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Saturday, July 4, 2020

Phenomena (1985)

... aka: Creepers
... aka: Dario Argento's Phenomena
... aka: Nadnaravni pojavi (Supernatural Phenomena)
... aka: Phenomenon
... aka: Satánica inocencia (Satanic Innocence)

Directed by:
Dario Argento

Controversial opinion: The heavily-cut U.S. version of this film is superior to the original version. There, I said it. Somebody needs to. And I completely understand this sounds like blasphemy or perhaps even a tad hypocritical on my part. I usually hate when censors or distributors alter a director's original vision... except when it actually benefits the film. While that's a very rare occurrence, it does occasionally happen. After New Line Cinema acquired the U.S. distribution rights to the film, they re-titled it Creepers and then cut it down to a brisker 83 minutes; an edit supervised by director Jack Sholder. That may not sound too bad until you realize the fullest version, the Italian release, runs a whopping 116 minutes. That's over 30 minutes removed. That's quite significant! Only in this case it's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Unlike with the butcher job committed on Argento's earlier DEEP RED (1975), which irreparably harmed that film, very little of what was removed here negatively effects the original cut's pacing, story, characterization or even the film's coherence. After recently comparing the two versions side by side, I completely understand why they removed most of what they did. The plot itself doesn't change in any significant way even shorn of 30+ minutes; only the amount of extraneous material does.

Unnecessary opening narration has been scrapped and several minutes from an overly-long detective scene at the beginning were removed, which is no big loss seeing how it's redundant, poorly scripted and kills momentum after the excellent opening sequence. An entire scene of our heroine, Jennifer, receiving an electroencephalogram has been taken out but the scene is awkward and pointless. In the uncut version, a large portion from Iron Maiden's "Flash of the Blade" plays two different times; once during an early scene where a victim walks around a room, finds a candle, lights it and walks around and, later, when our heroine is trying to find her way out of a locked room. In the cut version, the vocal portions of the song only figure during the later scene, which creates more of a surprise when it suddenly erupts on the soundtrack during one of the film's more suspenseful moment. That surprise is not there in the uncut version as we'd already heard a large chunk of the song used prior.




Most of the other snips are to tighten up the film and reduce the amount of time spent lingering on establishing shots, people standing around, cumbersome dialogue exchanges, needless exposition and the like. The only significant cut that does much damage is a nice character bit when Jennifer first arrives at the school and talks about her mother having an affair and abandoning the family, which should have been left entirely intact as it helps viewers sympathize with, and relate to, the lead character.

While some of the others edits made for Creepers are likewise not ideal, they're hardly crippling. The few jarring jumps in picture and sound bizarrely manage to only heighten the film's surreal qualities. Since it was released during a time when the slasher-hating MPAA demanded cuts to nearly every depiction of on-screen violence, most especially those in a horror context, New Line did trim some of the more violent moments. However, we still see most of the murders even in the cut version as only strategic frames were eliminated, not the kills themselves. For instance, in the uncut version we see a pair of scissors nailing a hand to a doorway and lingering for a few seconds while the victim screams and pulls the scissors out. In the cut version we only see the scissor impact before it cuts away. Personally, I'm willing to trade off that and a few shots of a razor sliding across a face for a viewing experience that glides along instead of one in a constant state of start-stop throughout the first half.


Phenomena casts future Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly, then just 14-years-old and with only a small but memorable role in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America under her celluloid belt, in her first leading role. It proved to be a pretty apt casting choice as Connelly emerges here as one of the most uncommonly well-rounded and appealing female leads in any Argento film. Hell, glancing back through his filmography, she probably IS the most well-rounded and appealing. Not saying her lack of experience isn't evident at times, but she at least manages to shade her strong-willing, determined heroine with vulnerabilities and insecurities to keep from coming off as one-dimensional. Connelly plays Jennifer Corvino, the daughter of a famous movie star / heartthrob who's dumped off at an exclusive girl's boarding school, the Richard Wagner Academy, in Switzerland. There, a psycho killer is running around offing teenage girls with a steel spear and hiding their bodies. Sounds like your typical slasher movie plot, right? Well, not so fast...








Jennifer isn't really your normal final girl trope and is much more akin to a troubled protagonist like Carrie White. First, she's a sleepwalker who doesn't remember anything that occurs while she's under. Second, she's a young teenager set adrift in a foreign country surrounded by strangers thanks to the self-serving preoccupations of her negligent parents. Third, she has a bizarre relationship with insects that's both telepathic and telekinetic; meaning she can communicate with, control and even share visions with insects. While those qualities may make her an outcast at school and the target of bullying, have her being labeled an epileptic devil-worshiping schizophrenic drug addict by the school staff and put her in harm's way on more than one occasion, they eventually come in handy when she becomes the killer's primary target. Jennifer does manage to find a couple of non-bug allies in the area. She's befriended by wheelchair-bound Scottish entomology professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasence), who understands what it's like to be different ("People have the ability to almost make you hate yourself"), and his pet chimpanzee "nurse" Inga (Tanga).

With the cruel headmistress (Dalila Di Lazzaro) and most of her peers convinced she's evil incarnate, her roommate (Federica Mastroianni) failing to protect her and getting herself killed in the process, her mom busy with her new lover, her father busy on location shooting in the Philippines and impossible to get in contact with and the father's Jewish agent and attorney (Mario Donatone) busy during Passover, Jennifer is stuck in a situation where she must uncover who's responsible for the killings or potentially become the next victim. And she must rely on her own courage and (super) natural gifts to do so since her parents, short-term (human) friends and authority figures have all failed her. Even assistance from her mentor and kindred spirit Professor McGregor, who had a previous relationship (perhaps even a sexual one) with an underage schoolgirl who's been killed, comes with limits. He does at least first hook her up with one of the world's greatest detectives, "the great sarcophagus fly," which is drawn exclusively to decaying human flesh, to get the ball rolling on her investigation.









Whether one watches the longest or shortest cut, you're ultimately rewarded for enduring some uneven moments in the first half with the liveliest and most entertaining finales in the entire Argento oeuvre, which features one surprise after another in pretty rapid succession. Not that what's leading up to that is necessarily bad. A lot of it is splendid actually. The visual pallet here is essentially the same steely blue look as what was used in TENEBRAE , which is a bit odd considering this was shot by INFERNO's cinematographer Romano Albani and not Tenebrae's DOP Luciano Tovoli. Even lacking the ultra-colorful, superficially gratifying look of some of the earlier films, just as much style seeps through here and it's even more imaginative.

Unlike many of his previous films, which are rather set-bound, excellent use is made out of outdoor locations, including a lake, a patch of woods near the school (Argento has a neat way of photographing even trees to make them look ominous!) and a stretch of road leading to a secluded cottage with the Swiss Alps, rumored to put off wind that leads to madness, in the backdrop. The sleepwalking scenes are a mix of a camera traveling down a white corridor past black doors at various speeds, Vaseline smeared lens and overbearing lighting. There are even POV shots from not just the killer, but also kaleidoscopic visions from a ladybug and even a maggot! Oh, did I mention there are a LOT of maggots in this film? Yes. Indeed there are, including a large pit of them feasting on the remains of the killer's victims.









Many film historians, including a good number of genre aficionados who are otherwise big defenders of the director, were highly critical of the film when it was released. I find that bizarre seeing how every issue they complained about, from the poor dubbing of the supporting cast to the inconsistent plotting to the occasional senseless / idiotic character actions, is present in every single other Argento film they'd praised. Only those debits, to me, are far less pronounced here due to its melding of giallo / slasher with supernatural / fairy tale and just how weird, wild, gory, creative and unpredictable the whole thing is. The audacious soundtrack, featuring contributions from Bill Wyman, Simon Boswell, Goblin, Motörhead, Claudio Simonetti and others, also polarizes with its mix of classical, synth / electronica, heavy metal and even opera. It's a truly bizarre soundscape, yet it's in service of a truly bizarre film, so should it be anything but?

Regardless of the initial reception, Phenomena / Creepers became Argento's biggest international hit since SUSPIRIA almost ten years earlier. It was popular in Europe, the U.S., Asia (especially Japan) and elsewhere, was one of Argento's most widely distributed titles during the video era and remains one of his most viewed films. The fact it features future star Connelly has also helped ensure that it's kept in circulation. This film also provided Daria Nicolodi, then-girlfriend of the director, with her only memorable part in one of his films and she gives a gloriously over-the-top performance as a seemingly-reserved schoolteacher who figures prominently during the finale. Patrick Bauchau and Michele Soavi (also the assistant director) show up playing police inspectors and Argento's eldest daughter Fiore Argento plays the Danish schoolgirl killed in the opening scene. The gory makeups are from Sergio Stivaletti while Luigi Cozzi worked on optical effects.










There have been countless releases for this title over the years. Media was the initial U.S. VHS distributor in the States (of the heavily-cut version) while Anchor Bay introduced American audiences to most of the previously-unseen cut footage with their 1999 DVD release. The 2016 release from Synapse includes three different cuts of the film: the 83-minute Creepers cut, the 110 minute English-language international cut and the 116 minute Italian language version. One of the many extras on the 2 disc set is the feature-length documentary Dario Argento's World of Horror (1985). It also comes with a soundtrack CD. Perhaps the definitive version to be released is the UK Arrow 4 DISC release, which contains the various cuts of the film, loads of extras and a brand new 2 hour documentary on the film titled Of Flies and Maggots.




Aside from the usually-lauded Deep Red and Suspiria, everyone seems to have their own opinion about which other Argento film(s) are the strongest in his filmography. For me, this one is right at the very top. It includes pretty much everything I want out of this particular director... plus a few things I didn't even realize I wanted until I saw them here. A straight-razor-armed chimp with a vendetta is just the tip of the iceberg.

1/2

16 comments:

spookyx3 said...

guess it's finally time to go back through these. i wouldn't have started here ordinarily except it amused me to follow disney's BAREFOOT EXECUTIVE (don't ask!) with dario's razor-wielding chimp.

didn't expect much from this one; i'd dismissed CREEPERS as "silly" decades ago. the (new to me) 116m cut started out with a ton of useless talk & sluggish padding (honestly kinda bizarre they approved this) that a turnaround seemed unlikely. then... the sarcophagus-fly bus ride happened, and my attention never wavered again -- exceptional from that point on. personally could've done without any heavy metal songs on the soundtrack, but no big deal.

my favorite part is actually the chilly pre-credits scene with that haunting solo synth line. gets under my skin. taps right into my own fears of being separated/stranded and lost in the middle of nowhere. how about those sleepwalking sequences, stretching up to the high shelf, reaching for the 'phone through the transom... i haven't stopped thinking about the movie for a couple of days now. took another look at CREEPERS to see where the edits were, and it fixed a lot of issues i had with the first half.

can't wait to do updated rankings. i would already put it ahead of OPERA and FOUR FLIES.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Glad you enjoyed it more on the revisit. Watching the two versions made ME wish I were an editor and could put together my own cut. There were a few things in the longer version I'd have kept but my personal ideal cut would definitely look more like Creepers. A lot of those dialogue scenes don't really add anything to the film and screw up the pacing. Also definitely don't like them using the same Iron Maiden song twice, even though I like the song. Not quite as bad as Zombie Nightmare though, where most of the songs sucked and they used the best song during the opening credits!

I will be doing Opera this weekend since I actually have (gasp!) two days off this week. Then when I get a chance I'll whip right back around and do a proper review of Cat O Nine Tails since I remember next to nothing about it. Always found it one of his worst but I'm not sure how I'd feel about it now. Four Flies I remember being decent though not one of this best.

I'm thinking my Top 3 is going to pretty much be set in stone after I finish all of his movies: Phenomena, Deep Red, Suspiria. And I've seen most of post-1990 stuff and nearly all I'd rank beneath even his *worst* pre-Opera films.

spookyx3 said...

need to get back to these this year -- since i only have a few ranked, ordering them by my highest rating on LB makes it look like i think DARK GLASSES is his third best film after DEEP RED & PHENOMENA!

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I haven't checked out Dark Glasses yet. To be honest, I was actually scared to based on how much I detested Dracula 3D and Giallo!

spookyx3 said...

didn't see those! or much of anything after 1996. the new one seems to be drawing the same sort of response that's met his work since then, with unfair "hang it up" derision at one end & desperate "the master's back!" raves on the other. DARK GLASSES is a surprisingly watchable, no frills small modern thriller, sort of an update of CAT O' NINE TAILS. story wise/aesthetically it's not up to much, and parts of the score (pounding techno) are dreadful... but, there are good things in here, like the lead's performance, her relationship with the kid, some unexpected not unwelcome sentimentality...

i got a little choked up by the end (i'm a pushover) reflecting on the totality of a career, and how it wouldn't be such a bad way to bow out. i honestly could see myself watching this again sometime (not soon), unlike most of what he's done since OPERA. gave it two & a half stars.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

"with unfair "hang it up" derision at one end & desperate "the master's back!" raves on the other."

And, in reality, neither camp is correct! You know, you may actually want to check out Mother of Tears and The Card Player at least. I didn't dislike either. Mother, of course, is a far cry from Suspiria artistically but it's not boring and Card was a decent enough thriller I though. I'll definitely be giving Glasses a look when I get a chance thanks to your comments. I'd (unfairly) written it off already due to his last few films.

Subway Theater said...

Argento justifiably gets a lot of crap for his post-1980s work, but I don't think ANY of the great 1970s horror directors really managed to continue making interesting genre stuff from the 1990s onward. (Before anyone mentions Wes Craven, I'll just say that I personally find the Scream movies overrated and don't really see him as a "great director" anyway, since he didn't really have a distinctive style.) If anything, Opera was more interesting than pretty much anything the others besides Cronenberg were making by 1987. The 1990s were brutal for everybody, which may be why I find a blog where the reviews stop at 1990 so appealing. :D

As for why everything started to fall apart around 1986-87, I guess that could fill a book. Because obviously things not being to my personal taste = things falling apart.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I don't know if it's a generational thing or not. It's a pretty common sentiment, even from most younger film fans, that the 90s was one of the weaker times for genre films. And it's an absolute mystery to me as to why a lot of the big names in the 70s and 80s kind of faded from view during this time. It's not like technology changed all that much in the interim (this was still well before digital) to where they couldn't adapt. I don't know if they ran out of ideas or what. I know funding was an issue since horror was on a downturn in favor of "thrillers" like Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, etc., and the video market being saturated by the early 90s didn't help matters. You even see schlockier genre directors struggling during this same exact time and seemingly none of these guys were able to recapture what they once had.

Even though obviously not as great as their earlier works, I actually do enjoy some of the later films from Argento and Romero, but most from the other formerly big directors didn't do much for me. Regardless of what one thinks of Craven, we do at least have to give him props for navigating this time better than his contemporaries. While I agree he's not an interesting director style-wise, is pretty nondescript / generic and took fewer creative risks, his overall approach definitely had a broader audience appeal. Not saying that is necessarily a good thing per se but it is what it is. :)

That said, I do quite like New Nightmare and enjoyed the original Scream even though what it spawned was God awful and I personally harbor some animosity towards it for what it did to genre cinema. I also have to admit that I've not revisited Scream since it came out so it's hard to tell what I'd think of it now. The fact I'm usually a series completist and have not seen anything past Scream 3 (or the TV shows) says it all, I suppose!

Subway Theater said...

Reading my comment back, I realize I sound harsher toward Wes than I mean to be. The Hills Have Eyes and the first Nightmare movie are definitely classics, and Last House, while very rough around the edges, achieves some very potent moments. Deadly Blessing has a nifty setting and OK premise, but could have used more time in the workshop. With New Nightmare, I appreciated what he was going for, but I watched it twice and both times I forgot all about what happened in the movie within five minutes after it ended.

Scream started out very good for the first 45 minutes, but then it got bloated and it stayed that way for the next two movies I watched. I also haven't seen anything past part 3. I firmly believe no slasher film should ever be longer than 95 minutes max.

Pretty much everybody runs out of ideas at some point. Even the most inspired musicians and writers start to rehash themselves after a while. It could just be that these were the people who happened to come along at the right moment when there was a system in place to find them an audience, and budgets that were both big enough and small enough, and their inspiration ran its course as it always was going to. (With Argento, there's also the curious fact that his heyday coincided with his relationship with Daria Nicolodi, although that could be a red herring.) By the time the 1990s rolled around, that system wasn't really there anymore for newcomers to flourish. And it may be that there was actually too much money for the established directors to work with, which invited both self-indulgence and studio interference.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Yep, I much prefer the grittier early stuff from almost all of these directors who first hit it big in the late 60s to early 70s. The 80s were also pretty good to most of them but it didn't extend long beyond that. The 90s generally sucking and then digital swooping in to drive in the final nail is the primary reason I decided to concentrate on pre-1990 stuff around here. Phone cameras and the internet dealt a lethal blow to good low budget genre cinema and there simply isn't going to be any way back from that at this point.

Not that there may not still be the occasional OK or even pretty good low budget film being made, but good luck finding them if they exist. When hundreds of new horror films pop up on streaming platforms every single week, it's virtually impossible to wade through the 99% of junk to potentially find that rare gem. And I guarantee there are some talented people out there trying their best right now, but sadly they have almost no chance at real success since whatever they put out there is just going to get buried and quickly forgotten. The film would have to go beyond merely good and be absolutely extraordinary to even stand a chance of crawling out of all that muck.

I share your exact opinions on Hills (great), the original Elm Street (great), Last House (highly flawed by has its place) and Blessing (again very flawed [I think I remember the ending being ruined by studio interference] but interesting). I do have to say that I have watched almost all of the post-1990 stuff made by Argento, Cronenberg and Romero with SOME continued interest but, for whatever reason, I have absolutely no desire to check out the later Craven, Carpenter or Hooper movies despite being a big fan of their earlier films. I doubt I will ever sit down and watch My Soul to Take, Cursed, The Ward, Mortuary, etc.

Also may be worth noting that when it comes to Argento, his father and usual producer passed away in 1987, the same year Opera (what many consider to be his last really good movie) was released. I think he had been involved in some capacity on all of Dario's best films.

spookyx3 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
spookyx3 said...

EDIT: where's my brain? nobody's beating romero's run up through KNIGHTRIDERS. i do love carpenter, though (mainly for BIG TROUBLE through THEY LIVE).

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I used to love People Under the Stairs when I was a teenager but I haven't seen it in ages. I also often forget that Craven made The Serpent and the Rainbow which is pretty gritty by his standards. Also a lot more atmospheric than most of his other stuff.

TCM2 has its good elements (make-up fx, Caroline Williams, design on that underground lair) but it's loud and annoying much of the time. Humor is kind of hit or miss. Strange that it's more appreciated now than when it was released but I guess it has an ADD kind of appeal to it.

Whew, The Mangler is absolutely terrible and Night Terrors isn't much better. Proceed with caution there. I'd say Night Terrors (which stars Zoe Trilling, who recently passed away) is a bit better but that's only because it's sleazier. I remember some people were trying to hype up his remake of Toolbox Murders but I found it average.

Another one I always forget (co-directed by Carpenter and Hooper so on topic!) is the anthology Body Bags, which I remember thinking was pretty decent.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Yes that Romero run is tough to beat. I've not seen There's Always Vanilla (I kind of disregard it actually [maybe unfairly, I'm not sure]) but I love everything else he made during that period. Night and Dawn get most of the attention but Martin is just as good, The Crazies may not be up there but it's still good and Season of the Witch is IMO extremely underrated.

Carpenter also had his good / great run. I've not seen Dark Star (genre enough?) but I've seen the rest. He had a surprisingly diverse block of films from the 70s through the 80s for someone known primarily as a horror director..

spookyx3 said...

deleted my post. except for "i hated SCREAM from minute one," i've said all this stuff before and better elsewhere on here.

> Whew, The Mangler is absolutely terrible

got MANGLER on blu-ray in a sale, so i'll give it a look eventually. i definitely don't expect a tobe hooper movie from 1995 to be any good at all.

> Body Bags, which I remember thinking was pretty decent.

been in the 'to re-watch' pile for years. liked the opening segment!

spookyx3 said...

read that george thought VANILLA was his worst film. not with SURVIVAL or some of the (decent but easily less interesting) later studio films out there. i rated VANILLA 7/10. unsure how accurate that is.

my favorite romeros are DAWN (139m only), NOTLD, and KNIGHTRIDERS, which i last saw on videotape three decades ago! actually, everything else pre-BRUISER -- save for DAY OF THE DEAD -- i last saw on video. need to give them all a fresh look soon-ish.

(again, i don't really remember it, but) DARK STAR is absolutely worth watching. i have it at 8/10. it's comedy. the alien is a beach-ball. the ending is an all-time classic (tho i read they stole it from ray bradbury).

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