DARIO ARGENTO: PHENOMENA: LOBBY CARDS AND REVIEW

CAST:

Jennifer Connelly (Jennifer Corvino), Donald Pleasence (John MacGregor), Daria Nicolodi (Frau Bruckner), Dalila DiLazzaro (Headmistress), Federica Mastroianni (Sophie), Patrick Bauchau (Inspector Rudolf Geiger)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Dario Argento, Screenplay – Dario Argento & Franco Ferrini, Photography – Romano Albani, Insect Photography – Ferdinando Armati, Underwater Photography – Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Special Stage Effects – Tonino Corridori, Insect Effects – Maurizio Garrone, Makeup – Sergio Stivaletti, Production Design – Maurizio Garrone, Nello Giorgetti, Luciano Spadoni & Umberto Turco. Production Company – Dacfilm. Italy. 1985.

SYNOPSYS:

Jennifer Corvino, daughter of an American film star, arrives in Switzerland in the area known as ‘The Swiss Transylvania’ to attend the Richard Wagner School for Girls. She arrives at the same time as a killer starts stalking the girls at the school. She is befriended by the wheelchair-ridden Scottish entomologist John MacGregor who discovers that Jennifer has an ability to telepathically communicate with insects. As she explores her newfound ability, Jennifer realises that this also offers a means of discovering the killer’s identity. 

COMMENTARY:

The films of Dario Argento have an extraordinary wildness to them. They cannot be viewed as rational psycho-thrillers or traditional tales of the occult – they are works that exist almost entirely for the sake of displaying scenes of gratuitous sadism, all presented with a wild artistic flair. Argento’s artistic fascination with psychopathology and sadism can take one aback. It is as if Argento treats the human body and its entrails as though it were an artist’s clay that he might pull apart and rearrange as though fascinated to see what sorts of objects might be placed up against or into it 

Many Italo-horrorphiles call Phenomena a slipshod piece of Argento. However, there is much to enjoy – Argento holds one’s attention throughout and the plot is neither any more nor any less coherent than any other Dario Argento film. The setting is admittedly a steal from Suspiria (1977) but Argento only uses it as a springboard and turns the film into a unique detective story. The scenes where Jennifer Connelly realises her psychic powers and starts using the insects to locate the killer are the most fascinating in the film and, although Argento never takes the insect telepathy angle anywhere after introducing it, this slant on a detective story has a uniqueness unlike anything that has ever been done before.

When it comes to his trademark suspense and dismemberment, Argento creates some startling scenes – like where Jennifer Connelly realises that she has been poisoned and starts making herself try to throw up before it affects her. The extended climax is also excellent with wild and weird sequences like where Jennifer Connelly follows a telephone cord down a tunnel into a cellar filled with pools of maggot-ridden dead bodies; or Patrick Bauchau having to break his own hand so that he can get out of a manacle; and Jennifer Connelly’s climactic fight with the killer’s son, being dragged underwater by him as she tries to flee the burning gasoline in the water.

Jennifer Connelly, then only fifteen years old, turns in a reasonably sophisticated performance and Donald Pleasence lends his kindly if aging presence as the wheelchair-ridden scientist.

Dario Argento’s other films are:– The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Deep Red (1976), Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae/Unsane (1982), Opera/Terror at the Opera (1987), Two Evil Eyes (1990), Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), The Phantom of the Opera (1999), Sleepless (2001), The Card Player (2004), Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (2007), Giallo (2009) and Dracula 3D (2012). 

HAMMER FILMS: 'THE TWO FACES OF DR JEKYLL' TERENCE FISHER'S MEDITATION ON THE EVIL MEDICATION : REVIEW AND GALLERY

CAST:

Paul Massie, Dawn Addams, Christopher Lee, David Kossoff, Francis De Wolff, Norma Marla, Magda Miller, Oliver Reed, William Kendall, Helen Goss, Pauline Shepherd, Percy Cartwright, Joe Robinson.
TECH:
Director: Terence Fisher. Script: Wolf Mankowitz. Producers: Michael Carreras / Anthony Nelson Keys. Production: 1960 UK

COMMENTARY:

Dr Henry Jekyll (Paul Massie) lives an almost reclusive lifestyle, only seeing other people when he needs to as he tends to his experiments. One person he does see is Dr Ernst Littauer (David Kossoff), the one man he feels he can confide in, even if they are not seeing eye to eye on his field of endeavour. Jekyll allows the mute children from the nearby school to play in his garden, partly out of generosity, but partly so he can examine human nature, as he believes he can tell a lot from the way they interact free from the niceties of adulthood. But what if there were some way of doing the same for him?

Crack open the bottle of serum, it was split personality time again for this umpteenth version of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which let's not forget the big twist at the climax turned out to be that the title characters were one and the same. Naturally, every movie and television adaptation that followed were not able to use this as a major surprise for their versions, mainly because the ending became so famous that everyone who had ever heard of it knew very well what its central conceit was: that Jekyll managed to separate the two sides of his personality into the virtuous and the wicked.

And how he suffered for it, except in this variation he's suffering even before he starts injecting himself with the fruits of his labour. By 1960, Hammer were enthusiastically remaking every classic horror tale they could get their hands on, and this was no exception, only they decided to go for a novel approach, the main selling point being that Jekyll was old and ugly, while his alter ego was young and handsome. Massie was the man filling both roles, and though he starts the film rather stiff and bland no matter which character he was portraying, he did grow into the role, appropriately enough for a film that becomes more interesting and lively as it progresses.

Terence Fisher was the man at the helm here, Hammer's star director, and continuing his meditations on the nature of evil as exhibited in the duality of mankind, something that the Jekyll and Hyde story sounds perfect for. And he does divine some worth from a tale that had already grown pretty old hat, although in those early stages it's up to Christopher Lee, playing the raffish gambler who is having an affair with Jekyll's wife Kitty (Dawn Addams) and helping himself to her bank account, to provide the interest as he is the most entertaining performer in this, with Addams lumbered with a role that is wholly in service of the plot. Once the Hyde incarnation is unleashed, Lee's Paul Allen finds himself with a new best friend.

In other hands this would be the ideal material for farce - you can imagine Ray Cooney crafting this into a trouserless comedy romp as Jekyll and Hyde try to conceal their subterfuge from the woman only one of them is supposed to be married to. Indeed, the other main female role is taken by Norma Marla as exotic dancer Maria, who curiously only appeared in one other film and that too was a refashioned Jekyll and Hyde plot, The Ugly Duckling, starring Bernard Bresslaw doing much what Massie gets to do in this. 

But here the laughs are more likely to be thinner on the ground, unless you begin to ponder that the serum would make a terrific exfoliant considering how the doctor's facial furniture vanishes (plucks his eyebrows, too) when he turns Hyde. If it doesn't have much new to say about the two sides of people, it does it with stronger stuff than audiences of the day would be used to, with drug taking, suicide and rape among its shock scenes, though it was yet another film of the era that suggested decadence by having a dance troupe leap onto the stage for a can-can. Music by David Heneker and Monty Norman.

Review: Graeham Clark
Review: Here
Images: Marcus Brooks