The film is purportedly one of Argento’s favourite and there are the usual flourish of gorily creative set pieces with the film makers going to incredible lengths to use thousands of real life insects and which ended up blighting the nearby town where they had been shooting much of the film.ĭonald Pleasance is as great as might be expected and by this point in his career when he was banging out films and in the year of Phenomena’s release he had four other films out also having been in eight films the previous year. Working with animals is notoriously tricky and so was the case here when Connelly had to be rushed to hospital after the chimpanzee bit off part of her finger.
It’s a typically extreme scenario for an Argento story and with all this going on its a wonder that parents were not rushing to take their daughters out of the school pretty sharpish but this is an Argento film where sanity is left at the front door to the cinema.įor Connelly it was not an easy shoot with a director whose English was poor and some typically bizarre scenarios several of which included a razor wielding chimpanzee. Aided by paraplegic entomologist John McGregor (Donald Pleasence) and her own uncanny ability to communicate telepathically with insects, Jennifer sets out to track down the killer before she herself becomes the latest victim…
However, a vicious killer is targeting the pupils, and sleepwalker Jennifer finds herself in the assassin’s headlights when her nocturnal wanderings cause her to witness the death of a fellow pupil.
#Argento phenomena movie#
Phenomena told the tale of Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), daughter of a world-renowned movie star, who arrives in the so-called “Swiss Transylvania” to attend an exclusive girls’ school. It was quite an undertaking added to which she would be shooting in a foreign country with a director whose detractors would often accuse him of misogyny in his films. In her first lead role he cast rising US star Jennifer Connelly a strikingly attractive teenager who had only appeared in a small role in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.
#Argento phenomena series#
Director Dario Argento had secured his reputation as a master of horror and the genius of giallo with a series of grisly inventive films including Suspiria and 1985’s Phenomena was at the tail end of a run of well received films.
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