Phenomena, Creepers

a Must watch in any good Halloween party.

Did you think we wouldn't review a horror flick on Halloween? Think again! Instead of praising vomits like Annabelle as well executed horror films, here at the SPAM Alternative headquarters we'll offer you a true horror film, not a shitty cock sucking bummer so, fasten your seatbelts for today's offering to Satan!

PHENOMENA ranks amongst Dario Argento's finest films. Some state that it is his best film, some do not, hence the neverending argument to whether today's review or SUSPIRIA or PROFONDO ROSSO are to be considered number one in the filmography of this great Italian master. 

Now, any connoisseur knows the difference between watching a European horror film and an American (rip-off) horror film. Dario Argento is perhaps, the king of the Giallo genre, and is definitely  the go to director if you are to introduce a friend to this brilliant perspective of what is making a horror film a good film that'll give you chillls from start to finish. Nevertheless, if you're a complete moron who's life is deeply based in stereotypes, I'm pretty sure your mental capacity is already too diminished to understand and enjoy the grandeure of a real good film. If that is your case, please leave this humble blog at once. 

Is he dead already?

Satan is in her eyes!

Needless to say, Dario Argento is a macabre master of technique, and with Phenomena he reuses a previous premise (many times has this plot happened with Argento with the young girl going to a boarding school of some sort with a murderer in the midst after the main girl), but with startling, uproarious but effective results. We should find some of this as amusing- a chimpanzee as a companion/servant to Scottish wheelchair bound emptamologist Donald Pleasance, and Jennifer Connelly's character, Jennifer, who can communicate and bring the wrath of swarms of insects- and I'm sure Argento, knowing what he's doing, recognizes the finer points of the insanity in his work. But he also turns up the screws in terms of the 'creep' factor (hence it's American re-edit dubbed Creepers), with sequences that edge on the self-conscious and the sublimely terrifying.

Simplistics of the plot, if there is one to speak: a young girl is sent to a boarding school while her famous father is off in the Philippines. She befriends a scientist who specializes in insects, and also in theories pertaining to a certain psychopath who may or may not be killing people in the dead of night- when young Jennifer is out sleepwalking! She's deemed crazy and meant to be taken to a mental hospital, but she has other plans up her sleeve, or up swarming in the air. There's a confident, fresh Connelly in the lead, as well as Pleasance who's always dependable as the prophetic veteran of this ilk (once or twice you wonder if he'll say "I shot him six times!") But it's what Argento puts his young lady through that makes or breaks Phenomena for the viewer. As with other films of his "classic" era like Opera and Suspiria, he doesn't tether himself to logic; it would only get in the way of his big ideas and abstractions, his visual of Jennifer looking down that white hallway, the little fly buzzing along with her, and of course the eventual lair of the killer.

My dear, we have a murder to catch.

I see dead bugs.

That lair, I should add, is the kind of place that, as Argento directs it, gets scarier as it goes along. Not the kind of scary where you always go BUMP in the night, but more where you suddenly get in a frame of mind, where the psychopath has the audience in a grip much like Jennifer. It's interesting to note a common stylistic trait we see here, which is a cliche to be sure, with the killer's POV as something characteristic of the material. It should be a big gag, but for Argento it's all part of the game he's weaving. While there aren't as many random things that happen as in Opera, and we don't get any kind of 'deep' murder mystery as in Deep Red, it's never too misleading. By the time Argento plunges us into that pit with the maggots we're squirming in our seats, and feeling an edge of exhilaration to wonder how the hell she (or another chap who happens to be in the room) will get out alive. But as if to seal the deal on making this a near-classic horror film, Argento does a crazy double-twist, one that had me raising eyebrows, laughing uncontrollably, and with a feeling that, as twisted as it's become, justice has been served.

Even with the 80's metal music not in cue to the scenes most of the time when they pop up (the Goblin music fares much better), and even with the lapses in judgment or the occasional poor acting turn, Phenomena should be something of a must-see for die-hards of Italian giallo, or just anyone wanting something a tinge 'different' in their slasher movie. And what makes a difference more than insects! 

Here's the movie trailer: