Phenomena, a supernatural giallo, was the last film I needed to see in Dario Argento's smash horror run from 1975's Deep Red to 1987's Opera (my two favorite giallos, incidentally). After the solid opening sequence, the movie moves at a steady but slow pace, intermittently drifting between dreamy (or nightmarish, as it were) and dry segments. A young Jennifer Connelly, fresh off of Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, delivers a very fine performance though, keeping the dryer parts bearable. Donald Pleasence lends his gentlemanly presence to the proceedings as well but unfortunately, his screen time is limited. The plot continues to lay itself out in a slightly confounding way until the third act, which is when Phenomena's gears are dropkicked into place, hard. An intense, head-spinning reel of insanity is what follows; mucus spewing, a foul pool littered with maggot-covered body parts, bloody thumb dislocation, a horrifying child mutant with Patau Syndrome, glorious and grotesque fly swarms, lake fires, decapitation by sheet metal, and a vicious chimp with a damn razor!! The aforementioned pace and artistic set pieces that led up to these sick atrocities only served to double the impact. Powerful, pants-wetting horror. Topping it all off is the soundtrack. Argento experiments with a couple hard rock tunes, which kinda bugged me here...I don't think they worked nearly as well as they did in Opera. Fortunately, however, the fantastic title theme by Claudio Simonetti, as well as the other score pieces, make up for that and more. Simonetti's, and Goblin's, music is always a highlight of an Argento feature.
