Vital Viewing: The Entity (1981)

The Entity is another film from the banner year of 1981 and tells the (reportedly) true story of a woman battered, beaten, raped, and all-around terrified by a malicious spirit in her own home. The paranormal events that plagued her are supposedly well documented and are the basis - or perhaps a better word would be inspiration - for this shocker starring Barbara Hershey. 

Carla Moran (Hershey) is a single mother raising three children: a teenaged boy, Billy (David Labiosa), and two young daughters, Julie (Natasha Ryan of Amityville Horror fame), and Kim (Melanie Gaffin).  She has a boyfriend Jerry (Alex Rocco) who apparently works away and is absent for the first half of the film.

Almost as soon as we meet the family, Carla is brutally raped inside her bedroom by someone she cannot see.  After the attack she begins screaming, alerting her son, who thoroughly checks out the house but is unable to find the assailant.  Carla convinces herself it must have been a dream, but when it happens a second time she and the family bug out and stay the rest of the night with her friend Cindy (Margaret Blye).

The rape scenes themselves (which continue throughout the majority of the film) hold nothing back, with Charles Bernstein's thumping (and distracting, if I'm being quite honest) score violently alerting you to the attacks much in the same way that John Williams' (far superior) score tells us the shark is coming.  The effective musical cues are so loud and booming that it becomes nearly too much, but just like the attacks, it ends just as abruptly.
What's extra unnerving here is that as an audience we too, witness the attacks.  We can see the entity pulling Carla's legs apart, touching her breasts, ambushing her sexually...it's almost too excessive.

Carla, thinking she is safe while out of her home, is shocked when the unseen force strikes again while she is driving to work, nearly causing her to wreck several times.  She seeks psychiatric counseling upon Cindy's advice and is a quivering mess when she meets Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver).  She tries to explain to him that she cannot see her attacker but she can smell him and feel him, and goes on to say that the room gets very cold and that the assailant smells foul. Dr. Sneiderman tries to convince her that the attacks stem from her subconscious recalling traumatic events from her childhood, that she is being raped emotionally and it is her imagination that causes her to believe that she is being physically assaulted.

But when others witness the merciless attacks (including her son, who is pushed away and injured by the entity when he tries to help his mother), Carla knows something must be done to try and stop the aggressive and relentless supernatural visitations. 
She enlists the help of a handful of parapsychologists from the local college, who have dabbled in paranormal activity before but have never seen anything of this nature before.
They begin experiments to see if they can somehow harness the entity, and when Carla's boyfriend resurfaces he is aghast at the lengths she goes to to try and rid herself of the supposed demonic spirit.  Naturally, Jerry doesn't believe one word of her story, until he is privy to an especially unsavory attack which unfortunately causes him to end their relationship.

With nothing to lose, Carla agrees to a dangerous experiment and complies with the scientist's request to somehow beckon the entity to come to her in a controlled environment.  Dr. Sneiderman shows up and tries to reason with Carla, but she's having none of it.  Her life has spiraled so far out of control at this point that she fears for her children's lives as well as her own.

Whether or not The Entity is actually inspired by a true event is not important here.  As in most films of this kind, viewers are asked to suspend their belief for a few hours and if you can just forget how ridiculous the premise appears to be, you are in for an effective story with great acting (in particular Hershey, who carries the entire film on her shoulders) and some unnerving and at times brutal scenes of terror.  Any woman not disturbed by the ferocious rape scenes is an unfeeling Stepford pod-person, as Hershey's portrayal of a woman in crisis is truly top-notch.  She holds nothing back, bringing a whole truckload of believability to a film whose main antagonist isn't even human. 

As stated, Hershey's performance is stellar, but also of note is the acting of a young David Labiosa, whose character of Billy is especially good as well.  His compassion for his mother is honorable as we see him struggle to be the man of the household and in turn protect his mother from her fears, whether unfounded or not.  Ron Silver also has a positive performance here, as a psychiatrist who may be getting a little too close to his unstable patient. 

While the film does lose a bit of its rhythm when they delve into the para-psychological experiments (a similar thing happened near the end of Insidious), and it did drag a bit for me at this point.  I guess I'm not a big fan of all the bells and whistles used to discover ghosts' existence - but that could stem from me not actually wanting them to be debunked or realized. I much prefer the old school 'what you can't see is scarier than what you can see': I don't want my ghosts uncovered, I want them firmly in the 'might be real' category.  Being scared is much more interesting than listening to a dissertation about their existence and the methods used to bring it to light. 

The Entity is vital viewing mostly due to Barbara Hershey's excellent portrayal of a woman losing hope and possibly sanity, but also because no one has yet to make a film on this particular subject matter as honest and direct, yet.  It doesn't really hide anything, and it sure the hell doesn't wait to scare the pants off you.  It just forces it right down your throat. And that lump you feel there, well..it's fear. 

Dead And Buried (1981): Potter's Bluff Is My Kind Of Town!

Upon recommendation from a review by James Gracey of Behind the Couch, I opted to check out this quiet little gem that has been sitting under the radar since its release in the most fabulous year in horror ever: 1981.
It was also right under my nose on my Netflix queue, and though it was slowly working its way up to the top, I did some rearranging and here we are.

Directed by Gary Sherman and based on a short story written by Alex Stern and Jeff Millar, Dead and Buried was adapted for the big screen by Ronald Shusett and the late, great Dan O'Bannon (Alien, The Return of the Living Dead, etc.) and tells the story of local sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) and the residents of a small coastal town called Potter's Bluff. 
Did I ever mention how much I love horror movies based near the ocean?  Well, my love of Jaws should prove that on merit alone, but I am a big fan of seashore terror.
Moving on...

When a visiting photographer is seduced by a local woman, it turns out she wasn't trying to have sex with him after all: she was luring him to his death so a mob of villagers could beat him senseless, tie him to a post, and set him on fire.  What is terribly unnerving about this though, is that the townsfolk all whip out their cameras and start taking pictures as the screaming man burns to death. ("Say Gasoline!!") They plant his body in his van and make it seem like an accident - kind of like a criminal would do on an old episode of Charlies Angels or Kojak.

Only thing is, the poor soul doesn't die.  Yet. 
While Sheriff Gillis discusses the case with coroner/mortician Dobbs (Jack Albertson in a role far from his jovial, Fizzy-Lifting drinking Uncle Joe in Willy Wonka), the gravely wounded photographer is offed in a most unpleasant manner while at the hospital under the care of a nurse who happens to be the very woman responsible for the earlier seduction and the victim's ultimate demise. 

Something is not quite right in Potter's Bluff. 

The sheriff begins to notice that visitors to Potter's Bluff are ending up dead, and how. Anyone that stops over, gets lost, breaks down, needs directions, or even comes there on purpose is pretty much doomed.  As Gillis attempts to figure out what is going on, we as the audience are given a good, hard, jolting dose of reality when the photographer shows up very much alive and working in the town as a gas station attendant.  (What?!)
No burning car or untimely death is going to keep Freddie down! (Speaking of Freddys: Robert Englund himself has a role here as one of the townsfolk!)

When Gillis takes it up with Dobbs, he gets a rambling speech about how much skill it takes to get a body ready for burial and how much of a talent he is to the business.  It is an awkward moment and we are meant to be aware that something is off with the undertaker.When is that not true? Those creepy undertakers anyway... (sorry, Shawn!)

After the good sheriff runs someone over with his car in a moment of unbridled stupidity, he is aghast when the man he hits retrieves his severed arm from the grill of the police cruiser and runs off.   This furthers his speculation that there is something very wrong in his little town.  A pathologist in town (because all small towns have their own pathologist!) runs some labs on a piece of remaining flesh from the car bumper and informs the sheriff that the person he hit has been dead 4 or 5 months, that there is no way that tissue from that arm is alive. 

Utterly beside himself, Gillis has a background check run on Dobbs, only to find out he lost his previous pathology job due to performing unauthorized autopsies.  Hmm...
When he tries to get some comfort from his wife, she brushes him off and acts too busy to discuss it.  When she leaves, Gillis finds a book on witchcraft, among other things, in her dresser drawer.  We are then witness to her teaching a classroom of kids about zombies. Yeah, that's where your tax dollars are going, people!

With all the pieces to the puzzle still not quite fitting together, Gillis finally deduces that Dobbs is quite possibly responsible for the deaths of the out-of-towners and comes to the conclusion that he has been luring them to Potter's Bluff for years to be guinea pigs for his morbid fascinations.  Only thing is, what he finds in addition to those truths may ruin his entire existence and everything he holds dear.

Albeit a tad slow, especially in the beginning, Dead and Buried has a  lot going for it.  Great, spooky atmosphere with lots of fog banks (crucial for coastal horror) much in the same vein as The Fog, interesting characters which you actually begin to care about, and a twist ending that if close attention isn't paid will go completely past you.  While the film would have benefited from a quicker pace and better acting by minor characters, it's still a creepy little installment in the seashore horror sub-genre.