JENIFER

2005/Director: Dario Argento/Screenplay: Steven Weber, Story by Bruce Jones

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Cast: Steven Weber, Carrie Anne Fleming, Brenda James, Harris Allan, Beau Starr, Laurie Brunetti, Kevin Crofton, Julia Arkos, Jasmine Chan

Some people simply worship Dario Argento. For years and years I just figured I was missing something or that I was not enough of a true film fanatic to see the brilliance in his work that his rabid sycophants did. Now I remember my reactions to films like Tenebre ( by the way, the second picture from the left in my banner is a scene from Tenebre I touched up in Photoshop) and Phenomenon and even his “magnum opus” Suspiria and do not feel I was so out of touch by feeling confused and bewildered. They were not really great movies at all in my opinion. Maybe not terrible movies, but Tenebre was so… so… terrible that I do not see what the big deal has always been about that movie. Okay there was a great axe murder scene with a spurting stump, but the rest of the film was so weird and Italian.

A pensive Dario Argento comtemplates taking a night

course in how to direct a sensible narrative.

Often supporters will admit his narrative technique lacks…well… narrative technique and that his story lines are illogical and incohesive and that his true skill lies in his camera work and atmospheric settings. I have even read some people compare his work to Mario Bava’s. There is no comparison and his technical skill and set designs are average at best even in his better work. The last thing I saw before Jenifer was something called Do You Like Hitchcock, and I figured it would have all these slick Hitchcockian references and gags but it had nothing of the sort really, not on any sophisticated level anyway. It was a goofy movie with a typical Argetno ending that was more like the ending to an EC comic book than a good horror/suspense movie. Well, now that I have expressed my general feeling about this “horror genius” let me give you my opinion of a short piece he did for the cable TV series called Masters of Horror (view my insightful comment on Takashi Miike’s ode to to incest and abortion Imprint elsewhere in the Café).

Poor Steven Weber comes home from working all day as actor and scriptwriter for horror megalomaniac Dario Argento and has to settle for cold cuts for dinner again.

Jenifer is a short made for TV film and to be honest, I did not completely dislike it, in the same way I did not dislike another shorter work Argento did in a double-feature called Two Evil Eyes with George Romero , where he did a graphic and psychotic version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat with Harvey Kietel in the lead role. Neither of the episodes were great pieces and hit and miss master Romero absolutely wasted one hour of my life with a Creepshow style “return from the dead and chase the girl ( played by the amply endowed Adrienne Barbeau ) around the house” story, but the shortness of the pieces made them endurable and somewhat enjoyable really. Honestly, I am not expecting Martin Scorcese or David Lean when I watch this stuff. Argento’s narration challenged approaches that undo his longer films were thankfully absent in these two shorter films (each about one hour long) and I found both of them decent little horror bits. Of course in Argento’s hands Jenifer has more than a few problems. Some of these can be excused if you realize the story is from a comic book story by Bruce Jones and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson ( I even found page samples below on the net). So we are not transposing Poe from paper to film here. Jones is a capable writer of suspense and horror comics that typically have a surprise twist at the end in the way older style horror comics did, such as the EC and Warren titles did, as well as the old Marvel and DC titles from the turn of the 70’s period.

Lovely Carrie Anne Fleming before Dario Aregento gave her a make over.

The general story is this: Police detective Frank Spivey (Steve Weber) rescues a girl from being murdered with a meat cleaver by an apparently homeless, deranged man. The man is shot and mutters the girl’s name with his last breath: Jenifer. As it turns out Jenifer is a mentally retarded and grotesquely deformed girl who happens to have a knock out body. For some reason Spivey allows the girl to live in his house where in no time she bites his wife in the face, rips the family cat to bits and is found sucking on its entrails in the bathroom, murders a carnival circus freak collector and chops him up and hides him the frig, then finally murders the innocent, little neighbor girl and does the same to her as the cat (I might add that no police ever appear to question anyone in the disappearance of the child… is this the same country that has the Amber alert?). During all this Spivey allows the slobbering freak to seduce him in bed and does not try to stop his wife and teenage son from leaving. To regain his balance and perspective on life he decides the best thing to do is to quit his career as a police detective and live in a run down , ratty cabin in the woods. Needing a career change he manages to beg a woman into giving him as job as a stock boy in a local grocery store. He lets Jenifer hang out at the cabin all day while he stacks pinto beans and toilet paper but she sneaks into town and sees him chatting with the woman and gets jealous and stalks her teenage son at an outdoor teenage party. Later Spivey finds her chomping on his guts in a tool shed. Needless to say he finally decides enough is enough (most guy’s would have decided that when he bit their wife’s face or ate the house cat and when they took a gander at her mutant face) and takes Jenifer out to kill her with an axe, but is shot by a hunter who rescues Jenifer and no not doubt the cycle starts all over.

Miss Fleming as Jenifer, a girl not concerned with the politics of vegetarianism.

The movie is a no brainer and to try and make anything more of out it is a lost cause. That a man like Spivey, no matter how unhappy, would throw away his family and career and cover up the murder of a child to protect a mentally retarded deformed girl who is “good” in bed is simply too unbelievable. Yes men can be slime, but most would not do this even to protect a Playboy Playmate! The violence is excessive and is simply exploitive gore. Every murder involves intestines and body organs and the scene of the nude little girl being gnawed on is simply bad taste. It the type of trick a no talent film maker would employ, the proverbial hammer on the head, trying to appear controversial because they are incapable of doing anything else. I put a photo of Argento in front of a fire place in this post that typifies the guy in my opinion. He is really trying to be this master of cinematic horror and wants us to be intrigued by his dark mind and black heart but ultimately his work is lacking and directionless and falls back over and over again on outdated shock and gore gimmicks to hold it together. You cannot say the same of Argento’s role model Mario Bava, though Bava did dabble amply in violence and even gore, but at his peak he was a brilliant film maker. While I admit Argento can be engaging and entertaining on one level I simply do not consider him to be in the same league as Bava.  Argento did do much to usher in the revival of the “giallo” style films in the 70′s and his use of color is sometimes interesting, but it is the continual lack of consistency that I find annoying with this guy’s work as a whole. All that being said, reviews on Deep Red, Suspria and Tenebre are coming one day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 12:19 pm and is filed under American Horror, Comic Books and Magazines . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.