That's changing. Anchor Bay Entertainment has new, pristine editions of two of the director's most famous works from the 1980s, Phenomena and Tenebre, (along with two more that he produced, Demons and Demons 2) and his most recent film, The Stendahl Syndrome, is coming to video from Troma. While I have to admit that I'm not Argento's biggest fan, it's good to see his work finally getting the presentation it deserves. The man is a serious visual stylist and it's unfair to judge him by the chopped up American editions or by the often dim and murky transfers from European tapes that have been around on the "gray market" for years.

Phenomena, distributed in a severely shortened version under the title Creepers, is about Jennifer Corvino (a young Jennifer Connelly), a student who is telepathically connected to the insect world. She finds that bizarre murders are being committed around the spooky Swiss private school where she's just enrolled. Perhaps if she teams up with the eminent entomologist Dr. McGregor and his sidekick, a genius chimpanzee, they can solve the crimes. No, this is not a comedy, but in most of Argento's films, the plots are not meant to be taken realistically. They're vehicles for his ideas and striking set pieces. Tenebre, also titled Unsane, is likewise unrestrained by logic. It's about an American writer (Tony Franciosa) who finds that murders he has created in fiction are being repeated in Rome. The combination of violence and sex is even more graphic, and Argento's innovative camerawork is at its most imaginative. The widescreen transfer reveals how much is lost in the earlier pan-and-scan edition.

In The Stendahl Syndrome, Argento takes his hallucinatory explorations of the relationship between art and sexual violence to an even more rarified level. It stars his daughter Asia (also featured in Dario Argento's Trauma) as Anna Manni, an Italian plainclothes cop who is both the victim and pursuer of a serial rapist. The film opens with a long sequence in the Ufizzi Museum where Argento loosely quotes Brian DePalma's Dressed To Kill with his restlessly roving camera. Before it's over, viewers will also catch references to Silence of the Lambs and The Twilight Zone, though Argento isn't imitating anyone. The title refers to a condition in which a person is so overpowered by a work of art that he or she becomes delirious. At one point, Argento takes the concept to a new extreme when Anna walks through a painting and into her immediate past.