Phenomena

Director: Dario Argento
Year Released: 1984
Rating: 3.0

One of Jennifer Connelly's first roles is in this Dario Argento horror/suspense story, and it isn't too bad, considering what a lot of the genre is like. Argento is Lucio Fulci with a lot more style, and his pictures are geared more towards the visual than anything else (he has a fondness for quasi-heavy metal, and his own group "Goblin" is one of the many artists working on the soundtrack), thereby ignoring bad performances or horrible line deliveries. The setup is pretty out there (it has his typical supernatural slant): a serial killer is after students at an all-girls school; Connelly, with her telepathic ability, assists wheel-chair bound scientist Donald Pleasance in finding the missing (chopped up?) corpses of the victims. Argento is considered one of the preeminent horror craftsmen - if you didn't know that you would probably hate this.