Sole Survivor
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Movie Reviews of Sole Survivor
Movie Review: Spooky!
Summary: 3 Stars
For twenty years I had searched for this film. I believe it was circa 1983-84 that I rented it on the now long defunct video disc format. I saw it once and it never left my memory. That is except for the title! While searching for clues, I found a website called "Find That Film" and- as the name of that website suggests, they helped me find it. This is a creepy film. It isn't the greatest movie but just as it did in the early 1980's, it gave me the willies. The acting is so-so and you can tell it was created on a rather low budget. It is reminiscent of the 1962 cult classic "Carnival Of Souls"- which also scared the heck out of me when I was kid. A young woman is the sole survivor of a plane crash. After she is released from the hospital, weird things start to happen. She becomes bewildered at the strange people that seem to pop up in random places and stare at her. What she does not know is that these are actual people who have recently died and are trying to take her with them. All of this the result of defying a plane crash that she was supposed to die in. The soaking wet girl in the hospital garage who appears just before a parked truck loses it's breaks and almost hits the woman, the guy who walks onto the highway and causes the woman to lose control of her car, the guy staring at her while she eats at a restaurant, the creepy old man staring at her in the park, the spooky man waiting for her at the top of a parking garage escalator, the shadow of a dead man staring at her as she rides away on a night bus etc. I don't know about you but there is something about dead people watching from a distance that gives me the creeps. 1961's "The Innocents" comes to mind on that. After I was finished watching "Sole Survivor", I had a rather unnerved feeling. That means I enjoyed it. Like I said, it isn't the greatest movie but it is effective. It's an appropriate film to watch on a cold dark night snuggled with your girlfriend.Movie Review: Although somewhat plodding at times, Sole Survivor is worth the patience for the finale alone
Summary: 3 Stars
Sole Survivor tells the tale of a lone living women(a "sole survivor" if you will LOL!) left in the wake of a commercial airplane crash(in easily one of the best scenes from the film, the camera pans through the carnage until it comes to her; sitting in her seat amidst the wreckage in silent shock and completely unscathed). Possibly suffering from the post-traumatic affliction known as "survivor syndrome"(depression, nightmares, and anxiety caused by thoughts of being unworthy of life over everyone else killed in the accident), our lead is caught wondering if the recent bizarre happenings and people that have entered her life are truly out for her death, or is it all in her head? Sole Survivor is definitely a well done film; it features excellent acting, effects, music, and direction throughout(Thom Eberhardt would follow this up with the 80's classic, "Night Of The Comet")... what it doesn't feature though, is much in the way of excitement. This is a "slow burn" type of horror experience(i.e. "The Changeling," "Burnt Offerings," "Don't Look Now," etc.) that focuses much more on atmosphere and a creepy premise rather than blood and guts or jump scares(although bare breasts do make a welcome appearance!), but for the patient it delivers with one of the best finales I've seen in quite awhile. Out of the group of four people that I watched this with, I was the "sole survivor" to make it to the credits without falling asleep... again, that's not a knock on the film so much as that when I told them we'd be watching a lost horror flick from 1982 they were probably expecting something quite different(like "The Burning" or "Night Of The Creeps")... now you know the type of movie you're in for at least if you do decide to give it a watch(and it deserves at least one). The DVD from Code Red is very nice, with a fairly clean picture in anamorphic widescreen and plenty of special features for the overly curious(or bored).Movie Review: Final Destination Any One!!
Summary: 3 Stars
In the movie there is a strange lady who actually Predicts the plane crash and the woman surviving , but surprisingly she did not have much of a bigger role as I thought she would. I figured they would try to help each other, but it really did not turn out that way. The movie actually has some slight creepy moments, but nothing too good as for scares. the Plot is original and good. IT's obvious that Final Destination borrowed from the story. The effects are pretty decent for the dead people and I really enjoyed the ending. The directing and acting was pretty good too. I would have given it more stars but it slowed down in parts other than that its not a bad movie.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. * ½
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