Phenomena (1985)

 

Director: Dario Argento

Screenplay: Franco Ferrini and Dario Argento

Cast: Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Corvino, Daria Nicolodi as Frau Brückner, Dalila Di Lazzaro as the Headmistress, Patrick Bauchau as Inspector Rudolf Geiger, Donald Pleasence as Professor John McGregor, Fiore Argento as Vera Brandt, Federica Mastroianni as Sophie, Gaspare Capparoni as Karl, Fiorenza Tessari as Gisela Sulzer, Mario Donatone as Morris Shapiro

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

It can definitely be said Phenomena is a wildly idiosyncratic film in terms of Argento's career. It has a simple premise at heart, a killer murdering young women in Switzerland, but it is one of the strangest in how it is telling it, with nods to Suspiria (1977) and the terror of boarding schools, entomology and insects, and Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe among other details. You also get Iron Maiden on the soundtrack and Donald Pleasence with a chimpanzee assistant, and that is not even factoring in our lead, Jennifer Connelly as a young woman with the telepathic ability to communicate with insects.

She is Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a popular actor, staying in a strict all-girls school where its headmistress, when learning Jennifer has an extreme form of sleepwalking, has her strapped to a bed, examined on by a doctor, and thinks she is high on vague drugs. From here, when she is pulled into the main story, it definitely emphasises Dario Argento did not embrace logic in many of his films conventionally despite the acclaim for his earlier seventies giallo. We get to her meeting Donald Pleasence, as a Scottish entomologist who has a female chimpanzee assistant due to being wheelchair bound, by way of the most dreamlike take on sleepwalking that includes Jennifer being a "kinda" witness to a gristly murder. In context to the films which came before from Argento, I can definitely say this one is more significantly ridiculous, a film which might put people off entirely for how bizarre it is. It argues thought, whilst with their own potential flaws, the era of his films especially after the Millennium have been misread for Argento in terms of plot logic criticism, more so when he was already entering films with more tangents to them. Case in point, with Dark Glasses (2022), the abruptness with its killer and rationale for their actions, alongside having an uncomfortable real life logic to it as it involves a misogynist killer picking off random women, feels a lot more grounded next to the likes of Phenomena or Inferno (1980), though the later has a more precise structure to it. In general, Argento's films, even his giallos, have their moments that deliberately break from logic in what he clearly thought would be more dynamic and dramatic; with Phenomena, the result is broader, which may be a tipping point for many, yet I love Phenomena itself for this lack of logic and fully aware of how absurd this is.

The strange airs around it help even in terms of accidental ones, such as for when the editing choices were made for these films when distributed in their original English dubs, which make no sense in hindsight, they have ended up with passages only available in their Italian language version for the restored version. Maybe Motörhead abruptly playing in one scene is the one odd choice even for me - I have gotten to appreciate Argento's use of heavy metal in the eighties even if not for everyone, and Iron Maiden's Flash of the Blade in multiple scenes actually works well - but even that adds to the personality of the game for the better. Details in the plot like the emphasis on the "Swiss Transylvania" this is set in and the Alp air's strange effect on the people, are the type of details you normally do not get enough of in some horror films and are the flourishes, even if never part of the main plot, that add weight. They feel like tonal flourishes you get from an Edgar Allen Poe tale, apt as he is referenced explicitly in a tribute to one of his iconic stories, Argento bringing in Donald Pleasence, a great casting choice, and giving him a chimpanzee as a sympathetic character who is yet an excuse, when tragedy leads to her needing to get revenge, to have her inexplicably find a switchblade in an outside bin the middle of nowhere and gun after the culprit.

Contrasted by the washed out blue touch that permeates the film, as Tenebrae (1982) was stark in its use of septic white, the film does feel like a dream. It started off from the idea of insects and their life cycles being able to identify the time of death, which was clearly the main fascination for the script, and spring boarded into something like a fever dream. Has all of it aged well? You can argue its plot reveal of the killer, in its take on mental asylums and disability, has not aged well, but the result includes a monster child with a spike on a retractable steel stick in a boat, so the film's absurd edge thankfully undercuts any bad taste to this, alongside giving Daria Nicolodi, despite this being the time her relationship with Argento ended for good, the chance to chew the scenery for the better. It is helped by Jennifer Connelly too; she is a visibly charismatic figure who helped keep the film grounded for all its absurd turns and ridiculous dubbing readings. The scenes in the worst all-girls' school possible, leading to her summoning a swarm of insects around the building, is ethereal as a set piece, and she keeps someone there in the centre to prevent this stumbling over, as it gets weirder. That also is the case when the film becomes more morbid, as it effectively gets into a killer who likes keeping the decaying bodies of their victims like a blanket comforter, then moving to a new house leaving them behind. Eventually when we get an entire underground swimming pool of decay in the location of the finale, one of the most grotesque scenes from the director, Connelly is still there to allow a legitimately sympathetic figure in the centre of this.

Add to this the music which is not the heavy metal, scored by Goblin and as strong as expected from them, and the film has always been one I have loved even if the one, even next to the Three Mothers films with their surrealist nightmare tones, that feels the maddest and peculiar in Dario Argento's career. This would have definitely been a film which gained a greater appreciation as time went on, with the irony knowing that the weight of expectation over Argento's career would have been harsh on the likes of this and Opera (1987), also with its heavy metal tinged eccentricities, next to his seventies smashes. For me, watching Phenomena even next to some of the great Italian genre films of the era did bring up the fact that Argento had become an auteur at that point. Even if one of the horror genre, he gained a traction and a weight to his name where Phenomena, for all its strange decisions in the plot, feels like a big event production in terms of the gravitas and style filtered through it. Rather than playing safe too, he decided to make something like Phenomena, and that realization has made my love for the film grow further.

Fruits of Passion (1981)

 

Director: Shūji Terayama

Screenplay: Shūji Terayama and Rio Kishida

Based on Retour à Roissy by Anne Desclos

Cast: Isabelle Illiers as O, Klaus Kinski as Sir Stephen, Arielle Dombasle as Nathalie, Peter as Madame, Keiko Niitaka as Aisen, Sayoko Yamaguchi as Sakuya, Hitomi Takahashi as Byakuran, Miyuki Ono as Kasen, Kenichi Nakamura as Le jeune homme, Ogaku, Akiro Suetsugu as Obana, Renji Ishibashi as Kato, Takeshi Wakamatsu as Le gardien de la maison, Georges Wilson as Le narrateur

An Abstract Candidate

 

Fruits of Passion feels caught between an unfortunate schism, a compromise between two sides which fits the legacy of a sequel novel by Anne Desclos, the original novel itself caught between the schism of being criticized by feminists for a tale of a woman becoming the ultimate submissive to men, yet also was a work by a woman who, even if hiding under a pseudonym until she finally revealed her authorship, was intelligent and as much writing the book as a challenge to the person she held the dearest, Jean Paulhan, the director of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française literary magazine, in his belief no woman could write an erotic novel¹. In general the erotic films of the past, specifically the ones this is linked to from the seventies, are always going to be challenging in terms of whether their ideas and tone can be defended or not, but this one is also matched by a director in Shūji Terayama, with his collaborators, who was unsung and interesting as he found himself her stuck trying to escape the cage of the genre as the lead herself symbolically wishes to. The film’s central premise of transgressive is questioned by the film itself, as it becomes a pretext which clearly sold the film, with its nudity and sex, but as the most un-erotic of erotic films and more concerned with its tale of Western imperialism on the East, gender and the denizens of a brothel we find ourselves with.

Terayama’s films have been generally difficult to actually see officially, which has made them a Holy Grail for me as a fan of surrealistic cinema, with Fruits of Passion one of the few more readily available as a French-Japanese co-production with a wider reach, one of a couple from a time where Nagisa Ōshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976) was another Argos Film production they funded and the most notorious. Its presentation as a generic sounding erotic film with the potential for problematic content would have not necessarily been a promising introduction to this figure, in which the notorious actor Klaus Kinski, as Englishman Sir Simon, takes a young woman O (Isabelle Illiers) to 1920s Shanghai to become a willing/unwilling brothel sex worker for his fantasies. It is a subject that may prove a concern, but is shot through the eye of a director with a complete lack of interest in eroticizing this, and even in mind to the film feeling like a compromise, shows his voice in a distinct direction, as he brought with him his cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki and composer J.A. Seazer to drastically undercut the direction of the premise. Also important is the co-writer, Rio Kishida, a female playwright and collaborator with Shūji Terayama who wrote plays explicitly dealing with the lives of women, such as the play Thread Hell about women working in a silk thread factory in 1939. That she wrote among multiple films Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice (1988), Akio Jissôji's sexually explicit erotic drama set in the 1920s and based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, she had no qualms about dealing with transgressive sexuality as much as feminist ideas.

This is felt with a sense of a film which is running away from its central premise as soon as possible. As much of this comes from O’s story itself as, barring some moments, it is not of real interest for either screenwriter. Shūji Terayama does evoke moments, like a childhood memory of her father abandoning her symbolized by a chalk outline as a child she cannot escape from, which show more to her psyche, but she feels like an outsider to the material as well as with Isabelle Illiers really feeling uncomfortable onscreen having to be continually nude, so much so a client of O’s comments about it and asks if she ever gets cold. Ultimate her plot barring its symbolic template is more rewarding than her dramatic arch, as it is visibly clear the brothel as a whole, and Shanghai under the influence of corrupt Westerners like Sir Simon, is the greater concern. Whilst a curious concoction of a Chinese setting, French co-production credits with French or English dubbing on the cast, and a Japanese production team behind the camera and Japanese actors onscreen with European figures like Illiers and Kinski, you also get a cast of idiosyncratic faces. Legendary model and Steely Dan album cover figure Sayoko Yamaguchi is one of the women working in the brothel, and whilst the brothel mistress is played, whilst dubbed, by Peter, the actor from the seminal LGBTQ film Parade of Roses (1969), and would later appear in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), looking as glorious as you can get whilst also emphasized as a more complex figure in the little he gets. Whilst initially presenting a strict punishment regime including punishing prayer, the mistress is revealed to actually be a caring woman in charge of a family of women and some male assistants who are just trying to survive.

The complete disinterest in being sexy feels on point, in contrast to the aesthetic beauties that are Terayama’s trademarks, such as the use of colour lighting, the surrealistic and melancholic sequences in-between, and the general lush aesthetic style, both attempting to be realistic to the time period but due to the curious co-production history showing its artifice at times. Attempts at a more distinct plot – as a young man who works at a cheap restaurant just by the brothel becomes smitten with O – are interesting, but it’s a fragment of an entire eighty minute film which in that short running time does show potential evidence that the film was compromised on its way to being completed. It feels like it was not given the potential to expand with the grace Terayama’s other films, even a piece explicitly about sexual desire, the mini-feature Grass Labyrinth (1979), could show.

The most compelling fragments from what survived come from the side characters and the context, which in its use of exotic aesthetic, whether defendable or not, evokes the works of Josef von Sternberg; the set up without the explicit sexual content in the thirties would have been a film Marlene Dietrich could have been the star of. The little of the historical plot is the most dynamic in how, with his desire to corrupt O, whilst also having a mistress on the side named Nathalie (Arielle Dombasle), Sir Simon is a terrible person. Kinski’s real life is one I do not want to touch with a barge pole, but he was a compelling figure especially in his antagonism with Werner Herzog. Even dubbed, the twisted aura he always had whilst too uncomfortable at times in certain places fits here, apt for the corrupt figure who thinks he can play games with the Chinese locals, even on a whim funding the Coolie Rebellion, trying to liberate the country from Western influence, and finding himself on a knife’s edge due to this. Even here the erotic set up makes sense as, being a voyeur wanting to see O degrade herself, the romance with the young man in the restaurant and his precarious gambling with life, literalized in metaphor in a casino, is his downfall spiritually and physically when money cannot get what he wants.

Alongside the humour which crops up, like a soldier being spanked for stealing the fictional underwear of his metaphorical mother in a BDSM mistress-client fantasy, or the weirdness of the swan rocker, briefly seen as a combination of a rocking horse and a sex bench, which cuffs a person in it belly first with its rib cage-like mechanics, allowing them to flap their arms like a swan, you see the side of this film which is Terayama’s, and it stands out. Alongside undercutting the illusion of its premise, like J.A. Seizer long before his work in the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) indulging in some time inappropriate but awesome prog rock, there are plenty of times this is undercutting the expectations. It has a lot of bird metaphors in their freedom symbolically, from cutting to a dead one filmed floating down the river, or the dream sequence of Illiers naked and chained on a bed, on the roof outside with birds tied to it flapping about, or really poignant scenes not involving O, such as the life of the former actress who is one of the sex worker. She has the most interesting route, from the humour of her role plays in imaginary films with clients, with male staff playing the director with a fake camera, or the tragic “adieu le cinema” that finished her story, which has the set up of a grand piano being talked of in the river pay off in a beautifully haunting moment when it rises out of the nearby water with a corpse being lifted on top of it.

This definitely counts as a flawed gem, especially as it has very little time to fully dissect the complex gender politics it had clearly in mind, something out of the ordinary in this especially when a few years later, you get the likes of Bolero (1984) with Bo Derek held as infamously bad, and erotic cinema would drastically change against especially into the nineties. It feels like the weakest of Shūji Terayama‘s films I have seen entirely because it feels compromised by its production history, working with material to the best he could, and that we were able to get makes this still rewarding. Only the fact most of his career is difficult to officially see, unlike this film, feels the sour aspect to all of this.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) The Story of the Story of O, written by Carmela Ciuraru for Guernica, and published June 15th 2011.

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

 

Director: Ciro Ippolito (and Biagio Proietti)

Screenplay: Ciro Ippolito

Cast: Belinda Mayne as Thelma Joyce; Mark Bodin as Roy; Benedetta Fantoli as Maureen; Michele Soavi as Burt; Valeria Perilli as Jill; Danilo Micheli as Bill

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It took seven years to get from Alien (1979) to Aliens (1986). Italy got there with an unofficial sequel a year later and likely with mind the Ridley Scott film would still be in cinemas around the world and people would believe this was an actual sequel, they could follow it with this without anything but pure carnival hucksterism. This is funnier as, with the actual Alien franchise, we never got Xenomorphs on Earth until Aliens vs. Predator in 2001 but this got there one year later too.

Set around astronauts on a space mission, we follow a group of cave explorers predating The Descent (2005), exploring a cave to their peril in the midst of an abrupt alien invasion. Immediately you see that the production wanted to make caving the exciting new thing, helped by the fact as the predominant set location for this lower budget film, actual caves, are impressive locations regardless of price of filming, legitimately beautiful locations and perfect for a horror film. More idiosyncratic is the obsession with bowling, which is Italian producers trying to figure out what is hip to American audiences and that they had access to a bowling alley too. Joking aside, it's a simple monster film, where Thelma (Belinda Mayne) as our lead is among this caving group, who also just happens to be psychic and has grim concerns about what is happening in general around her. That is a plot detail which is abrupt but means she is the one person with a bad feeling as, likely due to the astronauts' mission, there are festering alien blobs on the beach among the sand castles let alone in the caves.

Obviously, like Luigi Cozzi's Contamination (1980), these Italian films wanted to have the face huggers from Alien, one of its most iconic images from the pulsating eggs let alone the horrifying critters inside, but could not for copyright reasons. The iconic eggs even if their biology is weird, meant to be the selling point for both but having to figure out something new even if unconventional, here blue rocks which pulsate and become face eating entities. They do one better than the face huggers, whose children burst out of chests, by gestating and bursting directly out the face of their victims, but it is one of the touches you see where this was made to follow a major film globally. Like Contamination's, which were more biological bombs which made everyone explode, there is no logic like the Xenomorphs to how these alien "eggs" work, only the fear of unknown objects being played to in a film like this which, in content, cause gory results or leads here to mostly vague rubber entities which have red Twiglet tendrils.

This film has a style, even if it is as much an Italian production shooting in America trying to be American, even if it unfortunately leads to a dubbing of one black cast member, a bowling alley staff member, which director Eli Roth once bluntly called "Amos & Andy" dubbing, clearly an Italian man in a voice over he openly admits crosses a line into being racist¹. It is a languid film in fact, taking half an hour to get to the caves themselves, soaking in the American locations, and as a monster film pacing itself quietly with its cast, it is a distinct change of pace even from other genre films from Italy at the time even if might put some off expecting the purely over-the-top and lurid nature of others from this era. The music is one of the strongest aspects, composer Oliver Onions, alongside the memorable name, also happens to be a pseudonym for Guido De Angelis and Maurizio De Angelis, the legendary composers behind films like Street Law (1974), acclaimed in the Italian genre field and earning their pay check for a great score here.

For the moments you can pick holes in this film, I have seen it enough times now they even have a charm. It makes no sense to see future director Michele Soavi, before directing Cemetery Man (1994), writing on a typewriter in a cave using lit candles, a habit his character has despite the newly elected Pope in Italy meaning the candles have become more expensive to buy, but it is a cool (and funny) image) alongside moments which work intentionally. One, in a prolonged camera pan after a victim against complete black, exemplifying the moment their face explodes from a recent host, is actually good enough to have become an iconic moment in a more acclaimed film. In terms of whether this is actually scary or good horror, that is entirely subjective. Honestly the more interesting thing about this era of Alien rip offs, which are different to even the ones for Aliens  which took a different tone as an official sequel, is how they reflect tropes from a popular film in their own way for better and for worse, like Peter Walker's Inseminoid (1981) for one closer to this Englishman's home. They are reflections of the industry of cinema, where everyone is eyeing everyone's success and sometimes blatantly cashing in on what worked, which can be ironic for entertainment for some viewers, but still counts as entertaining. This one at least, to the film's credit, has the creepy idea of being inspired by tape worms in terms of the alien tendrils, even if I made a joke about them earlier in the review, taking inspiration from something which is real and can be found in a human being's guts, which is creepy. The egg symbology from Alien as mentioned is scrambled, a pretence to sell the film, but when this is about cavern walls with tendrils coming out of them, and the aliens themselves being vague entities we never truly see the full sight of, even if to cover the practicalities of the effects, it is still effective.

Also this commits to an appropriately nihilistic ending, taking advantage of when you can shoot at the right time, and you can depict a metropolis in carefully chosen shots completely without people, offering a gut punch that makes up for this lower budget with an obsession for bowling. Ciro Ippolito, the credited director, is an outlier as none of his other films fit the template of genre cinema at the time, more of a producer/writer for titles like the romantic film Vanilla and Chocolate (2004). This is the same for the un-credited co-director Biagio Proietti, though he has a co-writer credit on Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat (1981). A lot of the history of Italian genre cinema factors in key figures, not just directors but also screenwriters and producers, who continued even if into other genres within this now-cult sphere of genre filmmaking. This makes these two fascinating alongside the film as a one-and-done in that said history. Literally they came to take advantage of the popularity of Alien, did not get sued or have their films pulled as infamously others did, like Enzo G. Castellari for the Jaws inspired Great White (1981). Whilst Alien 2: On Earth was once an obscure title, likely because it did not have a known or infamous name in the director's chair, it was salvaged and rediscovered, allowing its mischief with a known franchise, and that it managed to get away with it, to sparkle with ghoulishness.  

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1) Taken from the featurette Franchised Terrorist: An Interview with Eli Roth, as was available on the British Blu Ray release by 88 Films.

Macabre (1980)

Director: Lamberto Bava

Screenplay: Pupi Avati, Roberto Gandus, Lamberto Bava and Antonio Avati

Cast: Bernice Stegers as Jane Baker, Stanko Molnar as Robert Duval, Veronica Zinny as Lucy Baker, Roberto Posse as Fred Kellerman, Ferdinando Orlandi as Mr. Wells, Fernando Pannullo as Leslie Baker, Elisa Kadigia Bove as Mrs. Duval

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Set in the USA, specifically New Orleans with Southern accents in the dub, Macabre was the debut film for Lamberto Bava, son of the legendary Mario Bava, and it is less a horror film in conventions but a really twisted horror melodrama. The set up is a film in itself but sets up a more morbid narrative: a wife named Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) is having an adulterous affair behind her husband's back with a man named Fred (Roberto Posse), creating suspicion in the eldest daughter Lucy (Veronica Zinny) to the point the later, in an act of psychosis, drowns her younger brother in the bathtub out of revenge for the betrayal. The drive back, panicked by the horror of losing her own son, leads Jane and Fred to crash the car, Fred losing his head in the collision with a wall.

A year later, the parents have divorced, and Jane has had mental health therapy, but this perverse melodrama with sultry jazz on the score by Ubaldo Continiello will see the repercussions of this incident for Mrs. Baker. Another figure of importance is Robert (Stanko Molnar), a blind instrument repair man who, in the prologue when his mother was still alive, let a room in the top floor for Jane and Fred for their affair, letting her take the room again by herself separated from her husband. Slow paced, I mentioned this was less a horror film in the traditional sense, and in a gruesome turn in the plot, befits its name a macabre drama in presentation. Late seventies chic of over textured and saturated coloured wallpaper and decor overwhelm the main setting, Robert's home, be it the marble wall bathroom with pure white sink to yellowish gold on everything from clothes to wall decor. Because of this, there is a sick lavishness to a sick story of love as Jane has not forgotten Fred, and someone comes to her room at night as Robert is still able to hear from the floor below.

Robert is our sympathetic figure, sweet and attractive with bold blue eyes, but they are unable to see a thing, Robert not playing a bad stereotype either of a blind man, caught blissfully unaware of Mrs. Baker ritualizing her beloved Fred, with even a portable shrine to him carried with her when she takes the room to stay in. Robert will learn the horrible truth, and even before then he is stuck knowing she pleasures herself at night seemingly on the top floor whilst he pangs in unrequited love. The story is made more complicated by Lucy herself, playing another obsessive in wanting her parents to reunite even if it means tormenting her own mother, like Lucy adding a photo of the late younger brother for her mother to find in her rented room. Wanting said parents back, in the same way Jane wants Fred back, makes up the key theme of the film, of two generations of people clinging to their past in unhealthy, destructive ways, making the film compelling as the equivalent of a radio drama extended into a ninety minute film. As I get older, this is the tone I prefer for a lot of horror, unless they can be great or fun exceptions, much more interesting to see this type of story you could tell in a thirty minute tale with audio only have its form expanded into this intriguing movie.

It admittedly has a plot twist you would have not gotten away with on an old radio show like Beyond Midnight or Inner Sanctum Mysteries. The twisted aspect is what Mrs. Baker keeps in the top of the refrigerator in the room, [Huge Spoiler] which turns out to be an act of necrophilia with Fred's head where the frozen peas should be stored. It is gross but the idea of a love so strong it turns into this obsession to even preserve what remains of him, as a talisman even if involving their actual remains, is compelling. More so as the story is actually based on a real story of a woman who kept her lover's head in a refrigerator too, Bava given a newspaper clipping of the incident by Pupi Avati, the filmmaker who also co-writer with his brother Antonio Avati¹. [Spoilers End] Even if the twist will be obvious if you have sussed up on your plot tropes, and have a sick imagination, the story is macabre literally for this sickly obsession with love in a lurid depiction.

It is helped by the lead Bernice Stegers, a British actress who was spotted through Federico Fellini's City of Women (1980)¹, made around the same time, giving a committed role as a woman lost in her own insanity. Her career is in small roles between film and television, but she would also reappear in Xtro (1982), a film which somehow managed to outdo this Italian film in terms of bizarre imagery. The perversity of the story is enough even with an even more absurd and supernatural end scene for an added jolt, because of its growing tension of everything starts to collapse. Even mother and daughter will be at war with each other in a gristly conclusion. Lamberto Bava's films after, to be honest, are not subtle in the slightest, his most iconic Demons (1985) as over-the-top as you can get, and whilst Macabre fits the director's career in the final act, when everything goes to Hell, the slow burn nature of this particular tale stands out with great reward.

 

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1) Taken from Macabre and the Golden Age of Italian Exploitation (2009), directed by Elijah Drenner.