other (sometimes quite literally) with no rhyme or reason, dropped lines and major characters either amount to nothing or randomly teleport into the film midway through, the plot has no thrust, and even the dizzy effects spectacle of the third act fails to entirely redeem its anemically meandering quality.

This plot is more of a labyrinth than that OTHER Jennifer Connelly movie.

That’s not to say that Phenomena is a total failure. It’s mildly amusing enough that it’s never boring, and that finale really is incredibly gross, if that’s something you value as I do. But you can’t help but feel like some projectionist mixed up the reels, even if you’re watching it on DVD. The film just never manages to come together.

The kills have some Argento flourishes (particularly his favorite image of heads crashing through glass windows), but for the most party they’re pretty workmanlike, created without an iota of the feeling or glamour that typically accompany Argento’s murder sequences.

It’s a pale imitation of the far superior work displayed as recently as Tenebrae, the film immediately prior to this one. It’s 80’s Argento, so it’s still heaps more interesting than your average Italian slasher knockoff, but it’s a mélange of genre clichés that fails to flesh out any of the idiosyncratic details that threaten to make it interesting. It didn’t feel like a slog to get through, but I certainly wouldn’t dream of recommending it. Just watch Suspiria again instead.

Killer: [Mrs. Bruckner (Daria Nicolodi)]

Final Girl: Jenifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly)

Best Kill: A man is decapitated with a huge sheet of metal in a hilariously overreaching bit of excess.

Sign of the Times: A major tension sequence involves someone trying to lift a phone by its cord.

Scariest Moment: Jennifer Connelly has maggots under her fingernails. Icky!

Weirdest Moment: A group of boys hit Jennifer with their car, offer her a ride, and then end up dumping her out on a hill.

Champion Dialogue: “He’s got more hands than the entire basketball team!”

Body Count: 7

1. Vera is stabbed in the gut with scissors.
2. Gisela is knifed through the back of the head.
3. Sophie is stabbed.
4. Professor McGregor is stabbed in the gut.
5. Mutant Son is killed by bugs.
6. Morris is decapitated with a metal plate.
7. Ms. Bruckner is slashed to death.

TL;DR: Phenomena is a tremendously wonky motion picture with a muddled, unsatisfying mystery at the center of it.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1186

Popcorn Kernels: Moonage Daydreams

Labyrinth

Year: 1986

Director: Jim Henson

Cast: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Dave Goelz

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

When a young woman accidentally banishes her baby brother to the goblin kingdom, she must work her way through a fantastical labyrinth to save him.

Obviously, Labyrinth made its way into my screening schedule due to the untimely passing of rock icon David Bowie, but it’s also a very appropriate interlude during the midpoint of my Muppet marathon. The last feature film directed by Jim Henson, Labyrinth is one of the final puzzle pieces in a career dedicated to converting the truly bizarre into the mainstream. The narrative of Labyrinth is piecemeal, part Alice in Wonderland, part Wizard of Oz, with the linguistic cunning of The Phantom Tollbooth, but beneath the vignettes of Jennifer Connelly’s journey there’s a dark, intelligent mind pulsing, constantly bursting forth with fresh, nutty ideas.

In the broadest sense, Labyrinth is about growing up and learning to share with/care for another human being. But Labyrinth is also about the poisonous behavior of clinging to material possessions, the unreliability of the rules by which one perceives the universe, and Jim Henson showing off just how devilishly creative he could truly be. The creature designs that erupt across the screen are feverish triumphs of character creation. 

From large to small, every monster, goblin, anthropomorphic door knocker, cockney worm, etc., etc., etc. has a personality and a detailed, idiosyncratic look. My personal favorites are the lichen-covered stone “Helping Hands” that guard the oubliette, and the trash ladies who roam the dump with their prized possessions piled on their backs, but every single creature has the potential to be somebody’s favorite for any number of equally sound reasons.

Labyrinth is confidently stylish and almost irritatingly large scale. The goblin battle in the third act somehow manages to wrangle puppets, life size monster suits, Jennifer Connelly, a dog, and rolling boulders all together in a dazzling, balletic display, sometimes all in the same shot. Labyrinth’s is a sumptuously realized world that took meticulous care and boundless creativity to produce, something Henson possessed in spades.

But above all else, Labyrinth is thoroughly weird. This is kind of unavoidable that features David Bowie in a lead role and lets him do the music, but that ain’t even the half of it. It’s a brain-bubbling stew of fantasy iconography, 80’s sludge pop, spontaneous reggae numbers, and Bowie music video interludes. Just like the titular labyrinth itself, it’s impossible to predict what’s around the next corner, which is why it’s pretty much perfect for kids and their frayed attention spans. 

There are moments where I must throw my hands up and admit that I have no idea what’s going on or why (like the totally pointless, nonsensical, masterpiece of a song “Magic Dance”), but whatever the reason, it’s relentlessly captivating stuff.

Rating: 8/10

The Beyond

For our podcast episode about The Beyond (including a lengthy Bowie tribute at the beginning and end), click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: X

A young woman inherits a Louisiana hotel, only to discoer that it is built over one of the seven entrances to Hell.

If Dario Argento is Italian horror’s Steven Spielberg, Lucio Fulci is its Roland Emmerich. He’s artful in his own way, but he goes straight for the jugular instead of tooling around with wastes of time like prestige, theme, or that bane of cinema, subtlety. In The Beyond, bad things happen because it’s Hell, dammit. Why are you trying to think things through when a man’s face is being pelted with glass?

The Beyond might not have much of a way with words (Or plot. Or logic.), but as a living gallery of excruciating pain, it’s undeniable. Continuing his lifelong vendetta against the human eye (this guy must have Un Chien Andalou as his screensaver… Film student humor!), he finds ever more extravagant ways to gouge, pluck, skewer, and otherwise inconvenience that accursed white orb. And that’s just the bedrock of an elaborately layered system of gore, from bloody falls to crucifixions to freaking tarantulas devouring a face. It’s an 80’s Italian film, so the effects don’t necessarily hold up, but they’re so gruesome that they bypass your brain’s reality cortex and dive straight for the “I’m gonna throw up” lobe.

The Beyond is a breathtaking gonzo gorefest, the ultimate visceral experience that horror filmmaking can provide. Its approach to gore can be easily summed up by one of its scenes, in which a woman is dissolved by acid, a wave of fluid sending her decaying body across the floor as a viscous, red foam. The Beyond is exactly that, an implacable crimson tidal wave threating to overtake you. 

Even amidst all this killing, Fulci never forgets to properly represent Italian horror, stylishly juxtaposing his kill scenes with moments of bucolic serenity, doubling down on the rapid cuts, rack focuses, and extreme close-ups so you’re incapable of forgetting which country is sponsoring this particular nightmare.

My only real issues with The Beyond are its slippery pacing and its climax. The dubiously dubbed dialogue scenes tend to drag like a 2 by 4 nailed to the back of a Hot Wheel car. There’s only so much momentum you can get out of wood. And the third act culminates in a bizarrely shoved-in, molasses-paced zombie sequence that seems like (and is) an ill thought-out studio note. Those two flaws combine with enough heft to knock The Beyond down a peg, but it’s still an exciting, revelatory, deliciously wicked motion picture.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 933