Italian Horror Blog-a-thon: Phenomena

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies blog run by Kevin J. Olson. Please check out all the fantastic contributions over there.

Some fans of Dario Argento’s films feel that Phenomena (1985) should have been the third film in The Three Mothers trilogy and not the official installment Mother of Tears (2007). Structurally and, at times, visually Phenomena bears a striking resemblance to Suspiria (1977), the first film in the trilogy, in that they have a dark fairy tale vibe and feature young women battling against malevolent forces. Both films also begin with the brutal murder of a beautiful young woman. In Phenomena, a school girl (Fiore Argento, the director’s daughter) in Switzerland just misses her bus and looks for help at a nearby house. Argento cuts repeatedly to someone or something trying to free itself from chains attached to a wall. The killer chases the girl through the woods and then kills her with scissors in a way that evokes the first operatic death in Suspiria.

Inspector Rudolf Geiger (Patrick Bauchau) and his assistant Kurt (Michele Soavi) enlist the help of Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasence) to help them solve a series of murders via a radical theory that involves using insects to tell them the time of death. Meanwhile, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), an American student, attends the Richard Wagner Academy for Girls in Switzerland, chaperoned by Frau Bruckner (Daria Nicolodi). We learn that she has a natural affinity for insects. She’s also a child of divorce who has been dumped there by her globetrotting father, a famous actor, and her estranged mother who lives in India. There is a really nice scene where Jennifer bonds with her roommate Sofie (Federica Mastroianni) as she tells her about how her parents split up. This scene is crucial in that it personalizes the film as we go from an objective third person perspective to the first person, empathizing with this poor girl who has been dumped into a foreign world with no friends or family.

Jennifer experiences eerie nightmares scored to Iron Maiden and is prone to sleepwalking on the ledge of a school building where she witnesses a murder and is eventually hit by a car. Only Argento could get away with orchestrating such an audacious sequence. Much like David Lynch he is able to seamlessly blend the dream world with reality. To make matters worse, Jennifer’s habit of sleepwalking makes her an outcast among her fellow classmates and a guinea pig to her teachers who poke and prod her like a lab rat. She meets McGregor and he helps develop her telepathic power over insects and they team up to stop the serial killer. He is the father figure that she is looking to fill the void left by her absent parent. In a nice bit of casting against type, veteran character actor Donald Pleasence plays a kindly old man, an academic type fascinated with the pursuit of knowledge along with his trusty chimpanzee attendant Inga (Tanga). The professor’s relationship with Jennifer is quite touching even though they make for an unlikely pair of amateur detectives.

With only one film on her resume prior to Phenomena (Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon A Time in America) and a background in modeling, Jennifer Connelly delivers a grounded, naturalistic performance devoid of the acting tics she would develop later on in her career. Under Argento’s expert direction, she creates a fiercely independent girl who also has a vulnerable side as evident in the tour de force scene where her classmates tease and torment Jennifer until she lashes out with her powers and the façade of the school is enveloped by flies while she looks on. Your heart really goes out to her as she’s misunderstood by her teachers and ostracized by her classmates. In addition, she’s learning to use and understand her telepathic powers. It’s a lot for a young girl to deal with and this is all beautifully realized by Connelly who acts very mature and poised for her age.

The origins for Phenomena came from a German news item that Argento discovered about crime investigators studying the behavior of insects in a room where a murder had been committed, leading to clues pertaining to the crime. He was intrigued by this idea and talked to the police who were quite supportive of this technique even though it was mostly theoretical and had only been applied once and not in a serious way. Argento then went to France and met with a famous entomologist who told him about how the world of insects applied to the criminal world. Co-screenwriter Franco Ferrini and Argento came up with the idea not to make a horror film but rather a supernatural thriller with this element introduced via Jennifer’s ability to telepathically control insects.

Argento sent actress Daria Nicolodi to the United States to cast Phenomena but she was met with a lot of rejection because of the subject matter. Argento originally wanted to cast Liv Ullman’s daughter Lynn in the role of Jennifer but when her agent read the screenplay he turned it down because it was a “splatter movie.” Another woman threw the script in Nicolodi’s face telling her, “You can’t torture an adolescent with such violent images.” Argento was taken with Jennifer Connelly’s beauty, in particular her eyes, and Nicolodi organized a meeting between them. She even showed the young actress’ parents a few scenes from Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which they liked. Nicolodi even became good friends with Connelly and they bonded over dinner. The two became close during filming with Connelly regarding Nicolodi as a kind of second mother.

Like most of Argento’s films, he creates an incredible mood and atmosphere and this is particularly evident in the way cinematographer Romano Albani photographs the forests that feature prominently throughout. For example, the establishing shot of Professor McGregor’s house shows trees blowing ominously in the wind at night – the elements at their most primal. Argento also employs his trademark saturated lighting in a given scene, like bathing Jennifer in cool blue while she dreams. Heavy metal and horror films have been linked together for a long time – both are marginalized genres within their respective mediums, never getting the respect they deserve and never being particularly interested in getting it. So, it makes sense that for Phenomena, Argento uses songs by Iron Maiden and Motorhead along with a creepy electronic score courtesy of Simon Boswell, Claudio Simonetti, the Goblins, and a slumming Bill Wyman.

As is typical with many of Argento’s films, Phenomena builds to an absolute batshit crazy finale as Jennifer confronts the killer along with the help of a straight razor wielding chimpanzee. At times, the film tends to defy logic (like how the chimp obtains said razor) but that was never one of his main concerns. Phenomena follows its own kind logic, which can be maddening sometimes (like the boneheaded choices Jennifer occasionally makes) but one ultimately has to surrender to the fairy tale vibe that Argento creates and enjoy one of the more original Italian horror films to come out of the 1980’s. Much to his chagrin, the film’s title was changed to Creepers in the U.S. by distributor New Line Cinema and almost 30 minutes was cut, including bits of gore and crucial character development. Thankfully, it has been restored in recent years and Argento considers it his most personal and best film to date.

Escape from New York

John Carpenter is one of those rare filmmakers that entertains while also trying to say something about the society in which we live in. It is a tough balancing act that few can maintain but Carpenter's films make it look easy. From the special effects opus/remake drenched in paranoia of The Thing (1982) to the two-fisted diatribe against Reaganomics of They Live (1988), he hasn't been afraid to sandwich a thought-provoking message in between action sequences. In this respect, his films are much more than genre pictures; rather they critique the problems of contemporary society. And for its time, Escape From New York (1981) was no different. Carpenter's film examined the validity of the Presidency and the increase of crime and disguised it as a slick, futuristic race against time that was very prescient, going on to influence similarly-minded and looking films for years, including a fascinating sub-genre of Italian rip-offs.

Escape From New York is set in 1997 (?!) and crime in the United States has gotten so bad that Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison with one simple rule: "Once you go in, you don't come out." One night, the President's plane is taken over by terrorists who crash it into the prison. The President escapes but quickly becomes a prisoner of the inmates led by the Duke (Isaac Hayes). It seems that the President is carrying a vital piece of information that is to be delivered to a historical summit in Hartford. Enter Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive who has been captured by the government and is scheduled to be transferred into the prison. Instead, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) offers him a deal: go into the prison, find the President, and bring him and the information back in exchange for a full pardon. Sounds easy, right? There's a catch: Snake only has 22 hours to do all this because by then the conference will be over and the world will be thrown into chaos. As an incentive he has two explosive charges lodged in his neck to keep him focused on the task at hand. And with this enticing opening, the film kicks into high gear as Snake enters the world's most dangerous prison to find the President and save the world.

Carpenter had just made Dark Star (1974) and no one wanted to hire him as a director so he shifted his focus to screenwriting. Inspired by the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay in 1974. He didn’t agree with the film’s philosophy but liked how it conveyed “the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines. He was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the President. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it" because the general feeling was that “it was too violent, too scary, too weird.” And so the director went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the successes of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), Carpenter was in a position to make a motion picture with a big budget. He decided to revive his Escape script. But something seemed to be missing. "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." So, he brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) character and came up with the film's humorous conclusion that offset the bleak tone of the film with a skewed sense of satire.

The film's setting proved to be another potential problem for Carpenter. It is apocalyptic in tone: a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York City. How could Carpenter create this world on only a budget of $6 million (his biggest at the time)? As fate would have it, in 1977 there was a big fire in St. Louis that burnt out several blocks of the downtown area. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to these blocks at night and then proceeded to transform the burnt out remains into a New York City of the future. They even found an exact replica of Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot that Carpenter had never experienced before. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 am and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the Sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 pm, depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going the Sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." This approach paid off, creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere of a futuristic film noir.

In addition, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles and New York City. He and his film company were the first ones ever to be allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let Carpenter have free run of the entire island. He remembers, “We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble.” With Escape, the director created two distinct looks: “one is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England.”

The heart of Escape From New York lies in its main character: Snake Plissken. His cynical, world-weary attitude flies in the face of the earnest authorities who send him off to the save the world. Snake could care less. All that matters to him is "the next 60 seconds," as Kurt Russell commented in an interview. "Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." It is this kind of intensity that makes Snake such an interesting character. He is the ideal anti-hero ¬– intent on getting the job done and content on being left alone. Snake doesn't need anyone. Russell's performance clearly echoes Clint Eastwood's style of acting – the strong, silent type. Snake is a clever hybrid of The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. It is an amusing riff on Eastwood's two most famous characters, which is only reinforced by the appearance of Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in a few films opposite Eastwood). It is to Russell's credit that he makes Snake a character you want to root for, that you want to see win at the end. There is something charismatic about Snake that makes you automatically want to like him. What is so great about the character is that Carpenter and co-screenwriter Nick Castle remain true to him throughout. They don’t saddle him with a love interest or dilute his intensity by having him crack the occasional joke. Snake remains an unrepentant badass, the proverbial fly in the ointment with a surly disregard for authority right up to the last shot of the film.

And to think that the studio did not want Carpenter to cast Russell in the role. Up until then the actor had done a string of Disney films as a youth and worked with Carpenter on a T.V. movie about Elvis Presley. The studio did not see Russell as a tough action hero. In fact, Charles Bronson expressed an interest in playing Snake (Tommy Lee Jones was also considered). However, by Carpenter’s own admission, “I was afraid of working with him. He was a big star and I was this little-shit nobody.” Fortunately, the filmmaker had faith in Russell and Escape From New York continued a long-standing relationship between the two men – both personal and professional – that continues to this day.

Escape From New York also features a strong supporting cast of character actors like veteran thespian Harry Dean Stanton as Brain, the smartest man in the prison, and Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, a hack who stayed in New York even after it changed into a prison. Let’s not forget Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain’s girlfriend Maggie and yet she is anything but that, as the talented actress plays her character as the tough-minded female equivalent of Snake. The film contains an eccentric assortment of characters each of who get their moment to shine and this only enhances the enjoyment of watching Escape. One of the best things about it is how these characters interact with Snake and how he views them. The supporting cast also fleshes out more of this fascinating world. They continually offer all sorts of tantalizing tidbits that allude to Snake's colorful past, to conditions in the prison and how the inmates have created their own world.

Of interest to fans of Escape From New York is a ten-minute sequence that was cut early on. Filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, in order to utilize their futuristic-looking rapid transit system, it shows Snake robbing a federal facility in the desert and getting caught, which explained why he was being sent to New York City. However, test audiences didn’t like it and Carpenter took the sequence out. He said, “I had high hopes for this sequence – it was an introduction to the world and an introduction to the characters. Unfortunately, the audience didn’t care for it.” In retrospect, this scene may have over-explained what was later alluded to in the initial conversation between Snake and Hauk but it does offer even more, albeit brief, tantalizing glimpses of the world that exists outside of the prison.

Escape from New York received mostly positive reviews when it was released. Newsweek magazine felt that Carpenter had a “deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility – which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "[The film] is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season." However, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr felt that the film, “fails to satisfy–it gives us too little of too much.”

First and foremost Escape From New York is a fast-paced action film that is never dull to watch. However, the film also contains a dark, satirical edge that never falters, even right up to the film's conclusion. One the most frustrating problems of most films are how they end. No one seems to know how to end a film without relying on tried and true clichés. Carpenter's film does not fall into this trap. Escape may be an action film but it also makes some very interesting comments about crime in the United States that are still relevant even today. One could argue that Carpenter's film is almost intended to be a warning. That if things get any worse, the world that is depicted in this film isn't that far off. It is these sobering thoughts that make Escape From New York as powerful and entertaining today as it was when it first hit the screens in 1981.


In addition, check out this awesome fan site dedicated to both Escape films.

 

Prince of Darkness

“The outside world doesn’t want to hear this kind of bullshit. Just keep it locked away. They’ve already managed it for 2000 years.” -- Birack

Prince of Darkness (1987) was made after John Carpenter went public with how dissatisfied he was with the studio interference he encountered while working on studio films like Big Trouble in Little China (1986). He decided to return to his independent filmmaking roots by signing a multi-picture deal with Alive Films. He would get a $3 million budget per film and complete creative freedom. The first result was a creepy horror film and the second installment of an informal “Apocalypse Trilogy” which began with The Thing (1982) and concluded with In the Mouth of Madness (1995). Aside from being heavily influenced by legendary horror author H.P. Lovecraft, all three films feature a higher, malevolent supernatural force that manipulates human beings against one another in order to bring about the end of the world.

A group of ambitious math and sciences graduate students team up with their teacher Birack (Victor Wong) and an intense priest (Donald Pleasence in one of his last roles) to investigate the presence of a biological evil, which maybe the Devil, in a decaying old church. The first ten minutes introduces most of the film’s major characters with almost no dialogue as Carpenter cuts from one person to another, letting their actions inform who they are. There’s Brian (Jameson Parker), the serious one, Walter (Dennis Dun), the self-professed ladies man who is also a bit of a jerk, and Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount), a smart, good looking woman who becomes romantically involved with Brian.

Pretty soon, some of the students get infected with liquid from the large cylinder that resides in the basement of the church, and a large group of homeless people also surround the building. Carpenter revisits the siege mentality from Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and the dysfunctional group mentality from The Thing. He cleverly pits skeptical scientists against the devoutly religious and then throws them into a crisis where they have to work together in order to survive. As Brian says at one point, “Faith is a hard thing to come by these days.”

Carpenter had been reading a lot about theoretical physics and atomic theory at the time. He thought it would be interesting to create some kind of ultimate evil and combine it with the notion of matter and anti-matter. From there, he decided to have an anti-God that would act as a mirror opposite of God. Carpenter started with that premise and proceeded to add on various other ideas. The director admitted that he was in a very introspective mood at the time of making Prince of Darkness and was interested in making a horror film where the threat was primarily in the mind.

One of the film’s backers was the agent for veteran rock ‘n’ roller Alice Cooper and suggested that he record a song for the film, which they used only briefly. Carpenter got along with Cooper and suggested that the musician play a small but memorable part of a homeless zombie. Incidentally, the impaling device he uses in the film is from his actual stage show. Pre-production lasted only seven weeks and principal photography was relatively short in an effort to avoid a potential Directors Guild of America strike. Carpenter and his cast and crew spent two-and-a-half weeks on Los Angeles locations and two-and-a-quarter weeks of studio interiors. To keep the budget low, most of the cast and crew agreed to work for less because they either wanted the opportunity to make a film for Carpenter, or they had worked with him before (i.e. Victor Wong, Dennis Dun and Donald Pleasence were all returning alumni). The underground church sequences were shot in an abandoned, condemned luxury hotel in Long Beach and large chunks of ceiling would fall to the ground during takes.

Early on there is a great shot of the priest standing outside the rundown church and the way Carpenter frames it – in a long shot with the large building dwarfing the man – is very effective. The filmmaker expertly eases us into the horror with unsettling images like an anthill covered with swarming insects, a bag lady with bugs covering her, and several establishing shots of creepy, zombie-like homeless people just standing outside the church. The first 30 minutes is a slow burn as Carpenter gradually builds the dread, culminating in the first death and it’s an impressive one as a homeless zombie impales one of the students with part of a bicycle frame. These seemingly unrelated images begin to reveal a bigger picture and a greater evil. Throughout, Carpenter’s simple yet effective electronic score establishes a menacing tone that builds along with the emerging evil in the film.

As always, Carpenter sneaks in his social and political message. In many ways, it predicts the corruption of power that is explored in Vampires (1998). Absolute power corrupts and those in such lofty positions hide the truth from society to keep the rest of us ignorant. Carpenter takes a couple of amusing jabs at organized religion with the priest shown riding up to various locations in an expensive limousine. For someone who is supposed to be all about devoting his life to God, he lives pretty well.

Early on in the film, the priest reads a recently deceased clergyman’s journal with an entry entitled, “The Brotherhood of Sleep.” One particular passage is shown with the words, “The sleeper awakens,” which is very Lovecraftian. Much of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos fiction was concerned with the awakening of an ancient evil. We learn that the Brotherhood of Sleep is a powerful, top secret religious sect. Birack is Carpenter’s mouthpiece as he compares the evil in the basement of the church to anti-matter. Like matter is the polar opposite of anti-matter so to is the relationship between God and his opposite, what Birack classifies as Anti-God or Satan.

The critical reception to Prince of Darkness at the time was not kind to say the least. In his review for the Washington Post, Richard Harrington wrote, “At one point Pleasence vows that ‘it's a secret that can no longer be kept.’ Here's another: ‘The Prince of Darkness stinks. It too deserves to be shut up in a canister for 7 million years.’” Liam Lacey, in his review for the Globe and Mail, wrote, “There is no character really worth caring about, no sympathy to any of these characters. The principal romantic couple, Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount, are unpleasant enough to create an unfortunate ambivalence about their eternal destinies.” In his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film a “surprisingly cheesy horror film to come from Mr. Carpenter, a director whose work is usually far more efficient and inventive.” At any rate, you get idea. Mainstream critics did not dig it.

When I first saw Prince of Darkness many years ago, I had a problem with its lack of the traditional two-fisted Carpenter anti-hero. All of the characters seemed to stand around and pontificate about what was happening instead of doing something like Snake Plissken in Escape from New York (1981) or Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China or Nada in They Live (1988) – men of action. For me, no one character stood out from the rest and they were all equally bland and uninteresting – except for Pleasence’s priest and Wong’s professor, but their characters are given no chance to develop.

Over the years, I have watched Prince of Darkness many times and realized that I was wrong, that there was much more going on in the film than I initially realized. The film was made independently and with a lack of movie stars, Pleasence excepted, but he was hardly a household name at the time. I’m sure that this did not help its chances at the box office but it works for the film because you don’t know who is going to live or die – all bets are off. And so, like in The Thing, the group of students get picked off one-by-one with a core group of survivors fighting against insurmountable odds. What makes Prince of Darkness a refreshing change from most of Carpenter’s other films is that it features his most commonplace protagonists – college students – hardly the stuff that heroes are made of and yet when the time comes, they step up to the challenge because they are forced to in an exciting climax that ends in typical Carpenter fashion with society being saved but at the expense of a few unlucky souls. Or is it? Like the other two films in “Apocalypse Trilogy,” there is a lingering ambiguity suggested by the final image which hints that all may not be well. Prince of Darkness is one of those rare horror films that are as thought-provoking as it is scary.

There is a really nice review of the film over at Voyages of the HMS Swiftsure and another one over at Lessons From the School of Inattention. Finally, most of the images for this article are courtesy of this fantastic site.