Rating: C-
Dir Sidney J. Furie
Star: Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa, Alex Rocco
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t hang around at the start. I was expecting significant set-up, introducing us to the characters, then things going bump in the night for a bit, slowly escalating from there. Nope. Barely five minutes in, and single mom Carla Moran (Hershey) is being slapped about, tossed around her bedroom like a rag-doll and sexually assaulted by something invisible. It’s done in about a minute, which had me thinking the entity needs to talk to its healthcare provider about stamina. Shot in tight close-ups, I wasn’t even sure what had happened. What was it? Why was it targetting Carla? How can it be stopped?
I hope you’re not at all interested in the answers to those questions – because the film certainly isn’t. Instead, it adopts a languid pace – there’s almost two hours to fill after the rape – with Carla visiting who is surely the worst therapist in the world, Dr. Phil Sneiderman (Silver), who simply refuses to acknowledge his patient’s experiences, even after subsequent attacks break the wrist of her teenage son, Bobby (Labiosa). He blames everything on repressed trauma from Carla’s youth, and/or repressed incestuous feelings for Bobby. To be fair, she does have enough psychological baggage to fuel a convention. Her out-of-town boyfriend Jerry Anderson (Rocco) isn’t much help: then again, she doesn’t bother telling him anything, so hard to fault him for being somewhat surprised when he witnesses an attack.
Eventually, she bumps into a pair of Dollar Store Ghostbusters, whose plan involves building a replica of Carla’s house in a university gym, and freezing the spirit with liquid helium when it shows up. This works about as well as you think it would i.e. not at all. But it’s all okay, because the end caption informs us, Carla and her family moved to Texas, and the entity largely got bored and drifted off or something. This is all based on the “true” story of Doris Bither, but largely demonstrates the problem with trying to adapt such things. Without the ability to answer questions, you’re left with something missing most of the key elements typically present in this kind of story. It desperately needs an Indian burial ground, or something, to provide structure. Instead, we get random sequences like the entity taking over Carla’s car, once, and for no particular reason.
While filmed before Poltergeist, it came out afterwards, leaving The Entity feeling a bit of a second tier knock-off. Quite why this made Martin Scorsese’s list of scariest horror movies escapes me. Hershey is decent enough, I will say, but it’s clear she wasn’t up for the nudity required. Those scenes are about the worst “stick your head up through a hole in the mattress on top of a mannequin” I’ve seen in a major Hollywood movie. You wonder why they bothered with her; probably because every other actress they asked, declined. Though let’s be grateful, we were as a result spared the sight of Bette Midler being spectrally ravaged.