Monday, February 24, 2020

Superstition






 Superstition
1982
Director- James W. Roberson
Cast- Jim Houghton, Albert Salmi, Lynn Carlin, Larry Pennell, Jacquelyn Hyde, Robert Symonds, Heidi Bohay, Maylo McCaslin, Carole Goldman, Stacy Keach Sr., Kim Marie, Joshua Cadman
            
     An old, dilapidating house sits on a rural grounds owned by the local church. An old woman, Elvira, and her seemingly idiot son are the caretakers, the latest in a long family line of caretakers. Teenagers use the grounds as a place to get into shenanigans.  The film starts with two of these kids meeting their grisly ends in the house. One is decapitated and gets his head microwaved. The other gets bisected!
           

      Revered Thompson is a minister recently assigned to the church. The local police want him to do something about the property, pronto. They suspect Elvira’s idiot son, Arlen, is the killer. A detective is assigned to tail Arlen and follows him down to a brackish pond on the property. While nosing around, a monstrous hand comes out of the water and drags the detective under. The body can’t be found and Reverend Thompson decides that he’ll have the pond drained, which drives Arlen crazy and he runs off.
            
     The Reverend speaks with Elvira but she only gives a vague warning that she has lost her son and that he is in the service of some mysterious woman and she makes reference to losing her husband to the same mysterious woman. Elvira tells Reverend Thomas that the property has a history of violence going all the way back to 1692.
            

      A new Reverend, Lahey, is moving in with his family. As the house is getting fixed up, people are killed in accidents. The drowned detectives body is finally found, or at least part of it. While swimming, one of Lahey’s daughters feels something grab her leg. When she emerges from the pond, the detectives severed hand is grasped around her ankle.
            
      The cops tell Reverend Thompson that (no surprise) in addition to everything else that has happened, another family tried to live in the home and each member was killed gruesomely. 
            
      Reverend Lahey’s son “disappears” (though we know that he has met his end). While looking for the boy, Reverend Thomas just happens to find a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, the Inquisition’s manual for how to persecute witches (because people just leave things like that lying around). At this point, you may want to check your brain at the door. Despite the book being written in 15th century Europe, it just happens to recount a tale from 17th century America. Well, I guess we’ll consider it a new edition. Anyway, Reverend Thomas learns that 300 years earlier, a Reverend Pike had overseen the trial, and death by drowning, of a witch. She wasn’t one of those falsely accused witches either. She was definitively in league with Satan and she cursed everyone before she died.
           
     As we discover, that witch has returned, and is responsible for all of the gruesome murders, with assistance from the missing Arlen. Now the two Reverends have to stop her as she goes on a murderous rampage.
           

    The movie isn’t great but it has some entertainment value. It seems to have a hard time figuring out what it wants be; either a slasher or an occult thriller. Some of the plot elements either go nowhere or are left dangling. Though it was a theatrical release, the production values are about on par with the television movies of that day. It’s not scary but does have some horrific elements with the murders. In fact, the creative gore is probably its standout quality. In addition to the microwaved head and bisection at the beginning of the film, we get one man perforated with a saw blade, a girl gets a spike hammered through her forehead and more.
            
     Not for those looking for a thoughtful supernatural thriller, but if you want some creative, video store era horror, it can offer an evening’s entertainment.

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