OK! Here's a nice little two-for-one on movies you'd figure I'd have seen! Phenomena is a movie by Dario Argento, creator of the very ODD Phantasm series [Ed: Er, no. That was Don Coscarelli], which in fairly nerdy fashion follow the progress of a little bishonen kid and a sleazy icecream truck driver, as they attempt to get to the bottom of an old guy's scheme to steal corpses from funeral homes and transform them into zombie jawas, to act as a labor force on a high-gravity, high-temperature planet, over the course of 20 years. The main character is played by Jennifer Connelly, the actress the vast majority of movie nerds seem to have a huge crush on, possibly attributable to a form of imprinting, having watched Labyrinth entirely too many times in their formative years. And as an added bonus, we also have Donald Pleasance in there, best known for being the doctor in Halloween, and just generally being one of the largest hams the world has to offer.

Incidentally, it is darn hard to find a copy of this, because, like most Dario Argento movies, the only time it was released in this country on DVD was as part of an odd boxed set. This lends it the disturbing quality of just starting when you turn on the DVD player, no menus, FBI warnings, previews, or anything. So, as I pause the opening credits here to give the above opening paragraph, I find myself looking at a fairly long list of "musical special guests" which is... strange. The obvious interpretation is that we're actually half-crediting the music in the opening credits, but that's an awful lot of different metal bands.

Anyway, having escaped from the labyrinth of the goblin king, and partying with potentially hallucinatory muppets for a bit, our heroin seems to have been sent off to a swiss boarding school. Before we get into that though, here's some other girl poking around some big fancy house in the middle of nowhere, where someone or something is chained to the wall inside... er, was chained to the wall. Random girl wanders in as the chains are ripped free, so I'm figuring she's going to be killed in about 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... nailed it on the dot! Go me! Well, time of attack anyway. She survives being choked with the chain and stabbed with a giant pair of scissors long enough to have a pretty cool surreal non-gory slow-mo death through a window into a waterfall.

Now we cut to another big house, at night, around which is sneaking a knife wielding... monkey in a diaper! Seriously. Apparently, this is the research lab of Donald Pleasance, and the monkey is his research assistant. I am dead serious. He uses a laser pointer to indicate what he needs, and his monkey goes and gets it for'em. Awesome. Anyway, he's rambling on to a reporter about how you can work out the exact date on which someone was killed by taking census info on the maggots hatching out of it. Yum.

So yeah, here's our main character (Jennifer, that's convenient) being driven to boarding school, and explaining, as a bee gets into the car, that she "loves all insects" and they never hurt her. This is, presumably, a Huge Plot Point. Anyway, only one building of the boarding school is used, the rest being FORBIDDEN. Anyway, her first night kinda sucks because all that's around is her chain-smoking french roommate's baby food collection (which has SOME rationalization but is still odd), and the headmistress confiscates a poster of her famous movie star father, of whom it turns out Frenchie is an obsessive enough fan that she starts rattling off all the trivia she's picked up regarding family. This honestly just leads into a really weird dialog exchange that's just made of a weird mix of extreme exposition and incidental small talk. I'm guessing there won't be a quiz later.

And now here's some other girl, running through the cool ruined condemned spare boarding school buildings, presumably fleeing the scissor-wielding serial killer who has been established to be out there by now. This is accompanied by some cool 80s metal. Meanwhile, our hero is having a funky nightmare and sleepwalking out into the hallway... and I feel the need to point out that this movie has a pretty darn awesome soundtrack all around, which so isn't horror flavored. So anyway, she's walking along what's honestly a pretty dangerously open ledge with no railing on the second floor, before being shocked awake by victim girl running screaming at a nearby window, before being... stabbed through the back of the neck with a big ol' lance. Good, apparently I'm NOT going to be tempted into making constant clocktower jokes nobody will get after all. Anyway, our somnambulatory heroine is now falling through rotting floorboards. Seriously, this walkway is SO not up to code. Fortunately, her sleeve catches a corner and slows her fall. She's still sleepwalking though, wanders into the road, and is almost killed by a pair of German punks. They pick her up, try to make small talk for a while, and eventually she freaks out, rolls out of their convertible, and into the woods. Again, this is a pretty lousy first day here. So around now she does seem to be fully awake, and is rescued by the monkey as a pair of ladybugs look on.

Dr. Pleasance, Forensic Etymologist checks her out, and hey, she really was packed off from America possibly due to mental problems. I thought I was kidding when I said that. Dr. Pleasance is wheelchair bound, so he's got cool elevators all over his place. So the two of them spend a while talking shop about bugs. Dr. Pleasance explains how weird it is that this here spitting beetle is so into her. Like, out of season mating call into her. It's also established that this is, officially, the creepiest part of Switzerland, and that this particular time of year the insect pheromones in the wind tend to drive people crazy.

The next day, the authorities at the school do something you'd think would be way more common in these sorts of things, and give her a thorough psych exam EEG, and drug screening. That night, as more crazy music starts up, Frenchie sneaks out to meet with her boyfriend, and brag about having a famous movie star's daughter for a room mate. He's not particularly impressed, and goes home. This of course leaves Frenchie another potential victim for Lancy Boy, and while that's going on, Jennifer does some more awesome-soundtrack sleepwalking, or starts to at least, but wakes up. You'd think by now this school would have some decent night security, but nope, someone gets to wander around stabbing their students, kids can just wander out into the surrounding wilderness...

And now for no particular reason, Jennifer is slowly following a lightning bug around while we are treated to some RPG final boss music. Apparently her insect friends are leading her to a valuable clue to the mystery in the form of a glove, but seriously, I am astounded by how awesome this soundtrack is here. No wonder it gets opening credits treatment. Sadly, it starts to rain, which chases off the orchestral proggy synthery. Anyway, the important clue glove turns out to be full of maggots. "They're larvae." OK fine Dr. Pleasance, full of larvae. Anyway, at this point we're just laying it right out there that Jennifer here is indeed friend to all athropods. Dr. Pleasance says it's not all that weird. Insects are totally telepathic dude.

Anyway, the various teachers at the school are reading all the letters Jennifer is sending to her father about how apparently she's the Bugmaster and a random reclusive scientist is even coraborating that. The teachers don't have any sense of privacy at all, so they go ahead and tell this to the students and they start teasing her like crazy. So she gets rather obviously annoyed at this, and immediately summons every insect within a pretty huge radius to come coat the school completely and shut'em all up, and passes out. Good news is, yeah, you can control bugs. Bad news is, the headmistress figures she's a demon or something, and while a stake burning would be a bit much, they should at least pack her off to the loony bin when she comes to.

This leads into a darn funny sneaking out of the room while the teacher on guard duty is asleep, silencing clocks, knitting needles happening to land in yarn balls, etc. So she sneaks out to Dr. Pleasance's house, he's all "Dude, that's lame. Having mental control over insects rocks!" albeit in much more respectful wording. Anyway, it turns out the glove larvae are from this really obscure insect species that feeds exclusively off corpses, so them being in what's apparently the killer's gloves would suggest he really spends a crazy amount of time handling corpses. Further, he says that in order to solve this case, it's time to bring in the two greatest detectives in the world! So yeah, he runs off to call L and Sherlock Holmes- oh. OK, he's actually referring to the crime fighting duo of Bug-control girl and obscure corpse-loving fly. Which is apparently called The Great Sarcophagus, so at least one of them gets a fittingly heroic name.

So, Hive Queen and Sarcophagus head out to the general vicinity of where the killings first started by bus to start corpse-hunting. The working theory being that aside from severed heads, he takes the bodies of his victims home to eat or sleep with or play dress up or whatever. Also on the bus is a Really Conspicuous Guy in a Trenchcoat. Anyway, Sarcophagus starts flipping out, so she asks to get out in the middle of nowhere. The same middle of nowhere with a big house from the beginning of the movie in fact! But, bum bum bum! A car pulls up while she's inside checking it out. While she's exploring, the soundtrack starts up with something that's actually fairly horror-appropriate, at least in a Diablo 2 town music sorta sense.

Presumably the bodies are up in the attic, but the stairs collapse when she tries to climb up. Wow, her two powers are bug-control and causing wood to collapse underfoot. Anyway, the realtor trying to sell the officially abandoned house, who, refreshingly, DOESN'T seem to be the killer catches her snooping around and chases her off. So he's the one who has to deal with it when a cop shows up to investigate it. A cop with the awesome name of Inspector Giger.

Meanwhile, the killer goes after Dr. Pleasance, but oh no! His monkey assistant gets locked out of the house while chasing what's either a HUGE freaking moth, or a weirdly styled kite. Realizing the danger, monkey tries to bust n through the window, but has a pretty hard time with it. Dr. Pleasance attempts to identify the killer with his laser pointer, but is killed before he can. The monkey is very sad and swears vengeance. Seriously, she gets this look of determination, chases the killer back to his car, and starts pounding on the windshield as he drives off, but is eventually shaken off.

As Jennifer comes to see the crime scene getting examined, we have some more inappropriate metal. Jennifer makes another surprisingly sensible call, and gets on the phone with her dad's agent to demand to be yanked the heck out of swiss-murder land. Meanwhile, Inspector Giger is checking out the creepy local asylum, and monkey is digging through a trash can to find evidence against the murderer in the form of those scissors he used to stab the first girl before getting his big ol' lance. Now, I realize how everything I describe this monkey doing comes off sounding absolutely ridiculous, but this is seriously the sort of thing this monkey does! Sadly, it seems dad's agent is a huge jerk, and is not sending along cash for a plane ticket. Instead, he sets her up to be nabbed an employee to trick her back to the school with promises of a plane ticket home. Or so I'm assuming. She claims she's flying her out at noon, but in the meantime she gets to stay with creepy agent-agent lady, who apparently has an insane son that insists she cover all the mirrors in the house. OK, seriously, I know Dad's off filming a movie and can't be contacted, but he's a really bad judge of who he lets take care of his kid.

Anyway, Jennifer starts prowling around, finds a kid sitting there, accidentally kicks a toy train into him, causing him to fall over. Oh #@$%, this is one of those psychos taking order from their mummified dead kids isn't it. Oh no. It turns out that she just has a life-sized kid-doll sitting there. That's still pretty frelling creepy. She tries to push a sleeping pill on Jennifer, also creepy. She just goes off to the bathroom to get a drink to wash it down with and wash her hands... and the bathroom is full of maggots "Larvae!" Fine, larvae. So she induces vomiting to get the pill back up (really stupid to have taken it to begin with), runs off to call the cops, gets knocked out before she can, and psycho lady activates her emergency security shutters. Inspector Giger gets on the scene weirdly fast considering nobody had a chance to pick up, apparently he was already coincidentally coming this way to check things out. Lot of good that does though, because we cut back to Jennifer coming to just in time to hear him being killed off camera.

So, Jennifer is now stuck inside a house so serial-killer friendly that there's a control panel to slam metal plates over all the exits. Frell. But hey, speaking of metal! The soundtrack goes all awesome again! So she goes all MacGuyver pulling down curtain rods to try and pull the phone out of the next room through an air vent... but fails, knocking it down the corpse hole. So, plan B, just crawl through that air vent... and down the corpse hole after the phone. The corpse hole is actually more of a long tunnel. Eventually she finds the phone and starts dialing, only to be grabbed by the mutilated arms of... oh, Inspector Giger. Apparently he wasn't killed so much as seriously bashed up and chained up down in the corpse hole. Still, she freaks out and falls into a septic tank full of disintegrated bodies. Yeah, that's not pleasant. Psycho lady comes down to gloat, Giger dislocates his thumbs to get free of his chains and take her out, and Jennifer, quite reasonably, decides to run for it.

On the way out though, she hears a crying kid. Huh, he really does exist. OK, don't investigate, just frelling run. You don't want to know why the kid hates mirrors... see, told you. He's got this really freaky mutant face. See? You should listen when I say things. So, she continues to run for it, finds a motorboat out back, and while she's starting it up, out comes running mutant-boy (who's like, 8 or so I feel I should stress), lance in hand, who hops on board and tries to kill her. He is pretty astoundingly freaky looking. Fortunately though, we are now outside. And who has the upper hand outside? That's right! The girl who commands huge swarms of insects! That's who!

Unfortunately, during the fight, the gas tank gets ruptured, and catches fire when attempting to start the engine for good measure, so after freak-boy dives overboard to escape the insects, bug girl has to dive out and swim for shore. Underwater since there's flaming gas up top. At least he lost his lance, presumably. Also, not really knowing about the fire situation, after a brief freaky encounter underwater, it seems he surfaces in the flames, so we're spared the effort of running away from a severely injured unarmed 8 year old.

Anyway, upon reaching the shore, here's dad's agent actually showing up in person, to drive her to safety! No wait, to have his head lopped off by Psycho Lady with... dang, I think that's just a broad sharpened square of metal. Presumably salvaged from the emergency shutters. She is understandably upset about her son being killed here. But hey, you're on dry land now, so "Why don't you call your insects?" Yeah, that's just what I was about to ask psycho-lady! Oh, but it turns out that isn't necessary, because I think we're all forgetting a very important character who hasn't been seen in a while. You realize of course who it is I'm talking about right? Not Inspector Giger, it's pretty safe to assume he's dead now. No, not Dr. Pleasance, he's definitely dead. Not Famous Movie Star Dad either. So who does that leave?

MONKEY RIGHT OF VENGEANCE! Yes, the amazing research assistant monkey comes leaping out of the darkness, scissors in hand (actually, on closer inspection, it's more like a set of pruning sheers), and totally goes to town on her face! Go monkey! I was hoping you'd be the big hero! Monkey and girl hug, the nightmare finally being over, and the credits start, with more of this totally totally awesome RPG final boss music kicking in. Seriously, I want the soundtrack to this movie. Oh yes, and the credits end up listing stuff like "assistant etymologist" because... yeah, we just had real bug swarms here. And real swiss wilderness too it seems.

Anyway, yeah. This is what's awesome about Dario Argento movies. You've got the BASIC structure of a standard horror movie, almost no gore, no nudity, and then you've got all kinds of crazy out of genre stuff in there like the good guy commanding swarms of insects via telepathy and ridiculously awesome monkey heroics. Or in the case of Phantasm, zombie jawas and a word for word ripoff of the gom jabar scene from Dune. Plus, again, totally awesome inappropriate soundtrack here. And of course, weirdly enough, that plot was actually really consistent and surprising. And yet, these are really really obscure movies, while EVERYONE has heard enough about, say, the Friday the 13th series to accurately describe any given one of them. It's a real shame that.