Phenomena

[Ribs]

Standard edition coming in January

[colinr0380]

Here's Michael Parkinson's slightly ambivalent take on "Creepers" from the BBC's Film 86 programme. It makes me wish that Arrow had requested an interview with him for their edition of the film!

[Lost Highway]

Here's Michael Parkinson's slightly ambivalent take on "Creepers" from the BBC's Film 86 programme. It makes me wish that Arrow had requested an interview with him for their edition of the film!

This is certainly in keeping with Barry Norman who he stood in for on Film 85 and who loathed horror films.

[therewillbeblus]

Revisited this previously-diagnosed-as-‘forgettable’ movie and fell in love with it. There's just so many ways this could go wrong and plummet into inanity, but Argento flaunts his quirky ideas with both his usual visual wit and a surprisingly gripping narrative trajectory to deliver one of his strongest works on that narrative level. The mood deftly oscillates between sincerely gripping and playful, but never allowing that to overwhelm the tone, thanks in part to the relentless striking set pieces and a transformative reworking of 'light and silly' into an ethereal wavelength. Connelly gives perhaps the most convincing performance of peril in any Argento movie too, which is a tremendous feat considering she has one of the least convincing superpowers out there. The whole bag is a gas, but that last act in particular earns its thrills at every turn, with several reveals arguably surpassing the rate as which most viewers are able to make sense of them, creating an intoxicating effect coupled with the horror and action dials turned to eleven. Bonus points for demonstrating some value of insects.

[Mr Sausage]

While never one of my favourite Argentos, I've always thought this was a stronger movie than people give it credit for. Yes, Argento never manages to integrate Connolley's 'power' into the narrative in a satisfying or coherent way, and nor does he quite build and sustain the fairy tale atmosphere he's going for. But the set pieces are indeed terrific (the opening is still my favourite, tho' the human stew at the end was sure something), and the unstable, offkilter feel of the thing builds to a pitch of narrative madness that seems to come from the very Föhn itself, that madness generating wind. It's a fun ride.

Peculiar soundtrack, tho'. Stuff like Valley and the Simonetti theme are perfect, but the heavy metal is so out of place it's jarring, and not in a good way.

[colinr0380]

Peculiar soundtrack, tho'. Stuff like Valley and the Simonetti theme are perfect, but the heavy metal is so out of place it's jarring, and not in a good way.

That aspect only gets even more jarring in Opera! It's like in these post-Tenebrae films that things start going dream logical, but with the soft focus reveries constantly being broken into by the bluntly explicit heavy metal tracked kill scenes. The opening of Phenomena is a great example of that, with the girl left behind by the bus wandering through the beautiful countryside like a disenfranchised Heidi scored to that wonderful Valley track, only to end up chased by a monster and getting a stunning slo-mo Tenebrae-styled head smashing into glass death. Then there is the infamously divisive 'back to nature' finale of Opera that perhaps only fully works if you are on Argento's post-Phenomena wavelength of beautiful girls and their deep metaphysical connection to animals and the natural world. With the tinge of the main character losing her mind in response to a trauma kind of itself leading into the Asia Argento starring films, particularly The Stendhal Syndrome, which kind of takes a protagonist similar to the sleepwalking Jennifer Connelly character in Phenomena out of being a somewhat passive witness to all of the goings on and instead turns that character moving through a kind of addled dreamstate oblivious to the real world danger around them into the central figure, and eventually maybe into the most dangerous character of them all.

[therewillbeblus]

Argento never manages to integrate Connolley's 'power' into the narrative in a satisfying or coherent way

That's also why the ending is such a great punchline

SpoilerShow

The final kill doesn't come from her will, but from the chimpanzee's own intelligence, avenging his father/saving his friend. It's completely divorced from Connelly's skills.

[therewillbeblus]

Peculiar soundtrack, tho'. Stuff like Valley and the Simonetti theme are perfect, but the heavy metal is so out of place it's jarring, and not in a good way.

You're not kidding.. I just watched this again, and the second kill especially is set to the most offbeat (literally) heavy metal song for the activity on screen. The two main examples sorta work once the tension heats up, but both this scene and the later one with Connelly are cringe-inducing as the principals are just wandering around at a leisurely pace. What were they thinking?