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

Census Bloodbath: Slayboy

For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1987

Director: Lamberto Bava

Cast: Serena Grandi, Daria Nicolodi, Vanni Corbellini
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: UR

Italian horror in the late 1980’s was in a very strange place. The thrilling, erotic giallo genre had long since died down, but international markets were still demanding more and more slasher content. The two big Italian horror exports that year, despite sharing four crew members and almost a whole title, explored two polar opposite approaches. Those films were Deliria AKA StageFright: Aquarius and Delirium AKA Photos of Gloria. They shared a costume designer, composer Simon Boswell, star David Brandon, and writer/actor George Eastman, but they couldn’t be more different.

Michele Soavi’s StageFright resurrects the idiosyncratic visual style of Dario Argento and applies it to a delightfully gory romp through slasher excess, whereas Delirium: Photos of Gloria (our topic for today) takes a more self-reflective approach, wearing the faded patches of the giallo genre on its sleeve yet failing to find the energy to rise above being mildly intelligent softcore trash.

Nobody got out of the 80’s with their dignity intact.

Delirium assembled a robust team of the giallo old guard to bring its story to life. Legacy director Lamberto Bava (son of cinema legend Mario Bava) helmed a crew that included Don’t Torture a Duckling screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici, Five Women for the Killer editor Mauro Bonanni, and The Scorpion with Two Tails production designer Massimo Antonello Geleng. And that cast is a nonstop barrage of familiar faces, both old and new.

The story is simple enough. Gloria (Serena Grandi of Anthropophagus) is an ex-nudie model who now runs a men’s magazine. Unfortunately the women who pose for the cover start turning up dead, photographed in front of a massive blow-up of Gloria which was shot during an unpublished modeling session that very few people have access to. She and the useless Inspector Corsi (Lino Salemme of Lamberto Bava’s earlier Demons) must find out who the killer is before they turn their sights on her.

The suspect pool is rather large, as Gloria is surrounded with intimate friends and coworkers who have all been acting rather peculiar lately…. First there’s Flora (Capucine of the Pink Panther series), a matronly lesbian who wants to buy Gloria’s magazine out of revenge for her resisting the woman’s advances. The list goes on and on from there: Mark (Karl Zinny, also of Demons), her wheelchair-bound Peeping Tom neighbor; Gloria’s actor ex-lover Alex (George Eastman, the impossibly tall cannibal from Anthropophagus), who always seems to be conveniently out of town whenever the murders occur; the stand-offish photographer Roberto (the aforementioned David Brandon); her brother and partner in crime Tony (Vanni Corbellini of The Belly of an Architect); and her dutiful – almost too dutiful – assistant Evelyn (Argento collaborator/ex-wife Daria Nicolodi of Tenebrae, Deep Red, Suspiria, and so forth).

Shockingly, she actually survives this movie.

Even though the cast isn’t particularly small, it’s intimate. There are practically no other characters involved, and the interpersonal relationships between almost every combination of personalities are explored with some depth. This is a giallo with an exceptionally focused murder mystery plot (that’s a low bar, but still) because the people populating it are at least mildly interesting all across the board.

That’s just about the last unequivocally good thing I’ll be saying about Delirium, but let’s keep this positive train a–chuggin’ for another minute. Seeing how the film is such a blend of old and new, it really is an interesting reflection on the genre it more or less put out to pasture. Much like Dario Argento’s Tenebrae five years earlier, it’s as much a meditation on misogyny in the genre as it is a pristine example of it.

With the most phallic, penetrative imagery this side of Slumber Party Massacre’s giant power drill, Delirium is a 90-minute exercise in foregrounding the never-quite-subtle sexual symbolism evident in the slasher and giallo genres. If you don’t want spoilers (like anybody cares), skip until after the next image.

The killer here targets women as an outlet for his rage at his impotence, a theme that has never been explored more explicitly (except maybe in the chainsaw seduction scene of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2). When the killer finally confronts Gloria, he undresses her with his blade, sticking it in her mouth and rubbing it across her body until he’s literally shot in the dick and “ejaculates” blood all over her face. And every other death is so symbolically penetrative it’s almost obscene, especially the sequence where a nude young woman is stung to death by hundreds of bees.

Truly delightful.

The overtly misogynistic violence clashes against the film’s depiction of women who have sexual autonomy and hold high-powered jobs, manipulating the voyeuristic eye of the camera and the men holding it.

But mostly of course, this is all just an excuse to shove as many bare breasts into the frame as physically possible. It’s a shame such an intelligent, knowing visual theme has to be supported by a weak softcore plot and actors who perform like this is the very first rehearsal of a high school play. It also features a completely unnecessary and inexcusable rape scene, which tilts the balance too far over the edge into genuinely nasty exploitation.

Delirium: Photos of Gloria tries its best, but it’s a thin wisp of a film; a sad straggler from a genre that had more or less already been interred. If you’re going for a taste of 1987 Italy, StageFright bridges the gap between Italian giallo and American slasher with aplomb, whereas Delirium merely plummets to its demise.

Killer: [Tony (Vanni Corbellini)]
Final Girl: Gloria (Serena Grandi)
Best Kill: My fingernails never can survive a good bee sting death.
Sign of the Times: Oh, Simon Boswell. You really had a time and a place.

Scariest Moment: Gloria visits her husband’s grave and finds her photo attached to the next casket.
Weirdest Moment: From the killer’s perspective, one of his victims has a giant eyeball for a head.
Champion Dialogue: “I warn you, the hate of a woman can be very bad!”
Body Count: 4; shockingly low for this type of movie.

1. Kim is pitchforked in the gut.
2. Sabrina is stung to death by bees.
3. Susan is killed offscreen.
4. Roberto is hit by a car.

TL;DR: Delirium: Photos of Gloria tries very very hard to be artful and worthwhile, but flails behind abysmal acting and softcore plotting.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1076

Census Bloodbath: Brae Yourself

For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: Anthony Franciosa, Giuliano Gemma, John Saxon

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Although the Italian giallo genre had started to peter out by the time the American slasher boom began in earnest, you can’t keep a good killer down. This deep into the 1980’s, the genre still had a thing or two to say, and the man to say it was Dario Argento, Italy’s premiere purveyor of beautiful murder and inscrutable nonsense. His 1982 offering was Tenebrae (also known as Tenebre for no discernible reason other than the fact that it’s required by law for Italian movies to have a half dozen alternate titles), which more or less automatically became the most interesting movie of the year by virtue of his stylish, idiosyncratic nature.

And his eagerness to expose breasts in ways no human has ever done before.

In Tenebrae, American author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) arrives in Rome with his agent Bullmer (John Saxon of A Nightmare on Elm Street) and his personal assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi, frequent Argento collaborator and his wife at the time; she also co-wrote Suspiria), to promote his new murder mystery novel, also titled Tenebrae. More or less immediately he is swept up in a real-life murder mystery as various vixens around town begin to be murdered with a straight razor, just like the victims in his book. Can the author solve his own mystery before the killer turns their sights on him?

And how young counts as TOO young for a sexy victim?

Tenebrae is the most typical giallo I’ve seen from Argento. Although he brings his usual flair to the murder setpieces, he indulges in altogether too many tropes of the dormant genre, including the black-gloved killer and a literal giallo novel actually incorporated into the plot. That’s not necessarily a problem. I dig the giallo clichés, but it just feels like his personal style is a little bit muffled here, at least in the way the plot and the basic imagery play out.

However, the same can’t be said for many other aspects of Tenebrae, especially the score, which is an electrical cacophony of beautifully catchy synthwork provided by the reliably frenetic band Goblin. It rivals the Suspiria score for pure operatic lunacy, though at least it’s performed in what are recognizable as “keys and “octaves.”

Argento also lets himself loose in the murder sequences, which find the director settled comfortable into his manic, off-kilter editing patterns. There’s a jagged beauty to his kills, which are executed with clockwork precision and a calculated flair. What is perhaps the most memorable kill scene (a double bill with a lesbian couple being murdered) is prefaced by a gorgeous tracking shot from outside a window, traveling over the roof of the apartment and down the other side. It’s a gloriously pointless shot, but it’s such a triumph of technical execution and sublime stylization that it almost doesn’t matter.

Except it does matter, at least a little bit. Argento’s nasty habit of halting a film dead in its tracks for an unrelated, dishwater dull sequence right when the tension is due to ramp up hits an all-time high here, clogging up multiple key moments with useless interludes.

The man does like to keep us on our toes.

Unfortunately, outside of the gonzo death scenes, the murder mystery plot is pretty rote. Argento falls back on his usual theme of exploring the fluidity of memory by having a character struggle to recall a vital detail of a scene he witnessed. Although this is cinematically interesting, it prevents us from getting a key clue toward the identity of the killer, and a murder mystery you can’t solve yourself isn’t worth the celluloid it’s printed on.

There are only two non-murder sequences that are remotely thrilling, and they both immediately precede a killing. The first is a slick reversal, where a dangerous hobo who is menacing a girl accidentally becomes a witness to her murder at the hands of someone else. The second depicts John Saxon waiting for a friend in a busy plaza. It’s a quiet moment, lazily watching the goings-on about town until increasingly bizarre shots of incredibly mundane tasks ratchet up the tension. These scenes are great, but Tenebrae is hardly scarier than your average stilted giallo.

Probably the most exciting aspect to Tenebrae is how chillingly self-aware it is. Peter Neal is so clearly a stand-in for Argento that he might as well have been played by a mirror. An author skilled a writing murder, Neal faces criticism of misogyny in his work. [SPOILERS The fact that he himself is driven to murder is both a thrilling twist and a bizarre case of cognitive dissonance on the part of Argento, whose life and work is full of these odd little conundrums.]

Overall, I’m glad I sat down with Tenebrae. It is a work of horror art. It just doesn’t show Argento challenging himself, and he’s at his best when he’s his weirdest.

Killer: [Christiano Berti (John Steiner) and Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa)]

Final Girl: This isn’t really applicable, but Detective Altieri (Carola Stagnero)

Best Kill: It can’t possibly be described. You just have to watch.

Sign of the Times: A woman shoplifts a book, because people actually read in 1982.

Scariest Moment: That hobo thing. We’ve already discussed it.

Weirdest Moment: In a flashback, a beautiful woman presses the back of her head against three guys’ crotches on a beach. A fourth guy slaps her and the others pin him down so she can stick her red heel in his mouth.

Champion Dialogue: “So passes the glory of lesbos.”

Body Count: 12

1. Shoplifter is choked with paper and has her throat slit.
2. Lesbian #1 is stabbed with a razor.
3. Lesbian #2 has her throat slit.
4. Maria is axed in the stomach.
5. Christiano is axed in the head.
6. Heels Lady is stabbed to death in flashback.
7. Bullmer is stabbed in the gut.
8. Gianni is garroted.
9. Jane has her arm chopped off and is axed to death.
10. Anne is axed in the back of the head.
11. Detective Germani is axed in the back.
12. Peter Neal is impaled on a statue.

TL;DR: Tenebrae is a typically stunning giallo from Argento, even if it's a little too generic in its plotting.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1064