AENIGMA (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Director/co-writer Lucio Fulci was refreshingly honest about stating publicly that he'd derived AENIGMA from the template of Stephen King's CARRIE (albeit channeled through Brian De Palma). Ironically, had he devoted more attention to fleshing out the characters in one way or another, AENIGMA might have given DePalma a run for his money.

To date the only Fulci I've reviewed here was the 1971 LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, which I downgraded as a bad imitation of Dario Argento's giallos. But the plot of AENIGMA is considerably tighter and the various death-scenarios are at least on a par with the best of Argento.

AENIGMA opens after the fashion of many contemporaneous stalkers, by showing the event that makes the film's monster. Kathy Wise, an ugly duckling at a Boston girls' school, gets mousetrapped when her macho gym teacher invites her to neck with him in a parked car. The gym-rat has arranged with a bunch of mean girls and their boyfriends to let them listen in on Kathy's passionate mewlings, until the mean girls lower the boom and reveal their presence. Kathy runs, gets hit by a car, and ends up in a hospital, stuck in a coma.

Only Kathy's mind is still able to range forth from her hospital-bed, and she somehow possesses a young student, Eva Gordon, who then enrolls in the same Boston school. Almost immediately the mean girls take a dislike to Eva as well, but it's Kathy who's in control, and Kathy begins knocking off each of her earlier tormentors one at a time, designing bizarre quasi-magical deaths for each of them. The scenario in which one girl is smothered in snails is the one I used above. However, my favorite has a girl get stuck in a museum, where she's terrorized by statues that slowly start coming alive. (Given that the film was shot in Sarajevo by an Italian director, it's interesting to see a victim essentially killed off by incarnations of history.) All this goes on while the only person who seems to suspect some weirdness is Kathy's mother, a custodian at the school.

Fulci supplies a weak "detective" of sorts in Robert Anderson (token American actor Jared Martin), a doctor at Kathy's hospital. Anderson notices that Kathy has some odd reactions that he eventually correlates with Eva's activities on campus-- I forget exactly how he pieces things together-- but in any case he ends up checking out the school. He meets Eva and they begin dating, but Anderson gets rather turned off when he dreams of Eva turning into a demoness who tries to savage him with her teeth. He then deserts Eva and takes up with Jenny, the only one of the mean girls who regrets her past actions. For the first time Eva-- who has up to this point been a passive pawn of Kathy's-- becomes jealous, and though she's sent home for having freaked out, she returns to school, mad for vengeance against both Jenny and Anderson. But at the last moment, Kathy's mother takes action and ends her daughter's rampage.

One big change from the CARRIE template is that both Kathy and Eva seem to have a thing for older men. In the King novel and the DePalma adaptation, Carrie grows up without her father in the picture-- he deserts at some point, and I'm not sure she ever lays eyes on him-- but Carrie is entirely uninterested in any males not in her own age-range. Fulci stresses Kathy's Electra-style situation in such a way that strains credulity-- why would an adult gym teacher conspire with a bunch of students for a prank?-- but the director keeps the motif going by having both Eva and Jenny date Anderson, putting both of them in Electra-territory as well. I don't think Fulci elaborates this motif to any significant discourse, but it added a little spice to the grue, so to speak.