Sole Survivor
by Thom Eberhardt
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anita Skinner, Kurt Johnson and Caren LarkeyDirector: Thom Eberhardt
Brand: BCI ECLIPSE LLC
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Anamorphic, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 85 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-04-01
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Code Red/Navarre Corporation
Movie Reviews of Sole Survivor
Movie Review: Silly fun.
Summary: 2 Stars
Sole Survivor (Thom Eberhardt, 1983)
When you watch as many movies as I do, some of the more forgettable ones are bound to fall through the cracks. This one caught my eye today, sitting there on the shelf, and I swore I'd watched it within the past couple of months, but couldn't find a note about it anywhere in my film notebook. So I popped it in and watched the first few minutes. Yep, looked familiar. So I skipped round a bit watching more and more of it and remembering. But I couldn't for the life of me remember how it ended. So I fast-forwarded and watched the last five minutes again. And now I know why I didn't remember the movie; the ending is so horribly stupid that I must have actively blocked the experience of watching this low-budget (estimated $350,000) dog that I can't believe wasn't a made-for-TV movie (it may have been, but IMDB doesn't list it that way) from my mind. It's not that the rest of the movie is as bad as the ending, it's just that it doesn't have anywhere near enough redeeming qualities to balance out the deathless stupidity of that final, unintentionally hilarious scene.
The plot will be very familiar to anyone who's seen David Hemmings' adaptation of James Herbert's wonderful novel The Survivor, the film version of which came out two years before this: a plane crashes, leaving (surprise!) one survivor, Denise Watson (Girlfriends' Anita Skinner in her second and last film role). After the accident, her therapist asks her about survivors' guilt, but she professes not to feel it. However, she starts seeing people whom she eventually realizes are ghosts of the victims, whom she believes have come to take her back to the grave with them. She tries to avoid this fate with the help of a sympathetic cop (Brian Richardson), who believes, of course, that there's a rational explanation for all this.
It's a pretty good plot (and one wonders why, in the age of American remakes of Japanese ghost stories, no one has got round to giving this one a revamp), but it's got that vintage-seventies TV-disaster-movie feel to it that pretty much guarantees a forgettable experience (and given that the movie was released in 1983, pretty much guarantees it was already feeling dated when it came out). Skinner is a relatively decent actress ("relatively" to the rest of the cast, anyway), but she never gets across the feeling that she's actually in danger, and that seems as if it would be important in a supernatural thriller, no? So you go along, half falling asleep while watching this, and then all the sudden you're blindsided by that final scene, the contents of which I obviously can't reveal, but my god, is it funny. It's almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie just to get to the laughs at the end. It's really, really terrible, but in such a way that it almost makes this transcend its insipidity and enter the realm of such bad-movie classics as Shriek of the Mutilated and Night of the Lepus (which, despite being so very very awful, are two of my all-time favorite movies for that very reason). It doesn't get there, and the lack of unintentional humor anywhere but that last scene doesn't help, but man, that final shot? It's a killer. You've gotta see it just for that. * ?
Summary of Sole Survivor
Before FINAL DESTINATION, there was SOLE SURVIVOR. Directed by Thom Eberhardt (Night of the Comet), This chilling film tells of a yound women who is the sole survivor of an airplane crash. Disregarding the warnings from a psychic actress friend, Denise tries to get on with her life, but she has somehow cheated death, and the Grim Reaper sends his minions to bring her to him.Horror DVD Video
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