Creepers (DVD)

You can find videos and DVDs of this 1985 Dario Argento film as either Phenomena or Creepers. I prefer the title Creepers, because it’s more fitting — this flick has more flies than The Amityville Horror, and more wriggling maggots than an unearthed mass grave.

Creepers opens in the bucolic, sun-kissed mountains of Switzerland, showing us a young woman who’s just missed her school bus. It disappears down the winding mountain highway and she chases after it for awhile, then gives up. With nothing better to do, the schoolgirl heads for the nearest lonely, scary baroque mansion as soon loses her noggin in a waterfall of gore. Cut to the city where another young lady, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), is just checking in to a boarding school that comes complete with a cagey headmistress and a history of student bodies.

Right from the start Jennifer doesn’t quite fit in but when the other girls find out she’s a sleepwalker who “sees” murders in her sleep, her social life goes from zilch to zip. But not to worry. The beleaguered beauty soon makes friends with a wheelchair-bound entomologist named John McGregor (Donald Pleasence) who lives nearby. His avuncular manner makes her feel less like a freak — he understands and shares her love of insects, and he even has a possible cure for her nocturnal sojourns. Jennifer also makes friends with the prof’s pet chimp and a very special telepathic fly.

While Creepers doesn’t enjoy the same reputation as Suspiria, Tenebre, Opera or Deep Red, it’s still vintage Argento. The then-14 year old Connelly shines as the cherub-faced heroine who’s forced into the most harrowing of situations in both the waking world and in trippy nightmare sequences. Pleasence is his usual commanding presence, despite being confined to a wheelchair and hampered by having an ape for a sidekick. (But you’ve gotta love a chittering critter who runs around with a scalpel and has a big placard around his scrawny neck that reads FORESHADOWING.)

The plot is way out there. It’s totally nuts one minute, then slams back into some semblance of reality before galloping off into a heavy-metal themed dream sequence that threads Jennifer through narrow, crooked hallways that lead nowhere. Speaking of heavy metal, the soundtrack includes songs by Iron Maiden, Motorhead, and of course, Goblin (who composed different themes for the flies and the maggots). The use of the songs is jarring and in most cases completely out of context — but it only adds to the disconcertedness of the viewing experience, helping you to feel our heroine’s plight as she finds herself in one whacky situation after another.

Creepers is practically ruined towards the end by some very bad makeup effects. To tell you who, what, where, when or why would spoil the fun that leads up to it, but when this character shows us its crudely constructed countenance it’s more ludicrous than terrifying. However, there are some other savory tidbits to compensate for that — Jennifer takes a dip in a giant vat of carcass gumbo and as she struggles to swim to the edge, we see another character, chained in the basement, breaking his own wrists to slip his manacles and lend her a helping hand. Ouch!

If you’re looking for puzzles pieces to fit, characters to do things that make sense, and a story that’s even halfway credible, then you don’t know Dario. That’s what makes the mad genius a genius — there’s no other horror director quite like him. If you want to shudder and thrill at things that go bzzz in the night, then be sure and add Creepers to your must-see list.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson