Phenomena

Argento's strangest film by a comfortable margin, and that is a competitive field. Jennifer Connelly, fourteen and a year off stardom, plays a schoolgirl who can telepathically command insects, which comes in handy when a killer starts working through a Swiss academy for girls. Donald Pleasence is the wheelchair-using entomologist who believes her, and his helper chimpanzee takes over the third act in a way no plot summary can make sound sane. Heavy metal blares across the murders, the story runs on undiluted dream logic, and Argento plainly cared more about individual images than about any of them joining up. Gorgeous, ridiculous, and unlike anything else even inside his own filmography.