Flies and the Alps

Yesterday got me angry because the Portland Trailblazers are now looking for a new General Manager.  As you may know just by reading some of the ramblings on here, and even if you don't, if you actually talk to me, you know this, I am a Trailblazers fan.  Exactly why a team would fire a general manager that was doing a good job is beyond me, and barring the next guy coming in and doing just as good of a job, if not better, the owner will see some angry letters his way.

And tonight is the beginning of the NHL draft, for you folks interested in seeing how your team's future will look like in a few years.

Sports rants are out of the way, so on to something that I haven't done in a while: writing about horror movies.  I haven't been able to catch up on some of the movies that I had been meaning to get to, so here's one that I had seen more than once.  As you may also know just by reading this blog, I am into horror movies, especially Italian horror.  Today is another movie by Dario Argento, one of the more famous directors to come from the country shaped like a boot.  However, it isn't a classic, but rather, one of his worst efforts, though not for the lack of trying.

Phenomena was made in 1984 and was pretty much the beginning of the end in Argento's relationship with Daria Nicolodi, who is also in this movie.  The central plot of the movie is that a young girl (Jennifer Connelly) can communicate with insects.  This power is useful in trying to figure out who has been killing a few of the folks in Switzerland.  A few things to note about the movie: this was filmed in Switzerland, so everything you see in the movie is really what you would see in Switzerland in real life.  Second is the girl that gets killed in the beginning: that would be Fiore Argento, older daughter of Dario Argento and sister to Asia Argento.  Phenomena also had the distinction of being filmed with all the actors speaking in English, which proved to be a chore for the likes of Nicolodi.  The plot of the movie also had a few too many red herrings, meaning that things designed to throw you off were many to the point where one couldn't figure out what was relevant to the story.

The entire movie wasn't that great, as it was more of the normal horror movie than an Argento movie, and the soundtrack relied more on bands like Motorhead and Iron Maiden, which in some ways threw off the overall mood of the movie.  Bad, for sure, but it's still better than most of the movies released in the last decade or so.