The
Hearse
1980
Director- George Bowers
Cast- Trish Van Devere, Joseph Cotton, David Gautreaux, Donald
Hotton, Med Flory
Despite
the name, this is not another movie about a killer car. The titular hearse,
rather than being the antagonist is simply a creepy plot device.
Jane
(Trish Van Devere, best known to horror fans from The Changeling) is a big city girl trying to escape her old life
and move into a house she inherited from her deceased aunt. However, her dream
of small town relaxation is not to be. Not only do the townsfolk not welcome
her, some are downright hostile. In addition she is visited with visions of her
dead aunt and close calls with a hearse driven by a sinister looking chauffer.
Reading
her aunt’s diary, Jane finds out that her aunt had fallen in love with a
Satanist and married him. Apparently Satanic rituals had taken place in the
home and Jane assumes this is the cause of her cold reception from the
townsfolk.
She
begins to have increasingly realistic nightmares, one in which she is carried
away by the hearse. The only thing helping her preserve her sanity is a budding
relationship with a too-good-to-be-true gentleman, Tom, who is not bothered in
the least by all the talk of devil worship. She of course falls in love with
him. I’ll give you three guesses who he really is and the first two don’t
count.
The
movie is not just typical of low budget horror movies from the late 70s to
early 80s, it’s almost the blueprint. It has every device; the POV stalker
peering through the window, the rude townsfolk, the phone line that goes dead.
The lighting, especially the outdoor lighting, is almost nonexistent. The musical score even sounds like a hundred
other films. So given all that, why watch the it? Despite its utter typicalness
the film does maintain a consistent sense of dread. Also, despite some
predictable plot twists, it’s not clear until the end of the film how, or if,
the heroine will overcome her small town Satanic nightmare.
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