If you know your horror you know about Dario Argento, the crazy Italian fuck responsible for SUSPIRIA, DEEP RED and Asia Argento. Even if you don’t dig his movies or daughter you have to give him credit for putting together Goblin, the band who made the distinctive scores for alot of his movies as well as DAWN OF THE DEAD and that movie where Art Carney refuses to leave before Mount St. Helens erupts. I also really like INFERNO, the movie I brought up the most when trying to convince people that SILENT HILL was a surreal nightmare world and not just a moronic video game adaptation with stiff dialogue that made no sense like they thought it was.

I thought I had seen most of the big ones by Argento and I had kind of avoided this one PHENOMENA that didn’t have as good of a reputation. Maybe part of the problem is that it’s better known in the U.S. as CREEPERS, the version where they cut out about a half an hour. But at least in its uncut form I really dug this strange fucking movie about an American girl (Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly) sent to a Swiss boarding school during a murder spree.

So far it sounds simple and normal, but let me explain the good parts. One of the people investigating the murders is the famous entomologist John McGregor (Donald Pleasance – Dr. Loomis in HALLOWEEN, the president in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK). When they find, say, a severed head in a river, he is able to tell by the life cycles of maggots how long it has been chopped off. He’s also quadriplegic so he has a chimpanzee for an assistant. And maybe it’s just me, but I think the chimp is a suspect. In the opening murder you never see the killer at all, you just see the point of the scissors he or she uses as a murder weapon. And you see the chains that hold the killer to a basement wall before it breaks loose, and these are some pretty small chains. A monkey might be able to break them. Then the first thing you see in the very next scene is the chimp running outside during a stormy night at the professor’s bug palace. (more…)