Phenomena (film)

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Phenomena
DVD cover
Directed by	Dario Argento
Produced by	Angelo Jacono, Dario Argento
Written by	Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
Starring	Jennifer Connelly Daria Nicolodi Dalila Di Lazzaro Donald Pleasance Patrick Bauchau
Music by	Claudio Simonetti Fabio Pignatelli Bill Wyman Simon Boswell
Cinematography	Romano Albani
Editing by	Franco Fraticelli
Distributed by	Titanus Distribuzione New Line Cinema (USA, theatrical) Anchor Bay Entertainment (USA, DVD)
Release date(s)	January 31,1985 (Italy) August 2, 1985 (USA)
Running time	110 min, 82 min (USA, edited)
Country	Italy
Language	Italian & English
Budget	$3,800,000 (estimated)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Phenomena is a 1985 horror film directed by Dario Argento. It is also known as Creepers.

Jennifer Connelly stars as a young girl who arrives at an eerie Swiss boarding school where the students are being butchered by a vicious serial killer. With the help of a wheelchair-bound scientist (played by Donald Pleasence) she discovers she has special powers, and uses them to pursue the killer before she becomes the next victim.

It was Argento's first film to be shot in English, although only the scenes of Connelly and Pleasance together were shot sync sound.

[edit] Synopsis

Vera Grandt (Fiore Argento) is left behind in the Swiss countryside by a tour bus. She goes into a nearby house for help, where someone breaks loose from being chained to a wall and comes after her, stabbing her hand against the door frame with scissors, then chasing her up to a nearby waterfall with a metal spear assembled during the chase, stabbing her more times, sending her through glass, and finally beheading her. Her head is found several weeks later.

Inspector Rudolf Geiger (Patrick Bauchau) and his assistant, Kurt (Michele Soavi), take her head to entomologist John McGregor (Pleasance), who can get a close estimate of the time of death based on its consumption by the ever-present maggots.

Jennifer Corvino (Connelly), insect-loving daughter of musclebound movie star Paul Corvino, comes to attend the Richard Wagner Academy for Girls, chaperoned by Frau Brückner (Daria Nicolodi), who places her with roommate Sophie (Federica Mastroianni), who has a tendency to sneak out with her boyfriend, Karl (Kaspar Capparoni), in addition to having a crush on Jennifer's father. Jennifer has sleepwalking issues that appear to be derived from a traumatic Christmas Day departure of her mother with her lover when Jennifer was 7, an event drawn directly from Argento's own life. Jennifer immediately makes an enemy of the Headmistress (Dalila Di Lazaro), by putting up a poster of her father, which is seized as contraband--that Paul has provided Jennifer with no other photos is seen as irrelevant.

One of these sleepwalking incidents gets Jennifer struck by a car, and the young Italian men who hit her, but rescue her, feel they have the right to take advantage of her for not letting her lie on the road. She escapes from the car and tumbles down a hill, where she is discovered by Inga (Tanga), McGregor's chimpanzee attendant, and brought to him. He immediately notices her calming effect on his live specimens, and believes her to have a special gift for telepathy. The same night, Gisela Sulzer was slain in the school, and Jennifer witnessed it, after which she fell one story and eventually wandered onto the road, but her memories of the incident are vague, and a brain scan by the school doctor (Antonio Maimone) is not helpful in addressing her sleepwalking.

The students taunt her for her connection to the insects, for which she begins visiting Dr. McGregor regularly, and she brings a whole swarm of them to the school, declaring her love for them. When Sophie is slain, a firefly guides her to a maggot-covered glove, her personal connection causing her to want to use her powers to stop the killer, which McGregor would have done himself, since his girl assistant, Greta, was also a victim of the same killer. To wit, McGregor gives her a specimen of the Great Sarcophagus fly, which is drawn to decaying human flesh which its offspring can live on. It leads her to the house where Vera Grandt was attacked, but she finds only old toys and the estate agent (Franco Trevisi), though the fly finds a severed hand.

Jennifer tries to get out of the school, whose headmistress is convinced that Jennifer is Beelzebub ("Lord of the Flies"), but her father's asssistant, Morris Shapiro (Mario Donatone) is away for Passover, and cannot come for her. Frau Brückner offers to allow her to stay at her house and not sleep in the school, but it soon becomes apparent that she is directly involved in the case as well.

After numerous red herrings in Brückner's house, Jennifer realizes that Frau Brückner has attempted to poison her with pills. When Brückner demands entry to the bathroom and sees that Jennifer has vomited up the one pill she took, she locks Jennifer in a room and takes away the phone. After a cat and mouse game with the phone sends Jennifer over a transom and into a tunnel underneath the house, she is grabbed by Inspector Geiger, whom Brückner has chained up and tortured in a dungeon under her house that has a pit full of decaying, maggot infested bodies. Geiger breaks his thumb to get his handcuffs off and beats Brückner with the chain when she attacks Jennifer, tossing her into the pit, giving her time to escape. She finds that this dungeon attaches to the basement of the asylum where a psychopath who raped Brückner through his prison bars is held. In this basement is their child, Patua (Davide Marotta), whom Jennifer first seeks to aid before seeing his deformed face, maggots falling from it. Grabbing his spear, he chases after her onto a motorboat located outside the house. In attempting to kill her, he spikes the gasoline tank and causes a fire, and Jennifer is able to summon insects to protect her. Mauled as he is, he tries to drown her with him as she swims away from the boat.

She emerges from the water, finally greeted by Morris, who is immediately decapitated by Brückner with a piece of sharpened sheet metal. Bruckner pins Jennifer down to the ground with the sheet metal pressed against her neck, as she reveals that her son was the madman who was murdering young girls throughout the city. Bruckner sought to protect her son, by murdering McGregor and having murdered the detective while Jennifer was trying to escape from her son. As she gloats that Jennifer would be decapitated before she could use her insect telepathy to summon help to save her, Inga attacks Brückner with a straight razor she found in a garbage can, murdering her. Inga then drops the razor and is embraces Jennifer.

[edit] Release history

For its US release, Phenomena was retitled as Creepers and heavily edited to remove nearly thirty minutes of footage. The murder sequences were shortened by several seconds to remove gore, a sequence where the second victim is spotted and chased by the killer was removed, and two lengthy scenes (which make up the bulk of the missing footage) involving Jennifer Connelly's character telling her roommate the story about how her mother abandoned the family and her character receiving a brain scan after the second murder were removed for the purposes of speeding up the flow of the film.

Anchor Bay released the film to DVD in 1999; restoring the film's proper name and restoring all missing scenes from the original US release. However, in a controversial move, Dario Argento had several scenes shortened.^{[citation needed]}

The original film (or Integral cut) of the film is available in Europe, on Region 2 DVD. The Integral cut (or Integral Hard, as it is known in Japan) never existed in English, but only in the dubbed Italian version, and adds only a few seconds of cut footage to each scene, mostly of B roll material.

The film's score features music by Bill Wyman, Iron Maiden and Motörhead.

[edit] External link

• Phenomena at the Internet Movie Database
• Phenomena at All Movie Guide