Aenigma (

1988

) ½

 There is a phenomenon I've noticed as I get older, that I group young people into progressively larger and larger groups. When I was in 9th grade I would never have mistook a Middle School student for a High School student, nor would I have ever mixed up a Junior for a Sophomore. A college Freshman would have seemed unapproachable mature and sophisticated. Now though, all these subtle different categories have been amalgamated into a single grouping: “Teens.” Younger groups are similiarly compressed into general categories like “Big Kid”, “Little Kid”, and “Baby.” I imagine that the categories are only going to get less and less distinct as I get older and older. I assume that something like that must have happened with director Lucio Fulci, who was in his early 60s when he directed today's film. Because he chooses to decorate the dorm rooms of his college-age girls with posters of Snoopy and Yoda exhorting them to “Read.” Seriously, these things look like they were lifted directly from an Elementary School library. Even I can't imagine being so out of touch with what the kids think is cool! Though I suppose if I continue on my current trajectory, I too will be asking college students if they like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew when I've reached retirement age.

Said Elementary School Library posters belong to the girls of Saint Mary's College, in Boston Massachusetts. A fictional college that can boast a student body consisting of some of the meanest, nastiest bitches I've ever seen. The first thing we see in the film is a group of 15+ girls playing a prank on Kathy, the homely daughter of the school's janitor. They convince Kathy that the school's gym instructor/resident beefcake Fred is into her, then ambush her while the two are making out in the car and chase Kathy through the woods in their cars. The chase sends Kathy fleeing into a busy street where she is promptly hit by a car and knocked into a coma. This is pretty bad, but what really makes the girls awful is how none of them shows any remorse for the fact that Kathy is now brain-dead. Indeed, quite the opposite, whenever she is brought up they continue to laugh at her, insult her, and talk about how funny it was to torment her and how glad they are that she's no longer around. I'm not asking you girls to go full I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and let the guilt torment you and slowly destroy your life, but at least act like maybe it's unfortunate that the poor girl will never regain consciousness. Jenny is the only somewhat decent one, who expresses a small degree of guilt over the whole affair, and even she doesn't seem to be losing much sleep over it.

Of course, just because Kathy is a vegetable, doesn't mean that she isn't capable of getting her revenge. Immediately after her accident the nurse watching over her notices bizarre spikes of brain activity, that come and go without any warning. Her physician, Dr. Anderson, expresses some mild interest in the phenomena but makes very little effort to understand or track it. As we will learn later he's much more preoccupied with the possibility of bedding a couple of college-aged girls. Because this is an Italian movie and not a movie from Northern Europe, his motivations are mostly portrayed as understandable and he is even given a faintly heroic bearing. This is nearly as bad as The Beginning of the End (1957) having the doctor most responsible for the disaster being the film's unambiguous hero.

Even if Anderson doesn't give a hoot about his patient, we in the audience who have seen Carrie (1976) and Patrick (1978) know what is happening, and we can safely assume that Kathy is reaching out psychically searching for a vessel for her revenge. She eventually finds one when Eva, a rich girl who just suffered a mental breakdown at her last school, transfers to Saint Mary's. Kathy doesn't waste any time and starts to psychically influence Eva before she even walks through the school's doors. We know this is happening right from the start because as soon as Eva is introduced, her image flickers back and forth from her to Kathy. Presumably, Eva's weakened mental state makes her a prime target for Kathy's psychic attacks, though just how much Kathy is in control of Eva is left rather ambiguous. It's not simply Eva being totally controlled by Kathy's spirit, as she retains much of her own motivations and personality. However, she does occasionally say things that are not true for her but are true for Kathy (like being from New Orleans) and seems to have an instinctive knowledge like knowing which room was Kathy's and where Kathy kept her lighter. Eva is utterly ignorant of the fact that she's being controlled or influenced by Kathy.

Indeed, far from enacting Kathy's vengeance, Eva's first order of business on getting to Saint Mary's College is to get laid. She's a bit of a slut too, as she proudly announces to her roommate Jenny that her type is “anything in pants.” However, Saint Mary's is an all-girl college, so it will be difficult to satisfy even her lax requirements. The only thing in pants that's available is Fred the gym teacher, so naturally Eva makes a B-line for him, encouraged slightly by the fact that he has a poster of The Incredible Hulk on his door (does nobody at this university have age-appropriate room decor?). However, when the night of their date comes, Fred stands Eva up. He's too busy being murdered by his reflection in the gym.

This leads to what is undoubtedly Aenigma's strongest aspect: The inventive death sequences. Nobody just gets killed here, no they die after elaborate, bizarre, and surreal nightmare sequences. Fred for instance stares at his reflection in the gym's full-length mirrors, only to notice its rictus grin does not match his own expression. Then the impostor rips through the mirror and strangles the real Fred. Virginia, after making fun of how Kathy used to eat snails, is attacked by a biblical plague of snails that crawl all over her naked body and ram themselves down her throat while she lays there paralyzed. It's a very memorable horror movie death scene even if I suspect it has its root in some obscure fetish. Grace is killed late at night in a museum by an ancient statue that comes to life and crushes her. The main mean girl Kim finds herself trapped in a room with a vision of her decapitated boyfriend Tom, and whenever she tries to leave she just finds herself back in the same place, eventually leaping out of the window in a desperate bid to escape.

However, it seems like whatever happens onscreen is not what really occurs for any of these victims. Fred for instance is found dead the next day by the police who write the whole thing off as another steroid junkie suffering cardiac arrest and move on with their business. Likewise, Grace is found crushed by the statue but the only mystery for the police there is how she managed to move the damn thing enough to make it fall on top of her. Making the death scenes psychic nightmares allows Fulci to go absolutely wild with creativity in executing them while not having to worry about why the police never step in and try to do something about the rash of bizarre operatic deaths plaguing this small college.

As this goes on, Eva's sanity starts to crumble, whether this is a result of her being possessed by the comatose Kathy or if it's just her pre-existing psychological condition re-asserting itself is left unstated. That would be a fine plot development, but the problem is that Fulci has no idea how to depict a mental breakdown in a realistic or normal way, so he has Eva flip out all of the sudden for no reason and smash up her room. It's an effective shorthand for what's going on, but I feel like it's a missed opportunity to tailor her breakdown to her particular mental anguish or indeed to explore her mental state in any detail. As it stands this scene is a humorous cinematic freakout, about the equivalent of the scene in The Tingler (1959) where Vincent Price gets high on LSD. However, with a bit more psychological nuance it could have been something genuinely unnerving like Repulsion (1965).

In any event, the school decides that in order to limit their liability they should have the girl talk to a psychiatrist. Fair enough, though I take some issue with the guy they chose, as they enlist the aid of our old friend Dr. Anderson. First of all he seems to be a neurologist, as he is also the doctor in charge of caring for the brain-dead Kathy. While a neurologist could provide counseling to a troubled girl in a pinch, it does leave me wondering if there are any qualified head-shrinkers in Boston. His lack of qualifications is small potatoes though compared to the fact that he immediately starts screwing Eva, which has to be a violation of some code of conduct somewhere. Worse still, once the girl is hopelessly in love with him, he starts screwing her roommate Jenny too.

It is at this point we are presented with a very interesting possibility. Eva's vengeful rage over being two-timed gives her a motivation all her own to use Kathy's psychic powers to seek personal vengeance. Jenny is the only girl that was halfway decent to Kathy, and so far the only one that she has held off from killing. She may want nothing more than to leave Jenny alone. Eva on the other hand has a very real and very personal motive to kill the girl, and just how much control she has over Kathy's powers is never made clear. This could be an interesting conflict, however, after setting it up the film does nothing with it, and instead has Kathy's mother pull the plug on her daughter for no discernible reason ending the film.

Aeigma seems to be under the false assumption that it is actually some kind of mystery as throughout the run-time it is constantly throwing out red herrings that lead nowhere and establish nothing. The most galling of them comes when one of the girls tells Eva that Kathy's mom is regularly taken into locked rooms with some of the faculty at Saint Mary's College. Nobody in the school knows what they do there, but lots of girls have reported hearing strange noises coming from within. What is going on behind closed doors? Is it a a witch cult al la Suspiria (1977)? A harmless get-together of co-workers? A singularly unappealing lesbian orgy? I have no idea because after establishing this thread the film simply drops it altogether and never mentions it again. I know Fulci's strengths have been primarily visual, and that it's a waste of time to watch his films for their plots, but come on there is a limit to the amount of scatter-brained writing even I am willing to put up with! There's a reason why the man's best films all take place in a world where reality is gradually crumbling under the weight of an extra-dimensional attack.