“I love you. I love you *all*.”
…in which Jennifer Connelly gets a beetle all hot and bothered, so much so that it squirts its approval on Donald Pleasance. That’s not even the weirdest thing which happens in this film. The chosen quote is spoken by Connelly in a backlit Jesus pose to a swarm of descending, avenging flies. As far as Argento narratives go, Phenomena is rather straightforward. A killer is loose in picturesque Switzerland, Connelly is sent to a cloistered boarding school, she has a telepathic connection with insects, Donald Pleasance determines the age of severed heads through the cunning use of maggots, there’s a helper monkey – remember, I said straightforward for Argento. The Italian horror maestro is always on firmer footing, I believe, when his films are centered around the supernatural. The dream (nightmare?) logic his films adhere to works better when the trappings are a witches’ coven in Germany, or the fairytale setting of the Swiss Alps, rather than your standard giallo thriller. Nothing in here makes much sense – the dialogue careens randomly from English to German to Italian, the musical cues are wildly mismatched (a driving proggy synth arpeggio for a dreamlike sequence where a lightening bug leads Connelly to a crucial piece of evidence; Iron Maiden for the aftermath of a tragedy), plot threads are picked up and abandoned as soon as Argento sees the next shiny thing. The film has style to burn, sympathetic protagonists, and a real sense of forward momentum, though. It’s batshit crazy, yes, but consider that later this same year Connelly was traipsing around in stink swamps with David Bowie, his engorged codpiece, and a bunch troll Muppets. Is being a fly whisperer to seek out dead bodies really all that odd in comparison?
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