aka Phenomena

As bad luck would have it, I could only get my hands on the American re-edited version, which ties my hands for this review; any complaints I may have, from abrupt musical cues to story pacing to plot holes, can all be blamed on the evil American distributor instead of director Dario Argento.

We begin with a Danish tourist girl who gets off the tour bus in the middle of nowhere in Switzerland (to look at wildflowers?) and misses the bus back. In a panic, she goes to the big house off the road, looking for help, where something bursts through restraining chains, chases her, and murders her with a stab to the gut. (Beautiful shot of her head going through a plate glass window — that ain’t candy-glass, bubba.)

Her decapitated head is found by the police some time later and brought to the crippled Scotsman John MacGregor (Donald Pleasance, who can’t keep his accent constant), an entomologist who dabbles in forensics (which is a true science, by the way — forensic entomologists help establish the time and place of death by cross-referencing the life-cycles of the insects eating the corpse with weather records; I read about it in Discover magazine). MacGregor’s pet chimp runs around with a scalpel and a big placard that says “FORESHADOWING.”

Meanwhile: Young Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), daughter of movie star Paul Corvino, is sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. She’s a little odd. Why? She loves insects. (My questions are two: How did they get the bugs to do what they wanted? and How long did they have to search to find a pretty fourteen-year-old actress who’s OK with having bugs crawl all over her for the length of a movie shoot?)

The school is of course run by a bitchy schoolmistress (that and nursing are the only careers open to hard-core bitches, apparently), but` her roommate Sophia is friendly and in love with her father.

But Jennifer has another problem: she sleepwalks, having visions of a white corridor with many doors and intriguing geometry. (Gotta gripe here: Maybe it’s the American edit, but the sleepwalking played absolutely no part in the the plot — she does it twice in the first half hour, then it doesn’t come up again. By the same token, they mention her split personality, and then nothing ever comes of it. If it’s the distributor’s fault, may they be thrust down to hell for ruining a movie; if it’s Argento, it’s just plain inexcusable sloppiness.)

While sleepwalking, she stumbles across another victim of the mysterious killer. Still in a daze, she wanders into town, gets hit by a car, dragged around by two locals with suspicious intent, thrown from the car again, and finally meets up with the chimp, who takes her back to MacGregor. A fast friendship is born, even though she makes his bugs horny out of season.

The next night she starts to sleepwalk again, but wakes herself up — just in time to hear Sophia, who had snuck out to see a boyfriend, also get killed. She goes out and discovers a glove covered with maggots. MacGregor examines it and pronounces them to be the larvae of the Great Sarcophagus, a fly that feeds exclusively on human corpses. A clue to finding the murderer.

I don’t want to go any farther with the plot, but here are some interesting observations (at least, I thought them interesting):

The school is always windy.

Belligerence and poetry don’t mix.

Some of the animated bug shots (especially the firefly) were completely unconvincing.

MacGregor: “It’s perfectly normal for insects to be slightly telepathic.” According to what branch of science, may I ask?

Wonderfully chilling scene: “We worship you! We worship you!”

Great — this is the second movie this year where the monkey gets ahold of the straight-razor.

How stupid do you have to be to take a pill given you by a hostile person when you don’t want it anyway?

That’s a pretty damned big house for someone on a teacher’s salary.

Mmmm! Stew!

Again, this movie is ambitious but flawed due to setups that never pan out; at some point I’ll have to track down a copy of the original Phenomena and see how much of it was Argento’s fault.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• insects: eighty gazillion