The Entity
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Movie Reviews of The Entity
Movie Review: My Review
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the first horror movies I ever saw. To this day it still gives me goose bumps I love it and watch it alot :)Movie Review: I didn't order these for me!
Summary: 5 Stars
I ordered these movies for a friend they are very happy with them and I was very happy with the fast shipping!Movie Review: Barbara Hershey and the case of the spectral groper...
Summary: 4 Stars
The Entity (1981), a fictionalized account based on a `true' incident, relates a tale of how a single mother in California suffered brutal attacks by unseen forces. Taken from the popular novel by Frank De Felitta and directed by Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File, Iron Eagle, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace), the film stars Barbara Hershey (Hoosiers, Tin Men). Also appearing is Ron Silver (Silkwood), George Coe (The Omega Code), Margaret Blye (Mischief), Jacqueline Brookes (Ghost Story), Richard Brestoff (The Man with Two Brains), Raymond Singer (Feds), Alex `Moe Green' Rocco (The Godfather), Natasha Ryan (The Amityville Horror), Melanie Gaffin (Armed and Dangerous), and David Labiosa, whom many may be familiar with from his appearance as the character of Antonio the busboy from the "Seinfeld" episode The Busboy.
Carla Moran (Hershey) is a single mother, who works during the day and goes to school at night, drives a funky car and lives in a funky rental house with her three children. After returning home one night she suffers a brutal, penetrating attack by an unseen aggressor, one that's real enough to her to believe her attacker is a corporeal being in the house (he's not). Her oldest son Bill (Labiosa) writes it off as a bad dream, but the amorous, groping, invisible entity soon returns on a regular basis causing Carla to think she possibly losing her marbles, to which she seeks professional help from a psychiatrist named Dr. Sneiderman (Silver). As Sneiderman begins probing Carla's background he believes the attacks are all apart of some delusion, stemming from her sketchy past, but the incidents continue and grow in intensity, eventually witnessed by others around Carla, including her children (at one point she suffers various bruises and bite marks upon her body). Eventually a disillusioned Carla, after a falling out with Sneiderman, comes into contact with a couple of university funded parapsychologists named Gene (Brestoff) and Joe (Singer) who later witness some of the strangeness, and they agree to get involved not only to document the powerful force but to also help Carla, much to Dr. Sneiderman annoyance who thinks such intervention by those he presumes quacks will only feed the delusion. Anyway, as the unusual activity continues the parapsychologists look for a way to isolate and immobilize the force, resulting in a grand and elaborate experiment in a university gymnasium where they use a willing Carla as the bait (once Sneiderman gets wind of what's going on, he flips his proverbial lid and tries to intervene), the hope being to capture that force which they believe to have crossed over from another plane of existence (apparently looking for a good time).
I'm not a big believer in the supernatural but I am perfectly willing to admit there's a lot of stuff going on out there that we, for some reason or another, just can't explain. Whether or not part or most of what's relating in this film actually occurred I do not know, but it certainly made for an interesting and unnerving film, especially if you like well developed ghost stories with an intellectual slant. I thought Ms. Hershey did a really wonderful job portraying a woman fighting to keep her wits, struggling to come to terms with those who would have her believe her very real experiences were all just a product of her fractured mind. One aspect of the film I really enjoyed was the animosity displayed between the established medical community, represented by Dr. Sneiderman, and the pseudo science of the paranormal, represented mainly by Gene and Joe, whom, by the way, were a real couple of nerdlingers (check out the scene when they're in Carla's bedroom and some static electricity appears in the air...the both dive for the floor in fright). There's one sort of funny scene when Sneiderman's in a staff meeting with his peers with Carla present, and after she leaves nearly everyone lights up (one guy's smoking a pipe, another a cigar, and most of the rest pull out cigarettes). I'm not entirely sure why I found this humorous, but perhaps it has something to do with seeing all these medical professionals engaging in an activity we now know to be detrimental to one's health. Anyway, I thought the film, which ran just over two hours, was pretty solid all the way around, including the flow of the story, the special effects (which were understated enough to appear real), the performances, and the direction. Furie and his cinematographer Stephen H. Burum (The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible) did employ some interesting camera slanted angle shots and tight close ups, most likely to create a heightened sense of tension, and they usually worked, on me at least. As I said the film runs just over two hours, and I thought the time was used well. The only element I thought a little off was the ending, during the grand experiment meant to try and capture the entity. I won't go into specifics but despite not being familiar with the source material, I highly doubt this `Ghostbusters' sequence was something that actually took place. Most likely it was a spectacular element tacked on to the film in an effort to provide a whiz-bang of a finale. It was interesting, but it felt at odds with the rest of the story in terms of up until that point there felt a certain sense of disturbing realism steeped in the fantastic, whereas the ending moved into the realm of the ultra fantastic. I did like their train of thought in as far as how they were planning to capture the entity, but, again, it didn't seem to fit well with everything that occurred previously given most of what's depicted is supposedly culled from actual events. That's not to say the ending ruined the film, but only that it takes away slightly from everything else that came before.
The picture on this Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD release, presented in widescreen (2.35:1), enhanced for 16X9 TVs, looks very sharp and clean, and the Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround comes through very well. Extras include a newly created and entertaining documentary titled The Entity Files (27:28) featuring a real life parapsychologist named Dr. Barry Taff who shares some of his experiences (he was involved in the true life events from which provide the basis of the film), a theatrical trailer, a poster and still gallery, and an original screenplay accessible as a DVD-ROM feature.
Cookieman108
By the way, I saw on the Internet Movie Database website there's a remake of this film in the works, tentatively scheduled for a 2008 release. No word as of yet who might appear in the film, but Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Ringu 2) is listed as the director.
Movie Review: Thirty years later: still scary.
Summary: 4 Stars
The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1981)
The Entity is not Sidney J. Furie's best-known film. It's not even his best. It hasn't shown up on any critical thousand-best lists (as has The Ipcress File), nor was it nominated for a veritable slew of Oscars (as was Lady Sings the Blues). But for all that, I'll tell you something--in The Entity, Furie did something that it seems directors have forgotten how to do in the ensuing thirty years; he gave us a horror film that is entirely humorless. And I don't mean that in a bad way. Horror film directors have been leavening horror with humor as long as horror films have been around, on the theory that horror hits you that much harder when you were just laughing. I subscribed to it, too, but The Entity, which I watched last night for the first time in about twenty-five years, is hard evidence that starting off scary and staying there can be just as effective.
It takes this movie about five minutes to kick in. We first see a bit of the daily life of Carla Moran (Looking for Mr. Goodbar's Barbara Hershey), a quick montage of her job and the night class she takes to learn to type. Then she goes home...and is attacked by something we can't see. She is raped, though the camera, the first time, is artfully-placed enough that we don't know this until she confides it to her friend Cindy (The Italian Job's Margaret Blye) a couple of days later. The attacks continue, and she notifies the authorities despite knowing how crazy she'll sound. This brings her into contact with two conflicting groups. One is the skeptical medical doctors, the most visible face of which is Phil Sneiderman (the late Ron Silver), a Freudian psychiatrist who believes it's all in her head. The other is headed by Dr. Cooley (The Naked Gun 2 ½'s Jacqueline Brookes), top dog in the same university's nascent department of parapsychology, who believe there's an actual evil entity stalking her. Meanwhile, the attacks continue, each one increasing in brutality (and each more graphically-depicted).
According to Frank de Felitta, who wrote both the screenplay and the novel upon which it is based, The Entity is a "fictionalized account of a true story". I think we've all heard that enough to know that it means there's a kernel of truth somewhere hidden way down in a mass of fiction, but hearing it still kind of sets your teeth on edge. This is a movie where every last detail is designed to make the viewer as uncomfortable as possible. Pretty impressive for a guy who doesn't often direct horror films (he did a couple in the early sixties, and then this one; his output since has been almost entirely comedies and thrillers). Not just the attacks themselves, but everything. Her kids. Sneiderman's absolute obsession with sex (which turns even creepier when he falls for her, which is inevitable). Cindy's husband, whose boorishness always seems as if it's going to explode into violence. Even the color schemes of some of the sets are just off enough to keep you on edge. The movie does have a few drawbacks (most notably its running length, which modern audiences used to Miramax's "ninety minutes tops" horror films will find well-nigh unbearable) and it looks and sounds dated, but it is still an effective, chilling horror film that deserves to be rediscovered. *** ½
Movie Review: All in her head?
Summary: 4 Stars
This rich little horror film about a single mother being repeatedly and inexplicably raped in her middle-class California home by an invisible incubus has been repeatedly dismissed as an exploitation film. but its much more thoughtful than that. The attacks on Carla Moran (the excellent Barbara Hershey) are too sudden, violent, and shocking to be played for salaciousness. There's much that's left teasingly ambiguous about why the poltergeist attacks her, and the psychologist (Ron Silver) who examines her wants to tie things too quickly and neatly to her history of childhood abuse and failed relationships. But the film repeatedly gives us epistemological proof of Carla's attacks (we see them as they happen), so it's like Edmund Wilson's famous critical optic for the Turn of the Screw" exactly in reverse: we KNOW the ghosts are real, and the critics who think otherwise (i.e. Silver and his psychiatrist mentor, whom we come to learn is ethically corrupt) are exactly wrong. Indeed, the psychiatric board who examine Carla seem to wish her almost as much ill as the spirit attacking her. Like all the better horror stories, the ghost is here a figuration for something else menacing its culture; here (as so often) it's about the problems a independent sexually active woman poses to her male-dominated culture, and vice-versa. The confusions of the ghost with Carla's lover (Alex Rocco), her nearly adult son, and her psychiatrist occur too repeatedly and frequently to be mere coincidence. The film is helped enormously by Hershey's strong performance, and hurt by its special effects, which were inferior even for the time.