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Debra Whitlock
Debra Whitlock

Creepers (aka Phenomena) (1984)

As bad luck would have it,
I could only get my hands on the American re-edited version, which ties my
hands for this review; any complaints I may have, from abrupt musical cues to
story pacing to plot holes, can all be blamed on the evil American distributor
instead of director Dario Argento.
We begin with a Danish tourist girl who gets off
the tour bus in the middle of nowhere in Switzerland (to look at wildflowers?)
and misses the bus back.  In a panic, she goes to the big house off the
road, looking for help, where something bursts through restraining chains,
chases her, and murders her with a stab to the gut.  (Beautiful shot of
her head going through a plate glass window -- that ain't candy-glass, bubba.)
Her decapitated head is found by the police some
time later and brought to the crippled Scotsman John MacGregor (Donald
Pleasance, who can't keep his accent constant), an entomologist who dabbles in
forensics (which is a true science, by the way -- forensic entomologists help
establish the time and place of death by cross-referencing the life-cycles of
the insects eating the corpse with weather records; I read about it in Discover
magazine).  MacGregor's pet chimp runs around with a scalpel and a big
placard that says "FORESHADOWING."
Meanwhile: Young Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer
Connelly), daughter of movie star Paul Corvino, is sent to a boarding school in
Switzerland.  She's a little odd.  Why?  She loves
insects.  (My questions are two: How did they get the bugs to do what they
wanted? and How long did they have to search to find a pretty fourteen-year-old
actress who's OK with having bugs crawl all over her for the length of a movie
shoot?)
The school is of course run by a bitchy
schoolmistress (that and nursing are the only careers open to hard-core bitches,
apparently), but her roommate Sophia is friendly and in love with her father.
But Jennifer has another problem: she sleepwalks,
having visions of a white corridor with many doors and intriguing
geometry.  (Gotta gripe here: Maybe it's the American edit, but the
sleepwalking played absolutely no part in the the plot -- she does it twice in
the first half hour, then it doesn't come up again.  By the same token,
they mention her split personality, and then nothing ever comes of it.  If
it's the distributor's fault, may they be thrust down to hell for ruining a
movie; if it's Argento, it's just plain inexcusable sloppiness.)
While sleepwalking, she stumbles across another
victim of the mysterious killer.  Still in a daze, she wanders into town,
gets hit by a car, dragged around by two locals with suspicious intent, thrown
from the car again, and finally meets up with the chimp, who takes her back to
MacGregor.  A fast friendship is born, even though she makes his bugs
horny out of season.
The next night she starts to sleepwalk again, but
wakes herself up -- just in time to hear Sophia, who had snuck out to see a
boyfriend, also get killed.  She goes out and discovers a glove covered
with maggots.  MacGregor examines it and pronounces them to be the larvae
of the Great Sarcophagus, a fly that feeds exclusively on human corpses. 
A clue to finding the murderer.
I don't want to go any farther with the plot, but
here are some interesting observations (at least, I thought them interesting):
The school is always windy.
Belligerence and poetry don't mix.
Some of the animated bug shots (especially the
firefly) were completely unconvincing.
MacGregor: "It's perfectly normal for insects
to be slightly telepathic."  According to what branch of science, may
I ask?
Wonderfully chilling scene:  "We worship
you!  We worship you!"
Great -- this is the second movie this year where
the monkey gets ahold of the straight-razor.
How stupid do you have to be to take a pill given
you by a hostile person when you don't want it anyway?
That's a pretty damned big house for someone on a
teacher's salary.
Mmmm!  Stew!
Again, this movie is ambitious but flawed due to
setups that never pan out; at some point I'll have to track down a copy of the
original Phenomena and see how much of it was Argento's fault.
A final parting shot:  Did this remind anyone
of that stinker Milo? Ewww...

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