The Phantom Library

I think that the Phantom Project has caused me to develop a love-hate relationship with giallo films (the Italian horror subgenre to which this movie and both Argento films belong). On the one hand, I hate them because they're often low-budget, prone to Kool-Aid Man-sized plot holes, and incredibly misogynistic, to a point where it's hard to even watch them as a lady. On the other hand, I love them because despite all these problems, they also are almost always trying to say something interesting about humanity, and no matter how low the budget, they still try to make art out of their slasher flick. I'd probably never watch them for fun, but whenever I watch them in pursuit of scholarship, I'm still impressed by what they can do with such a limited niche and tools. Until that elusive day when we find a Phantom slasher movie that is thoughtful and interesting as well as well-produced and professional, they're all we've got. Keep dreaming big, though, everybody.

As you can see right off the bat from the list of actors up there, we've got some interesting personalities in this movie, doing their damndest to make it pop despite its hefty problems. It's especially neat to see Michael York; a few years earlier he appeared as the dashing Raoul character Michael in the 1983 Markowitz/Schell film, and it's a real treat to see him in this movie on the other side of the mask. I have such a soft spot for recurring Phantom film actors; I want to go to a party with this guy, Robert Englund, Jill Schoelen, and Derek Rydall and pick their brains about the crazy coincidences of their careers. Donald Pleasance is also a pleasant (ha!) surprise as the police inspector who will be doing most of the Raouling in this movie.

The film's introduction is a long piano-playing sequence in which York, playing Robert Dominici, a master musician, wows his audience at a triumphant recital. While I often appreciate the attempts at artful shots in movies like this, this intro sequence tries for ethereal and spine-tingling but fails thanks to the confusing lack of information and over-frequent cutaways; a female doctor working busily at a microscope is obviously about to become the first murder victim, which is an expected device, but an obviously Japanese-style sword arts scene involving slicing apples from a master's hands and chin comes out of left field and raises way more questions than it answers. They're shown together because the doctor is murdered by someone with a sword - in the best shot of the sequence, we see two decorative swords on the wall behind her, and when she returns from the other room we realize a few moments before the murder that only one sword remains - but the bewilderment of Mystery Ninja Theatre is going to hound us the entire length of the movie.

Mysteries abound in this beginning scene, which is good for a movie involving a mystery! Why are we seeing these flashbacks during Robert's performance, and does that mean he's thinking of acts he performed or innocent because they're happening while he's playing? What was the doctor studying, and why did somebody kill her? Where does the dojo fit in, and who decided we needed that much carotid artery spray?

But alas, no answers yet, so back to Robert's concert. It seems pretty clear to those of us used to the Phantom story that he must be the title character, thanks to his musical genius, although I did briefly wonder if this might, like the Ye ban ge sheng movies, be a rare case of a male Christine figure (it's not. Giallo films are not exactly progressive). There are at least three ladies dotted throughout the crowd giving him the smoldering eye (guess they're really turned on by Chopin, which is fair), however, cementing him off the bat as a playboy with many lovers, something that most versions of the Phantom don't have the luxury of.

Everything was fine during the piano-playing and the murdering, but after that people started talking and everything went to shit. I thought at first that my copy of the film must just be bad, because surely there was no way any movie could have a dubbing track this bad. Alas, though it wasn't just me; a large percentage of the actors (almost everyone except for the three main characters) have been dubbed over with prim British voices that don't match their lips and are often about as urgent and emotional as tea and biscuits. Because York and Pleasance don't need to be dubbed, being as English as they could be already, their lines are in the normal film soundtrack, which provides a very unfortunate contrast to the too-loud dubbed overlay of everyone else. Even more bizarre, basic lip-reading makes it obvious that the actors are in fact speaking their lines in English, but without matching up to the obvious dubbed track, which is just straight-up baffling. My thought here is that, from the movements of their mouths, they probably have thick Italian accents (you know, because they're mostly Italian) and therefore despite the fact that they are speaking in English, they were dubbed over to make them more understandable anyway (or perhaps more palatable to an English-speaking European audience?). It's disastrously distracting, even after the audience has had time to get used to it, and the final insult is that Fenech, whose thick French accent makes her difficult to understand in many of her lines, is the only female actor not dubbed for some reason.

If you can focus past the uncoordinated soundtrack, you'll discover that Dominici has a girlfriend, Susanna, who was one of his ardent audience fans but is apparently upset with him because they've been having an on-again, off-again fight over their future; she wants to get married and have kids, he thinks that would be giving up his youth and refuses, and everyone's feelings are hurt. After she stomps out on him and he spends some time flirting with Fenech's character Helene, apparently an old (or current? this Phantom is kind of a cad) flame, we're left with an odd half-formed love triangle and no real idea what's going on yet.

But that's okay, because ninjas. Or, more accurately, samurai, since this new scene at the dojo involves two men fighting with shinai, bamboo practice swords. While I'm baffled by the inclusion of the Japanese elements in this movie - seriously, they will never be explained and kind of make no sense - I'm also interested. At least this movie can say it is definitely doing something other Phantom films don't, and I think it's actually doing a surprisingly effective job of representing the Phantom's classic connection to the mysteries of the East, substituting the exotic fighting styles of Japan for audiences who know that the dusky palaces of Persia are mostly long gone.

At any rate, it's revealed here that one of the two masked fighters is Dominici, who apologizes for his poor showing and explains that he's been feeling distracted lately. Sword-wielding Phantom is established!

We now get to meet Pleasance as Commissioner Datti, who is also paying a lot of attention to swords but is considerably less enthused about it than I am. I don't think much of his forensics team, who apparently don't really understand how swords work since they tell him that death by throat-slitting was "instantaneous", and the usual movie Phantom police bumbling begins. What is it with law enforcement in Phantom movies always being absolute failures for at least three quarters of the film? I get that they can't be too good at their jobs off the bat - if they caught the Phantom in the first ten minutes, we probably wouldn't have too much of a movie - but seriously, wouldn't his criminal genius be better illustrated if he could hoodwink cops who weren't actually blithering goats? I'm just saying.

Yaaaay, boobies! Welcome to Oh, Right, This Movie Is Italian! This scene is well-shot and carefully shadowed, leading the audience to think that the couple having sex in the bed are probably Robert and one of his ladies, only to reveal after they separate that it was in fact Susanna with an extracurricular lover of her own. As always, I sprang into action to talk about all the interesting ways that a Christine who has more than one sexual partner is uncommon in Phantom stories and what it might mean in a 1980s Italian cultural context, but also as always, it turns out shortly that Susanna is not really the Christine character and all my theorizing is for naught. Alas. The lady obviously doesn't feel good about cheating on Robert, despite their recent fight, and her guilt combined with the realization that her flame Davide is actually forming an attachment to her causes her to leave with the intention of turning over a new leaf and reconciling with Robert as soon as possible.

...which of course involves her wandering off into the streets at stupid o'clock and refusing to allow Davide to drive her to the train station. Women being easily murdered after deciding to head out into dangerous territory alone is, after all, a requirement in bad horror films. And get murdered she does, after a thoroughly unconvincing fakeout that was meant to make us think she was going to make it; the shock factor Deodato was reaching for isn't there, but there is a rather lovely, artsy shot of her crashing through a glass door after being stabbed, turning the clear window in it red with blood. It goes without saying that Susanna is subtextually being punished for sleeping with Davide - in the shorthand of the movies, she's proven herself to be "slutty" and must therefore be murdered for this capital crime. And, by contrast, Helene will later be lauded as a paragon of feminine perfection thanks to her enduring love for Robert, giving her more of that virginal Christine shine by way of contrasting her with the demonized Susanna.

An interesting twist on the idea of the Phantom's superpowers surfaces early in the movie and returns here; earlier, while talking to Helene, Robert jokingly said he could sometimes see the future, and in this scene repeats the idea to Datti, to whom he explains that he was the one to find Susanna's body first because he had had a "premonition" that she might be in danger and decided to go out and look for her. While those of us who are not wearing empty gourds on our shoulders instead of heads are pretty well aware that Robert is probably the killer and therefore doesn't need any kind of prognostication to forecast that Susanna was going to die, it's still interesting that the supernatural element was preserved, moved from the nineteenth-century thrills of hypnotism and ventriloquism to a quasi-modern notion of ESP.

And, by the way, while those who come into this movie looking for a Phantom are easily able to point to Robert and then just sit around waiting to see when his guilt will be revealed, Deodato does do a credible job of not giving the whole game away from the beginning. For at least the first half of the film, we have no idea why Robert would have any motive to murder people, and his genuine emotional reaction to the loss of Susanna and the film's habit of following him as a protagonist much of the time combine to give the viewer more than a few scenes of doubt. I'm a pretend professional at watching movies like this, and even I, a few times, had a second of "Wait, but are we sure he did it?"

Wait, what? In a throwaway line here while Davide is being interrogated to make sure he didn't murder Susanna for leaving him, he mentions that he and Robert are best friends. What? Since when? We've never even seen them in the same room together, let alone having a conversation, and we never will for the rest of the movie. What the hell kind of best friend is that? The line is probably an attempt by some well-meaning screenwriter to manufacture some more dramatic possibilities by giving the men a motive to feel betrayed by one another... but since they never actually do that, it's mostly just there to be confusing.

After some shots of a shirtless York wandering around (ladies!), Helene shows up to try to console him after Susanna's death and he gives a very interesting monologue about his hatred of sympathy, which he cites as his reason for refusing to leave the house and face all the people who are currently feeling bad for him. The proud rejection of others' pity is very in keeping for a Phantom character, but the actual lines he says also subvert the idea; when he bitterly says, "Other peoples' sorrow doesn't help your own. It doesn't help you adjust or try to forget," he is rejecting sympathy not because he doesn't want pity but because it doesn't help him personally, something that would have been very much at odds with the original Erik's ability to be moved by Christine's emotions. It sets the stage nicely for the rest of the film, in which it will become increasingly obvious that sympathy is the thing that Robert most fears being pointed in his direction.

Helene appears to be here mostly so she can offer to have sex with Robert to help him get over his dead girlfriend. If that sounds catastrophically badly timed, it's because it is. Even Robert is like, "Man, could you have offered that at any other time in my entire life instead of now?" before he sends her away. Pro tip: people whose significant others have just been horribly murdered are usually not going to react well to you showing up, grinning seductively and saying, "But I'm alive!" Jesus, Helene.

Before she leaves, she asks, "Did you love her very much?", to which Robert intriguingly replies, "I don't know." He goes on to give a very touching speech about Susanna, and about how his last, enduring and most vivid memory of his lover is of seeing her corpse, and how awful it is that he can't remember the times she was beautiful and alive, the way she made him feel, because it's all been swept away by the strength of the horror of her murder. It's a surprisingly poignant portrait of shock and grief, and one of the best moments of the movie for really convincing the viewer that maybe Robert isn't the bad guy here after all.

At this point, the killer beings making anonymous phone calls to Datti, deriding him for failing to catch him, claiming he can never be stopped and making only slightly-veiled threats against the life of Datti's own daughter, a young flautist named Gloria. Gloria's musical talent, appropriate name and status as the only true "innocent" in the movie all put her in the Christine role, one that she'll share with Helene for the rest of the film; similarly, it's now plain that Datti is functioning as a somewhat older Raoul figure than we are used to, protecting a loved one who is family rather than a romantic partner.

But before that continues, it's time for Return to Ninja Theatre: The Revenge of the Ninja, another very short and mostly purposeless scene at the dojo. This time, the only point is that a masked student is revealed to be Davide, not Robert, thus offering him up as another potential suspect for all the sword-murdering that's going around. Since Davide will promptly disappear off the face of the earth after this scene, it's not the most convincing red herring that ever was, but at least someone is trying. The only thing it does do effectively for me is make me suspect that perhaps Susanna's death was perpetrated by Davide, the jealous lover, and blamed on Robert on account of his occupation murdering a bunch of other ladies, but since Davide is no longer appearing in this film, I've got to assume that either I'm wrong or someone somewhere made some unfortunate cuts to the plot.

Deodato goes for a classic fakeout, giving us all the ominous music and leadup to make it look like Helene is about to be murdered (including the abject failure of her dog to do anything about intruders in the house - bulldogs are adorable, but they are terrible guards), but it turns out to just be Robert, drunk enough to take her up on her booty call. The sex scene is actually rather lovely, with soft piano and flute accompaniment and a tasteful fade to black before too long. (By the way, I watched this movie in a crowded game store while John was playing in a tournament, and let me tell you, the appearance of surprise boobs every now and then made the experience challenging.)

Robert leaves behind a single rose (which, if you guys remember, is a Phantom device first introduced in the other film he was in, the 1983 Markowitz/Schell movie!) with a thank-you note and peaces out, to... go find himself, apparently? No explanation is given and we are all about as confused as Helene. He wanders off and moves back in with his mother, where he stays for two months in the blink of an eye, apparently doing nothing and talking to no one. His mother is matronly and pleasant, reminding me a bit of Mama Valerius, which in turn made me again get excited over the prospect of Robert being a male Christine figure, but my hopes were once again dashed.

It's interesting that Robert stopped playing the piano, the instrument he's an international master of, at the time of Susanna's death and never started again, causing everyone to remark on his dearth of musical activity. We don't often see a Phantom that simply stops making music, but the timing, coinciding with the death of his girlfriend, suggests that any musical career or talent he had symbolically died with her. For most characters, perhaps a sign of his emotional attachment to her that he can no longer perform now that she's dead; for a Phantom character, perhaps also a sign that he's committed to the dark part of his personality, crossing that invisible threshold between Angel of Music and Phantom of the Opera. As soon as his mother mentions it, he moves out at light speed.

In a waystation bathroom, we discover that Robert is losing his hair, which comes out in large tufts when he combs it. As a result, we get to see the first time he gets on the express train to Badideasville onscreen, when a bum points it out (in a comfortable, we-all-get-that-eventually kind of way) and is nearly killed by Robert suddenly rushing him and beating his face repeatedly into the tile floor. His reaction to the physical change, and a brief earlier scene in which Datti opines that the killer probably murdered the doctor in order to hide something she knew, both point pretty strongly toward the idea that Robert Has a Problem.

Now that the cards are on the table about Robert's murderous capabilities, we're treated to the entire flashback of the doctor's death scene, filling in the missing pieces and motives. She told him that, after completing her tests, she was certain he had a very rare disease and that there was unfortunately no cure. This disease is not named, and the only descriptions we get of it are that it usually occurs in children rather than adults and that it may attack the braincells (thus giving him a reason to get progressively more unstable over the course of the movie), which describes a ton of diseases and doesn't really give us very many clues. Datti's suspicion that she was killed to prevent her from telling anyone about the disease is borne out when he cuts her down after she mentions that she'll be discussing his extraordinarily rare case with a specialist at an upcoming medical conference.

I'm a huge fan of this development, because the idea of disease as the Phantom's deformity is an interesting one that can go a ton of different ways and explore whole forests of possible ideas and symbols. We've all been in those conversations where we speculate about whether or not Leroux's Erik had a disease and whether or not it was porphyria or leprosy (or are those conversations just me?), but this is the first adaptation of the story yet to actually commit to the idea of the Phantom suffering from a physical disease. Such an approach puts the treatment of those with health problems in our society under a stark and unflattering spotlight, both lingering on the visceral horror that people instinctively feel toward the sick and ruthlessly pointing out how inhumane and marginalizing the treatment of the ill, who can hardly help their condition and are no less valuable as human beings, often is. Just as the original Erik was shunned for his appearance, something outside his control, so those with serious diseases are often shunned and mistreated by society at large, something this movie is not going to let you forget any time soon.

While there are very few living people with this disease in the world - eight total, according to the new set of doctors that Robert decides to go to after realizing that he's deteriorating faster now, and all children - one of them lives fairly nearby, and Robert makes a day trip out to see the kid. The murders have been all well and good so far in this movie, but hands down the most absolutely terrifying moment of this film is when Robert comes face to face with his fellow disease-sufferer. Deodato does an excellent job of the suspense, letting Robert's (and our) first view of the child be of him on a swingset partially obscured by trees, so that we only get enough flashes of him to realize that something is dreadfully wrong before we're hit with the full view. It's effectively creepy (even the sound of the swingset is creepy, something I made much worse by replaying it a zillion times trying to freeze on the frame I wanted) and manages to evoke both loathing and horrified pity almost immediately.

I'm including a screenshot, which I don't normally do, but I think it's important here for context. Here's the first real look we get at this little boy, which is a punch in the face to Robert that everyone in the audience can feel, too: