By Richard Winters
My Rating: 2 out of 10
4-Word Review: Beautiful lady is possessed.
At her mother’s gravesite a young Susan feels compelled to go inside a Mausoleum and there she comes into contact with evil spirits who possess her and allow her the ability to destroy those around her that she does not like. She becomes an adult and marries, but her husband Oliver (Marjoe Gortner) begins to suspect that something isn’t right with her and tells Simon her psychiatrist (Norman Burton) who reads up on a book of ancient rituals to rid her of the spirits before it is too late.
This film is a tired rip-off of not only The Exorcist, but all the rip-offs that came after it. The special effects are cheesy and the mechanical direction fails to add anything new to the genre. The brief bursts of horror are intercut with long, drawn out dramatic segments that go nowhere. The heavy-handed musical score is annoying and the budget is well on the cheap side. Susan’s transformations and murders quickly become mundane and redundant.
The acting is especially bad and in some ways the worst part about the movie. All the performers deliver their lines in a hollow sounding, robotic way. Gortner makes for a weak ‘good-guy’. I might be able to handle him as a psycho, but as a lead he is terrible. I was glad to see his character get killed and just wished it had been sooner. LaWanda Page best known as Aunt Esther from ‘Sanford and Son’ TV-Show adds some levity as the couple’s maid and even says a few very choice four-letter words.
This would be a good candidate for Mystery Science Theater 3000, but hard to take seriously on its own. Even lovers of tacky cinema will be challenged to get through it. This is the type of bad movie that gives other bad movies a bad name.
My Rating: 2 out of 10
Released: May 3, 1983
Runtime: 1Hour 36Minutes
Rated R
Director: Michael Dugan
Studio: MPM
Available: VHS, DVD (Region 1 & 2)
Scopophilia 