Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Day: Halloween 2010 edition!
[For the entirety of October I will be showcasing one horror film each day. Every film is pulled from my DVD shelf or streamed via Netflix Instant and will be one I haven’t seen. Unlike my A Movie A Day or A Movie A Week columns there won’t necessarily be connectors between each film, but you’ll more than likely see patterns emerge day to day.]
Hoo, boy. I wanted to put something a little more family friendly in the sub-head quote, but really there’s only one quote from the movie that stands out, one of the final lines of a ghostly evil voice telling the distressed Barbara Hersey “Welcome home, cunt.”
This is a rough fuckin’ movie, man. And supposedly based on a true story to boot.
I can take my ghosts sympathetic (The Sixth Sense), I can take my ghosts drunk (High Spirits), I can take my ghosts mean (The Legend of Hell House), but I draw the line at rape-ghosts. I think that’s a stance people of all nationalities, races, creeds and political affiliation can unanimously take.
Barbara Hersey is a single mother with a troubled past who is intruded upon one night in her bedroom as her kids sleep one room over. And by intruded upon I mean savagely raped. The doors are locked, the windows bolted and the attacker is never seen by us or Hersey herself.
The majority of the movie plays with the question is there a ghost or is it all in Hersey’s mind? One of the missteps the movie takes is showing us too quickly that it is indeed a supernatural occurrence in a scene where Hersey is again molested, but this time in front of her teenage son, who is electrocuted… by ghost lightning, I guess… and throw backwards, unable to help his mother.
It’s a great scene, very off-putting and well executed, but then we get another half hour of Ron Silver, playing her psychiatrist, telling her that it’s all in her head.
Sorry, the audience knows better at this point, so we just find ourselves waiting for the rest of the characters to catch up.
What is The Entity? Who is it? We are never told. It could be a random haunting or it could be more than that. Carla Moran had a rough childhood, born into a religious household with a preacher father that “held me the way a father isn’t supposed to hold his daughter.” There’s also her first husband, a young guy who turned to booze and pills when he knocked her up at 16, dying in a motorcycle accident.
The impression I get is that it’s not one single person and not necessarily attached to her, but drawn to her fragile and cracked emotional state the way a shark is drawn to a wounded fish.
Whatever it is, it’s mean, it’s brutal and it’s not afraid to show itself in front of other people, a welcome change of pace for this kind of movie.
Ron Silver is surprisingly likeable as the doubting shrink and Hersey knocks it out of the park as Carla Moran. She straddles the line between victimization and strength perfectly.
After finishing the movie, I tweeted “The Entity is Poltergeist with 100% less dwarfs and tons more rape-ghosts.” True words, indeed. Poltergeist is a much, much better movie, no question, but the two share a similar feel. Both take place in the suburbs, both visualize beings from the other side, but Poltergeist attains a kind of effortless brilliance that few films can.
It actually hurts The Entity a bit, this comparison, because it just can’t hold up. Jacquelin Brookes is a fine actress, but she’s no Zelda Rubinstein. A big green animated floating blob isn’t as amazing as ILM’s work. Charles Bernstein’s pounding trash-can lids score pales in comparison to Jerry Goldsmith’s brilliant score.
But despite the similarities in subject matter and characters, if you can separate them in your mind you’ll really enjoy this flick. It’s quite different in that it takes a rather exploitative subject extremely seriously and gives a good go at making a strong character driven tale of the supernatural.
Final Thoughts: Stan Winston built fake boobs to be squeezed by ghost fingers, so that alone should make the decision easy for most horror fans. The overall picture is flawed, marred by a score that sounds just like the one for Stephen King’s MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE and by an ending that goes a little cheesy with a possessed frozen helium gun. I’m not kidding. But the finale, post-cheese, is fairly dark and more disturbing than almost anything in the previous 2 hours. Great performances and a different type of R-rated studio film on the paranormal (and the Stan Winston boobs, of course) make this a solid recommend.
Currently in print on DVD: YES
Currently available on Netflix Instant: YES
Here are the next week’s worth of AMAD titles:
Thursday, October 7th: DOCTOR X (1932)
Friday, October 8th: THE RETURN OF DOCTOR X (1939)
Saturday, October 9th: THE TENANT (1976)
Sunday, October 10th: MAN IN THE ATTIC (1953)
Monday, October 11th: NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980)
Tuesday, October 12th: PROPHECY (1979)
Wednesday, October 13th: THE OTHER (1972)
Tomorrow we go back to some classic horror with DOCTOR X! See you folks then!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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