Parasitic psychic witch bullies bullies in Fulci’s ‘Aenigma’
By: Lucas Hardwick
Tags: Movies, Film Reviews, Movie Review, Film, Horror

If anyone out there needs a great idea for their horror script, I invite you to investigate the life cycle of the Schistoma, also known as the more vile sounding blood fluke, responsible for the second deadliest tropical disease in the world behind Malaria, Schistosomiasis, which is liable for about 200,000 deaths per year. When it doesn’t kill, it pretty much wrecks anything to do with digestion, blood, and the brain. And as if snails weren’t creepy enough on their own, they also happen to be the secondary hosts for these little bastards. The Schistoma — let’s just go with blood fluke — larvae float around in lakes and streams until they burrow into the soft tissue of what eventually will be your next plate of escargot, reproduce asexually for a couple of months until thousands emerge back into the water as fork-tail cercariae looking for their final primary host — a.k.a., you.

Title card for “Aenigma.”

After you’ve finished a sneaky skinny-dipping excursion to the local village lagoon with the preacher’s daughter on your mission trip to the Congo, both of you are likely carrying the now matured juvenile Schistosomula which spend a couple of weeks in your bloodstream, eventually honeymooning in your resort-like liver. Here, thousands of fully matured one-and-a-half centimeter blood fluke get it on, which is a pretty disturbing affair in and of itself, as the female slides its entire body into a groove inside the male. For the most part, the two are paired for life, but even at this minute scale, natural selection is a bitch for any male that can’t hack it.

The paired blood fluke then swim off and buy a nice Cape Cod in the blood veins around your intestine and bladder, and can live there for the next 20 years or so releasing eggs which end up being the agitating culprits of Schistosomiasis. As the female blood fluke produces eggs, about half are excreted through bodily wastes back into the water to find new snails to infest, while the rest travel through your body causing gastrointestinal disease. If they manage to get to your spinal cord or brain, you’re looking at seizures and paralysis. The Xenomorph in Alien did it with more theatrics, but the blood fluke’s casual approach is far more diabolical, affirming parasites as nature’s nastiest bully.

And speaking of bullies, nothing does it better than a good old fashioned possession, whether it be demonic or, in the case of Lucio Fulci’s 1987 flick Aenigma, where comatose Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) takes bullying to the ultimate level with telekinetic possession exacting her revenge on, you guessed it, a group of bullies. And with no more story than that to get in the way of a plot with more curves than a blood fluke, what we end up with is a “three college girls walk into a dorm” scenario episodically being dispatched as Kathy causes them to see and experience horrific projections that result in their individual demise.

Young college student Kathy is tricked into a date by her roommates at St. Mary’s College with hunky gymnastics instructor Fred (Riccardo Acerbi) — who is not only toxically male, but is also the guy with a popped collar who’s first in line at the party to do a keg stand — and upon discovering she’s been set up, Kathy mistakenly runs into traffic and is hit by a car and remains in a coma.

In the meantime, new student Eva (Klaus Kinski’s niece Lara Naszinski) arrives at St. Mary’s, whose yardstick for a successful year at college is “making out with as many boys as possible.” But unbeknownst to her, and only to the audience for most of the film, through some telegraphic editing, we’re told that comatose Kathy possesses Eva upon her arrival making her Kathy’s secret weapon for unloading appropriate revenge.

But that’s not all! Through some unexplained mystic power that probably has something to do with her mother’s periodic glowing red eyes and overall peculiarly witchy disposition as she works cleaning Kathy’s dorm, Kathy is able to cause these terrible people to be subject to nightmarish horrors which result in their mysterious deaths often connected back to the possessed Eva.

While Kathy is laid up in a horrifically garish state in the hospital, we witness her pleased facial expressions with each satisfying kill. And as Dr. Robert Anderson (Jared Martin) unravels the mystery of Kathy’s active brainwaves in spite of her comatose state — and like the Clingasaurus Rex you thought she probably was all along — Kathy immediately falls in love with him and uses Eva to unethically pursue his affections. And have you seen Eva? Of course, Dr. Anderson unethically goes for it!

Kathy’s only friend is her old roommate Jenny (Ulli Reinthaler) who is also now Eva’s roommate, and after Eva gets sent away for recovery after cranking it to 11 on Dr. Anderson, ends up falling for him putting comatose Kathy / possessed Eva in the weird position of, yeah, having to try to murder her too!

As basic and logical as revenge stories are wont to be, we now have plenty of plot to ramrod this puppy through 89 minutes of tepid suspense driven only by what we showed up for in the first place, the gruesome, squirmy sights and sensations from the Godfather of Gore, Lucio Fulci.

This movie is often said to be guilty of being a K-Mart version of Carrie with a little Suspiria mixed in to church it up, but like I tell my wife anytime she is able to turn her nose up at a movie by comparing it to the plot of Beauty and the Beast, there are only about 32 plots to do anything with in the entire world. And sure, I can see the connections to those former flicks, but it’s Fulci’s ghastly unique sensibilities that bump right up next to camp that make this movie a pukey, weird-a-rama extravaganza that I dare not detail here so as not to completely ruin the experience. But take my word for it when I say it contains one of the grossest kill scenes in the history of movies. In one scene in particular, just when you’re saying to yourself, “Are they really going there?” Yes, they really go there. You may have witnessed someone having an averse reaction to mollusks, but have you seen it with astral projection?

If Dario Argento is The Beatles of Italian horror, then Lucio Fulci is the Rolling Stones. For all the artsy fartsy, colorful, restrained suspense stuff Argento was doing, Fulci was down and dirty, giving us what we show up for, filling in the blanks with some of the wildest imagery ever put on film. And after a pretty successful round of films in the 1970s and early 1980s, Fulci’s ailing health resulted subpar output by the late 80s, with greatness appearing in fits and starts until his death in 1996. And Aenigma is a perfect example of rather mediocre yield. While the weirdness meter on this film is pegged out, budget restriction keeps the effects — save for one or two scenes — looking pretty transparent.

As everything wraps up, Jenny heads out for a hot date with Dr. Anderson at the hospital, and of course winds up in the morgue where she’s confronted by comatose Kathy / possessed Eva who tries to kill her. And as possessed Eva begins to strike with a surgical scalpel — and why Kathy didn’t just, you know, murder Jenny with some spicy food and a bad dream, I don’t know — drops dead, and we see Kathy’s witchy mother Mary (Dusica Zegarac) pulling the plug on her life support ending the girl’s psychic reign of terror.

The lesson here is be nice to people, even if the bullies you’re bullying had it coming, lest you become a parasitic, murdering bully. For all its cheapness, there’s enough going on in Fulci’s Aenigma to make it a great time, with a little skin, a lot of rubber, and a story weird enough to make you forget about the real world horrors blood flukes and Malaria for a little while.

Three stars.

(Blu-ray release from Severin Films.)