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Overview
The sentinel – talk about dedicated to your job. And it may not even be one you wanted. But hey, when you’re as big as the Catholic church and it’s for your religion, you can make someone protect the gates of hell.
Are you ready for another 70’s classic horror? This one hits all the right buttons and can definitely make you creep out if home alone. There is also a book – actually trilogy of books – and Rhys the 2nd one really gets WEIRD. After listening to us, if Rhys thinks something is WEIRD, it must really be off the rails.
And if you’re looking for disturbing scenes, this one will fill the order. Especially if you are looking for specific female activities not normally portrayed in movies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(1977_film)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076683/
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Transcript
Stephen: the Sentinel. Yeah, the Sentinel, yeah. Black Sabbat or something. Sabbat. It said Hein.
Sabbat. Yeah. Yeah, that’s it.
Rhys: It was really interesting ’cause we were talking about getting this moving. I’m like, make sure you get the director’s edition and you come back with the German version.
I think it’s really funny ’cause Hex and Sabbat means the witches Sabbath. Yeah.
There’s no witches in the movie at all. I don’t
Stephen: know. Yeah. I must say th this movie definitely had a seventies feel to it.
Rhys: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. So before we get too far along, I just wanted to take a second and give a shout out to our friend Olivia, who is apparently a big fan and hey,
Stephen: thanks for listening.
Hey. Alright. Good to know. I love hearing about big fans. Yeah. So that Olivia, if you’re sharing it, you’re helping drive the numbers up. We were just talking about that we’re getting good results from views and stuff, so thank you. Appreciate it. Absolutely.
Rhys: Alright. So Sentinel this Sentinel. I think I’d like to think that I purposely did this after House of the Devil because House of the Devil is nod to movies of the seventies and you can see the trends.
That’s Ty West used actually in this movie.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I even made the comment, I’m like, so what are we watching that’s a whole lot different than House of the Devil. I’m like, the storylines are very similar. Yeah.
Rhys: The job in this is you don’t know what the job is, you just get stuck in the job.
Stephen: Yes. And they do focus quite a bit on lawyers and modeling, especially at the beginning. But that’s not the job that is going on.
Rhys: And clergy, clergy’s in there too. Clergy, yeah. Yeah. Evil little Viceroys or Monsignor’s
Stephen: running around. Yeah. They certainly don’t make the Catholic church look good in this one.
Rhys: It’s really funny. This is, this movie’s an American movie. It’s from 1977. And at the time the, this movie gets compared a lot with Rosemary’s Baby. Okay. I think the main reason is because you have a group of people who live in a building. The building itself is very distinctive. Like this house is that she’s living in and the people are secretly evil or working against her.
But I always looked at this movie as more along akin with the Exorcist. Or the omen. Because in the seventies there was this rash of movies where the Catholic church was almost like the hero. It was like this big, and you don’t know it because it’s some secret sect of the Catholic church that you’ve never heard of as somebody who goes to church on Sunday.
You’ve never heard of these shadowy organizations that are out there. But they ended with this film after this movie was done. There’s a big break until what was that one in the eighties? A Mouth of Darkness or something
Stephen: like that. Prince of Darkness. Prince of Darkness, yeah. Prince of the, with the glowing green Satan in a
Rhys: Tube.
Satan in the Tube. So this was, this kind of marked the end of that period for about 10 years until it started to become more popular again.
Stephen: Yeah. ’cause right around Prince of Darkness, we got stigmata shortly thereafter, and a couple others. Yeah. It
Rhys: picked up from there on out. This is a big studio film.
This is a universal film and it’s really funny where Universal got their influence from. They got their influence from this, from airplane.
Stephen: I see that. Not at all.
Rhys: So Airplane came out and they took a bunch of super old, super famous actors from the past and put them all into one movie, and it was a huge hit.
Ah, okay. Yeah. And so Universal opened up the catalog and went through and said, Hey, who do we have, who was really popular like 10, 20 years ago that we could cram into this
Stephen: movie? And that’s my first comment. Huge list of actors. Yes. That, that I hadn’t even seen some of these in a while because they were from the sixties, seventies, or whatever.
Yeah.
Rhys: Yep. And you’re gonna sit here, especially you younger listeners are, you’re gonna be like, oh, it’s gonna be a bunch of old people we’ve never heard of. But it’s people like Jeff Goldblum. Yeah. Is in this movie, and Christopher Walken is in this movie, and these are some of their first films that they were ever read.
Stephen: Yeah. And Sarandon, Chris Stron, who Fright Night and princess Bride.
Rhys: Absolutely. This is a big studio production. It was made for $3.7 million, which counting for Inflation would’ve made it a $20 million film if they were making it today. Wow. That’s pretty high end for the things that we review.
Yeah. That very and then Universal was ridiculously hands-on. In fact, if you enjoy this movie, it is in spite of everything that they did wrong when they were making it.
Stephen: I think there’s still a lot to be said with that sentence in today’s movies quite often.
Rhys: Yeah, I, I personally like the movie and the more I got into it, the more I’m like, how did this thing actually work out as well as it did with so many people meddling in it?
Wow. It’s a 92 minute movie. It’s that nice little hour and a half sweet spot. Yep. Yep. And there are two versions out there. There’s the one that we watched and reviewed, which was the one that I saw originally, and then there is a heavily edited television version that was out and about. That’s why when you were getting the films, I’m like, make sure you don’t get the TV one, because apparently they cut the TV one so much that it almost doesn’t make sense.
Stephen: Wow. And that’s one of the comments I made about this one. I’m like, this movie definitely could use a modern remake to tighten up a little bit of the script and writing and the story, the explanation. And so you could tell what’s going on. This is one I would definitely say if somebody really hit, put some love into it, could have a wonderful remake.
That could be fantastic.
Rhys: Unfortunately, I think in 2013 somebody made a movie called The Sentinel, which is a spy film with Keefer Keefer Sutherland in it. So if they do come up with it, they’re gonna have to call it something ridiculous like Hex and Sabbat or something like that. Yeah, something like that.
That’s a great choice.
The movie, when you watch this, especially if you have that nostalgia for seventies films, this movie hits all those points. It was shot on film. It’s a grainy film. Everyone’s wearing those kind of disco close. You have this building, which is almost a character to in the film.
Yeah. All on its own.
Stephen: And I even, I made the comment, it’s wow, the, this, if nothing else speaks to seventies film, it’s how they use the nudity in it. And I know that’s sounds like humorous, but it really does. There’s a way that they had nude people in seventies movies that disappeared. And everyone got so much more prudish in movies.
And then it started to come back, after like basic instinct, but in very minor ways. And there’s just that disco orgy feel about every nude scene.
Rhys: Yeah. It’s not even hypersexualized,
Stephen: it’s just No, not at all. They, it’s just very natural. Yeah. They didn’t get like models, they didn’t get these like beautiful people or anything at all for that.
And it’s just, Maybe Beverly dangelo, but that, this was an early one for her too.
Rhys: Yeah. Lots of people with no clothes on. This really would’ve boiled down to
Stephen: welcome to the seventies.
Rhys: Yeah. The film’s based on a novel by a guy named Jeffrey Conz.
Stephen: We have gotta start getting some of these novels and reviewing these on the side.
I’ve still got Hold the dark. I’m actually sitting on your books. I actually started, I’m working on, yeah.
Rhys: Jeffrey Convicts was actually more of a screenwriter. He had a movie that he was trying to push in the early seventies and it fell through. So he wrote this thinking about adapting it to the screen later.
He wrote it in 74. And then there’s a sequel that he wrote in 79 called The Guardian. But in the eighties, he could have kept on writing I suppose, but in the eighties, he was admitted to the state bar of California and he became, A lawyer. So he, I don’t know that he necessarily is writing anything anymore.
Universal went to him and said, Hey, make this into the screenplay. So he’s, he wrote the novel and he did the
Stephen: screenplay. And that’s interesting. He became a lawyer and he had a lawyer in the movie, like Stephen King puts a lot of writers. But I made the comment, I’m like, wow, this is one of the me most, the least lawyerly lawyer I’ve ever seen in a movie.
He does stuff that no lawyer would do.
Rhys: Oh yeah. He makes Saul from Better Call Saul look like some sort of Supreme Court justice. Yeah, he does. So apparently Columbus’s book, it started out as this thriller about people who watch over the gates of hell and keep. Demons from coming out, which is the gist of the film actually.
But like his sequel, it went into space, it became some sci-fi thing and just like really jumped the shark. So
Stephen: Sounds like a Halloween or Friday the 13th.
Rhys: Yeah. The film was directed by Michael Warner. And Michael Werner was picked by a universal executive to be the director in this film. Convicts was not a fan and he worked closely with him.
And he kept trying to get him to do something and Warner’s just no, we’re not gonna do that. It just would blow him off and go another directions. Wow. But yeah, convict is not a fan. He said he was winner was too pedestrian, a director to make a good horror film. And he was an egomaniac apparently.
Stephen: But that’s coming from a
Rhys: lawyer though. Yes, a lawyer slash author,
Stephen: horror
Rhys: author winner was not Universal’s first choice of director. They wanted Don Siegel to do it who directed Dirty Harry and escaped from Alcatraz, but he didn’t want to dip his toes into the horror genre weren’t. On the other hand like the thing that he’s probably best known for are the Death Wish films.
Oh, okay. So again, he’s not really a
Stephen: horror
Rhys: director per se. But it was interesting to me that they were looking at Don Siegel too. I’m like, what’s with all the big gun vigilante film directors that they’re looking at for
Stephen: this movie? Actually he did a fairly good job of nailing the horror movie of the time.
He did he definitely had some skill as a director to be able to direct what needed done.
Rhys: And this is what I think is amazing. ’cause like I talked about, all the pressure that Universal’s doing on this, they’re handpicking people for stuff. And the funny thing is, Michael Winter, like just completely ignored everybody with choices that he wanted to make.
He didn’t like canvas. Canvas didn’t like him, he didn’t care. He just basically disregarded most of the notes that he gave him. Universal wanted a different actress for the role for Amanda. Is that her name? Alyssa?
Stephen: Allison.
Rhys: Allison, yeah. And then Winter wanted Christina Rains. And so he just sat, he just cast her.
Boom. She was done. In the long run. She did not like working with him. She didn’t like his style. She thought he was rude. She thought he was brusque. But she says she’s never watched the film because it brings up too many negative wow emotions for her. He didn’t get everything he wanted though.
He wanted Martin Sheen to play the Sarandon role. But Sheen was universal, thought he was too much of a television star as opposed to a movie star to put in there, which is so funny because he had just come off Apocalypse Now and stuff like that. Yeah, that’s,
Stephen: We just talked last night after we saw the flash about how corporate execs through the decades have pretty much not had any clue about anything with movies and screw up quite a bit.
So
Rhys: yeah. Stick to your spreadsheets. Yeah. Universal wanted to get John Williams to do the score, but John Williams was busy working with this guy named George Lucas on a little side project at
Stephen: Time. Small side. Yeah. Yeah. So he was busy.
Rhys: They tried to get a guy named Michael Small, who was also unavailable.
So they ended up hiring Gil Mullet, who was a French composer. He had done the sound for the music for the Andromeda Strain and the $6 million Man. Oh. All of the music from those, that was all him.
Stephen: Which at the time, both of those would’ve made him very popular.
Rhys: Yeah. And it’s actually very dynamic music throughout in its very seventies.
It hits and it’s not even you can say it hits that genre because that’s just what it was. That it wasn’t like a style anyone was aiming for, but
Stephen: nowhere did the music really stand out. There’s not like themes that you heard. Yeah. Sing or whatever.
Rhys: Yeah. Michael Winter was the one who directed it.
He was born in the uk. He died in 2013. He was a vocal British conservative until the mid nineties, and then suddenly he switched to the Labor Party. And I’m, I always wonder about these people who are like, lockstep, like politically oriented people until all of a sudden something happens and then they like completely flip to the other side.
I just, I don’t understand how that happens, but that
Stephen: happened. I’ve not enough involved in the British government to have any clue.
Rhys: He directed 42 projects, including the Night Comers, which was a prequel to the turning of the screw, the innocence from season. One. One. Yeah. He did Serpico he did Death Wish one, two, and three.
So that’s where he’s at. Some some actors who worked with him in the Sentinel didn’t like working with him. They found him cruel and confusing. But he claims he never worked with any actor he would ever consider difficult to work with. And I think it’s mostly because anytime anyone told him anything, he would just choose to ignore them.
Stephen: That’s a good way to work though, obviously didn’t stress him out.
Rhys: Yeah. The film was nominated for four awards. It didn’t actually win any. The cast, however is huge. It, there’s five Oscar winners and eight Oscar nominees. In the cast of this movie through
Stephen: various decades, not just Oh, yeah. Seventies actors, some of these, this was a beginning for ’em.
They weren’t known that went on bigger eighties and nineties, whereas some were big back in the fifties and sixties. So it, yep, I was like, wow. And not even with the names and the faces I knew and recognized none of their parts, none of them stood out as oh, this is so and so acting as this thing.
They were young enough or old enough compared to what their heyday was, that it, they were able to pull it off without being distracting that they were this a-list or whatever.
Rhys: It was a really crazy eclectic mix that just, even though it probably shouldn’t have somehow actually works.
Stephen: Yeah. And anybody playing the six degrees of Kevin Bacon use this movie? ’cause it could probably tie in a whole lot of people.
Rhys: Oh my gosh. Yeah. So Christina Rains played Allison, she’s the key protagonist of the film. The studio didn’t want her, but Winter had worked with her previously on his huge hit The Stone Killer from 1973.
And that’s what makes it really odd to me that she agreed to work with him again. If her experience on the Sentinel was so horrible, did he change or did she just forget how bad he was? Four years previously when she
Stephen: worked with him, or was the first one in early film. So she was still getting her feet wet and now she’s a little more experienced, so she knows what works, doesn’t, likes whatever, who.
She
Rhys: was born in 52 in the Philippines and moved to New York to become a veterinarian to earn money for school. She started modeling and so she was an actual fashion model. She retired from acting at age 40 in 1992, and then she went on to become a registered nurse. Wow. I think she’s a respiratory nurse, maybe.
She was involved in 46 projects throughout her career. But aside from the Sentinel there’s not a lot of titles you’re gonna recognize aside from, her, your typical TV show guest starring role type things. She was regular with Mark Harmon on a show in the eighties called Flamingo Road.
Okay. Which I didn’t remember. Yeah. She also claimed that there were strange things happening when there were shooting at that apartment building and. Again, Steve points this out. If you’re one of those people who likes to go to places, the this building that the Sentinel is housed in is actually still in New York.
We should do
Stephen: that. We should map out some of these places like the campground that was in Alaska for the the Mountain one.
Rhys: Oh yeah. For Black Mountain side. Yeah. Chris Sarandon plays Michael. He was born in 1942 in West Virginia and married his first wife Susan in 1967, who
Stephen: most of us probably have heard of.
Rhys: Yes. More people have probably heard of Susan Sarandon than Chris, to be honest, but
Stephen: he wasn’t Princess Bride, so that gives him a pretty big leg up. He was, and it’s,
Rhys: he was in a lot of stuff, like he had just come off dog day afternoon. Okay. And that’s why the studio wanted to cast him in this role.
When they did cast him in the role, because he grew the mustache and everything for the role during the dailies one of the guys from the studio itself didn’t like him, didn’t recognize him, and is who is this Greek waiter who’s in my movie?
Stephen: And they’re like,
Rhys: this is Chris Sarandon, the guy you told us
Stephen: to hire.
Rhys: So he was in 103 different projects. He started out in the guiding light. He started in soaps. Okay. Then he was in Dogs Afternoon. He was in Fright Night. The Princess Bride Child’s play, the Nightmare. Before Christmas, he was Jack Skelton’s voice.
Stephen: Okay. I probably knew that at some point.
Rhys: Just cause I thought that had come up recently. We had talked about just cause recently he was in the Fright Night remake and then lots of the weird little television guest spots. Judging Amy er, Felicity Chicago, hope after the movie came out. Winner said he thought they should have cast Christopher Walken in his role, which I think would’ve made it a very different feel for the movie.
Yeah, definitely. He was a really young kid at the time,
Stephen: but, And Walkin’s part was definitely way small in the Move movie.
Oh
Rhys: yeah. Sarandon says it was the worst shoot of his career and made him want to quit acting.
Stephen: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So if you see him at a convention, don’t talk about this one.
Rhys: Martin Balsam played the professor, the absent-minded professor. He was born in 1919. He died in 1996. He was in 179 different projects. Wow. For all you movie buffs. He was in breakfast at Tiffany’s. He was in Psycho. He was in the original Cape Fear. Wow. Torah. Torah. Catch 22 murder on the Oriental Express.
All the president’s men, Saint Elmo’s fire, the Cape Fear remake, and he actually had a really long run on all in the family.
Stephen: I’m gonna to go pay attention to that next time that’s on. It’s just so
Rhys: funny ’cause he was such a preeminent actor. That’s the weird thing about this is that aside from a handful of actors, most of the people just had these kinda little things.
Yeah. Here you have this guy who’s like acting royalty and he plays some nutty professor
Stephen: For 30 seconds basically. Yeah.
Rhys: John Carin played father Hallin, which I think probably the hardest part about that was sitting still enough for them to put fake dust on him in cobwebs. He was born in 1906. He died in 1988.
He was active in 354 projects throughout his career. Wow. Yeah. Pretty busy man. Yeah. It includes things like the Black cat the Grapes of Wrath, the Three Musketeers, the 10 Commandments, the Man Who Shot Liberty Vance. Silent Night. Deadly Night. So this wasn’t his first horror movie. Yeah, the House of Seven Corpses.
And Kung Fu he was in with his son David. He was in the Howling and he did a voice in the Secret of Nim.
Stephen: Ah, interesting. That’s a movie I haven’t heard about in a while, haven’t it? Or in a long time. Yeah.
Rhys: Ava Gardner plays Ms. Logan, the realtor. She was born in 1922. She died in 1990.
She was married and divorced three times to Frank Sinatra alone. Wow. So she was also married to Artie Shaw. And Mickey Rooney. She didn’t like to watch her own performances, and she was known for being very vulgar. She would swear a lot when she was on set. Apparently. I. She was in 70 projects throughout her life, and she’s probably the most movie star of any actor we’ve ever had on anything because of those 70 things on her list, only three of them are television shows.
Wow. So all the rest of them were movies and one of those was a seven episode run on Knots Landing. But she did eight full length films in 1942 alone.
Stephen: Wow. Yeah. Wow. Busy. Yeah. I recognized her from movies of the time.
Rhys: Yeah. The Killers Nose of Kilimanjaro, the Barefoot Contessa, the Sun also Rises.
Yeah, she was in the graduate. She was not alone. Yeah. Seducing Dustin Hoffman. Arthur Kennedy was born in 1914. He died in 1990. He was in 103 projects including the 10 Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia, fantastic Voyage Day of the Evil Gun, the Death of Innocence, the Antichrist and Covert Action.
I believe he was the one who played the Monsignor in our film.
Stephen: Okay. Okay.
Rhys: Burgess Meredith, born in 1907, died in 1997. He was from Cleveland.
Stephen: Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah.
Rhys: He was fascinated in animal intelligence like dolphins. He did suffer from a form of bipolar disorder called cycl. He didn’t acknowledge publicly until 1994.
He plays Charles Chazen. He was involved in 182 projects like of Mice and Men, Tom, Dick and Harry, the story of GI Joe, a Walk in the Sun, the Twilight Zone, raw Hide, Batman, the movie and the series. Rocky. Most people our age would know him from Rocky. Puff the magic Dragon. Clash of the Titans.
Wow. Night. Night of the Hunter and grumpy old men and grumpy old
Stephen: men. Yes. I loved him in grumpy old man and grumpy old men. He was fantastic. Yeah.
Rhys: Yep. Eli Wallach plays Detective Gatz. He was born in 1915. He lived in New York. He was the son of Polish and Jewish immigrants. And it’s super funny because it wasn’t until I looked at his bio, I was like, that guy looks so familiar.
He played the Mexican tuco in the good, the bad, and the ugly. Oh,
Stephen: wow. Isn’t that wild? Yeah. You
Rhys: take the mustache off and he is a completely different guy. That’s cool.
Stephen: He was also, oh, speaking up real quick, as an aside, I forget, I’m gonna have to look up. I was just watching a, an old movie. It was an action movie and I saw our favorite Eternal Korean bad guy that was like in every eighties action movie that, on the side.
Oh yeah. I saw him in that. I saw him in something more recent too. Like a 2020 movie something. So I was like, oh, wow. That’s I remember us talking about him ’cause he was like, in every movie we watched
Rhys: every single movie. Yes. The one Asian henchman that they would have. Yeah. Who knew martial arts and the hero would have to fight him last.
Stephen: I know that I ever heard him speak a word, but No I don’t think so.
Rhys: Yeah. So Elon Wallach was in the Magnificent Seven, how the West was won. Genghis Kahan, the good, the bad, and the Ugly. He was in the Adam West Batman series. He played Mr. Freeze. Oh, cool. Which, Again, I never would’ve pictured that either.
He was also in the Godfather, part three in Mystic River. Huh? Okay. Beverly Angelo plays Sandra. She was born in 1951 in Columbus.
Stephen: We got Oh, really?
Rhys: Yeah. A few Ohio people in
Stephen: here. Yeah. Ohio. The Sentinel was her first major motion picture. Really? Wow. Yeah.
Rhys: And working with Wallach and considering the scene that she does.
Yes. It’s amazing that she went on to do anything else.
Stephen: Yeah. You that we’ll talk about it, I’m sure, but man, I can’t say another film. I’ve seen that scene particularly, except maybe Meg Ryan. Meg Ryan faked it and did it better, I thought. But
Rhys: yeah. She went on to do 129 projects, including Annie Hall every which way, but loose.
The Coal Miner’s daughter everyone’s going to know her from the National Lampoon Vacation Series. Yeah her list is lots of that stuff. She was in a Harold Kumar movie. Unlike the majority of the people listed here, she actually has seven upcoming projects. Wow. Most of these people are either dead or retired now, but she’s got a project called Marsh’s Mushroom coming up, caps crossing, something called afterward Summer Camp, no address.
Drugstore, June and the Trainer.
Stephen: Wow. Okay.
Rhys: After the movie was done, winter said that he thought she should have been the lead instead of Christina Rains. Wow. Oh yeah. Tom Beringer is in this film. It was his first role. Jeff Goldblum is in this film. It was not his first role, but something went wrong, so they made him overdub all of his lines.
They didn’t like the way his voice sounded on set, so they called him back in. So all of the lines that you see Jeff Goldblum say in this movie are him overdubbing them in studio. That’s
Stephen: Crazy. Yeah, and it’s funny, Barringer was in this, ’cause literally out of the last five movies I’ve watched, he’s been in four of them.
I dunno what happened there. Some weird nexus of Tom Barringer movies.
Rhys: Yeah Christopher Walken is in it as well. And Richard Dreyfuss even has a walk-on rule. Oh really? If you blink, you’ll miss it. But yeah, he’s a party goer. Oh.
Stephen: Oh, okay.
Rhys: Now, We talked about this in 1932. We’ll talk about it in 1977. In order to cut costs, they used people with actual physical deformities to play the denisons of hell at the end of the
Stephen: film. Which is funny because I thought of the movie Freaks. I was like, I wonder if they did something similar.
Rhys: Similar, just like in Freaks. The crew would not eat with them when they were on lunch on set. Wow. It became, the author said that using them winter went from being subtle and scary to being unsettle and gross when he put them in the film. Winner claimed they were all very nice and they enjoyed filming the movie.
They went around and recruited them from circuses and things like that. Asked them if they, nobody was pressed into it. It also should be noted that he wouldn’t eat with them either. It was leaked on its release and it caused a lot of controversy around the film. And I think one of the things that people point to about this film as opposed to freaks was just to be clear, everybody signed up to play in both of these films, right?
Everybody got paid to act. In both of these films, people will look at freaks and say, here’s a movie that actually uplifts people who have physical deformities. And in this film, their use is a substitution for the denisons of hell. And so it’s a, leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths,
Stephen: which you could, jumping me, mentioning George, you could say that about the Ewoks in Jedi too.
There’s, a lot of that or the Wizard of Oz with that, so it’s a touchy thing in that case. It is,
Rhys: I always fall back on that quote that we had in freaks where it’s if they’re doing it and they’re okay with it, then don’t demean it because that’s how they’re making money.
Stephen: And honestly, if you can evaluate it as it’s putting a lesser quality value or whatever on horror in general, that, oh, they, they were like using ’em for horror movies and they were like the, oh, they’re the freaks, so use them and deformities. You know what? People wanna be in a movie they wanna act.
I’d be a, I’d be shot, I’d be a dead body on a killing floor. You know what I’m saying? Oh yeah. It, I don’t I think what we’ve talked about, horror movies aren’t that low level, oh, you go to do horror movies ’cause you can’t do anything else, or, whatever. And honestly, these if people have deformities, and this has been changing in years, but not enough, we don’t have enough change 40 years later on this.
But if I felt uncomfortable even with a hair lip or something being out in public, but I could say I was in a movie. People view you differently. And I know that’s not what people wanna hear, but it’s human fact. Yeah. So I think that using somebody with deformities in the movie makes, gives them some self-confidence.
Gives them some, yeah. Depending on how you treat it. Now, not eating with them kind of spoils that whole thing, but yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. This movie also has a, not fancy but lovely example of special effects of the 1977 era. So if you wanna see Fancy ones, watch Star Wars it involved a lot of actual artists doing a lot of hand painting, modeling, that kind of thing.
And you might be thinking where is this in this movie? You might also remember me saying that you can actually go see this brownstone. To this day, it’s still in Brooklyn. I think it overlooks central Park. At the end of the movie, they knock it down and there’s a new building in its place. The new building that’s in its place was actually a paint over on the film. And watching this movie like three times now looking at it, I’m like, it’s almost flawless. You can’t sit there and be like that looks flat, or, yeah. There’s not enough detail in it. It’s an amazing job with the new, and all they did was just paint over top of the old one.
Boom.
Stephen: New building. That’s cool. And me and Colin have talked about that, how the art of painting some big mural that’s the background or part of the movie, that whole skill has fallen away because, oh, we’ve got computer graphics, we’ll do it there. But a lot of times these practical type effects hold up even better than the digital effects.
So I vote for bringing stuff like that back.
Rhys: Yeah. Tony Parmley did the special effects in this movie. There’s other movies that he worked on. Taxi drivers, probably like one of the biggest ones that I can think of. But I mentioned him because a lot of the effects all, there are no computer generated effects.
All the effects that you see in this film are actually taking place, on set. And as with so many of these movies about the secret church forces from the seventies, this one has to start in some foreign country. They, the Exorcist starts in some foreign country. The omen, this starts in Italy.
It’s nowhere near as exotic as a dig in Egypt or anything, but it’s something. You have this secret conclave of cardinals and they’re meeting in this ancient chapel. They’re finalizing their plans. We don’t exactly know what their plans are this early in the film. They’re all wearing different kinds of robes, and I think it might be to indicate that they’re from all around the world, maybe.
Stephen: Yeah. I would guess
Rhys: because a lot of the Catholic church has like uniformity to it, everyone dresses the same golden glitz and Yeah. Their overall concept of the sentinel, they start by explaining it here that they have to watch and make sure that nothing evil enters. And at the time when you’re watching the movie, they might be talking about the room they’re sitting in for all we know.
But they’re actually speaking on a global level. When you actually get the gist of the whole film there’s a nice closeup of one of these rings they have. It’s like a. A woven cord wrapped around a crucifix. Get used to it ’cause you’re gonna see it a lot in this movie.
Stephen: Pay attention.
Rhys: And then the movie, the scene ends with this ominous note as someone says, there is danger here.
Stephen: Dun.
Rhys: And then we’re in New York City, straight from there to New York City. We’re overlooking Central Park.
Stephen: And the whole conclave meeting, it was, it looked modern, but it could very well have been past times. It could have been earlier, it wasn’t clear. It could have been ’cause the police or whatever standing there their clothing looked a little older.
It could have just been another country. So I think, making it some ancient time would’ve been cool. But I. Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. But you’re right. It was hard to actually pinpoint a date from that first scene. And then in the second scene, you know exactly where you are and when you are. Because everyone’s still wearing the big collars and the slightly flared bell bottoms.
Stephen: Yeah. It’s, I it’s oh, hey, look, central Park, I know where we’re at.
Rhys: Yep. We zoom in, there’s a photo shoot taking place there, Jeff Goldblum’s behind the camera. He’s taken these shots, Allison, then it, it does this thing where it’s just flowing from scene to scene while the credits are running.
So there’s that shoot in Central Park. There’s an actual very serious studio shoot where he is shooting with a five by seven. And it did a really good job of capturing the look of fashion photography of the seventies. And it hasn’t changed that much aside from the fact that the cameras are smaller.
But interspersed with her. You have Allison and Michael. They’re walking along the street. Oh, they’re buying a lamp. They’re having a joke. They’re laughing with each other. Oh, there’s a magazine on newsstand with Allison’s face on the cover of it. So we get the fact that yes, she’s not only just a, she’s not only a model,
Stephen: she’s a successful one.
Yeah. And that’s a great, that’s a great example of how to give us all that information without some big, long, boring, stupid dialogue scene or something. I did have one question on the opening credit scenes, though. There was one scene where there’s two women in a field sitting there waving their hair, but the film is played backwards.
Rhys: Wow. You
Stephen: picked up on that. Yeah. I was like, it’s, is that
Rhys: intentional? It was an intentional choice on their part. They liked the way that it looked. Running it the other direction. It went by and I never even noticed it until it popped up in the notes while I was looking for stuff. Yeah.
Stephen: I was like, okay, is that some hint of what’s coming?
Is are they already possessed or what?
Rhys: Wow. Good eye, Steve.
Stephen: I always remember the scene with Job of the Hutt where smoke is going backwards into the pipe.
Rhys: And like you were saying, it’s a good way to set setting, to set characters and what else are you going to do while the credits are rolling? Especially in a movie like this where you have so many big names, you don’t want, we’ve had lots of movies like shoot the Western,
Stephen: oh, Tomahawk
Rhys: Bone, bone Tomahawk, where they didn’t really give you credits.
They’re just like, here’s the title and that was it. But if you’ve got this many stars in one movie, You wanna share their names, right? You would love to be able to roll that credit list, during the commercials if you get away with it. So you have to have something to do during that.
And what a great way to give back story, just imagery wise.
Stephen: I think back to whatever the Christopher, whatever Batman movies, I think they did the same thing in that first one. His whole origin was within the credits. Yeah. And they just showed the, and I liked that.
Rhys: Yeah. When the credits do end, we find the two are out looking for apartments.
Michael’s looking for a high-end place. During his tour, we find out, we confirm that he is a lawyer and she is a fashion model. Allison and her friend Jennifer are looking at smaller brownstone style apartments. And while they’re doing this, we find out that two years ago Allison was hospitalized.
We don’t know why. Just know she was hospitalized two years ago. She’s been with Michael ever since then, but before she marries him, she wants to have a place of her. So that’s why everyone’s out looking for apartments. At the end of the scene, Allison and Jennifer are walking down the street from the last apartment they looked on.
As they’re blurring into the background, a hand in the foreground grabs a fence, and it’s got a ring with a little rope and a crucifix on it. We now know that Allison, or maybe it’s Jennifer. It is Allison. It’s Allison. Everybody. Allison, she’s being watched. Back at the Depart, they’re back at Michael’s apartment and they’re having this discussion about whether or not she actually needs her own apartment.
Michael just wants to get married, but she’s adamant she wants her own apartment. She needs to be on her own. It’s actually, from a psychological standpoint, it’s a good idea. If you’ve been with this person who’s been taking care of you ever since, it’s a good idea to get a little distance, stay on your own, check things out, and then you can move back or not.
Stephen: And in New York, 500 bucks a month. Yeah. Grab that apartment. Yeah.
Rhys: While she’s talking on, while she’s talking to him, her phone rings. The phone rings, and it’s her mother and it’s bad news. Her father is in the hospital dying. We cut to the sheen where they’re in the hospital. There’s this skinny old man with some kind of modeling on his face.
We learned he is dying of cancer, so maybe that’s, maybe it’s some sort of skin cancer or something. And then he flatlines. And
Stephen: that is one of the most disturbing scenes in the whole movie because they’re standing like across the room watching him gasp his last breath. And they don’t, they’re barely crying.
And I’m like, wow, that’s really a disturbing scene when you watch it
Rhys: cold. But we find out why.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Allison is at her mother’s, we’ve moved on in time. They’re preparing for the funeral. She says she can’t go. She has a migraine. There’s a doctor there who’s oh, here, take some pills.
And everyone else leaves to go to the funeral, leaving Allison at the house. And they do this really cool thing. And I’ve seen this happen before where She looks out and there’s a car pulling up and the door opens up and out of the car comes her. Yeah. When she’s like a teenager. And so she’s actively standing in the house watching herself from the past,
Stephen: move through the building.
And this was a really good flashback memory scene. It was really well done. And how they, they didn’t do the something’s brighter or something’s fuzzy, it, it really was like they were there, which I’m sure they were on film. I get that. It’s a memory thing. Yeah.
Rhys: She’s, you are using this flashback.
She comes home, she’s home early, she walks upstairs looking for her father. She hears voices behind the door. She opens the door and her father’s cavorting with two prostitutes who are eating cake. I don’t know that you could have a much more heavy handed symbol for very rich people. We’re gonna hang out naked and eat cakes.
Screw all you poor losers.
Stephen: And that, the whole debauchery scene there, it reminded me of something from Alice in Wonderland. It just seemed like it would’ve Yeah. Was a little
Rhys: surreal. Yeah. Yeah. He loses his patience and he slaps her and she runs off to the bathroom. When he does, he knocks over this bird cage, which you could almost take as like a symbol of the innocent thing in the cage has now been set free.
Yeah.
Stephen: Another one Bob would love to watch,
Rhys: She goes in the bathroom, like right from this incident, slits her wrists. She is just eh, my dad’s douche bag. There you go.
Stephen: You gotta wonder, did she already know and suspect, because, it, it just seemed a little abrupt. I guess
Rhys: when you’re doing that kind of blatant debauchery, it would be hard to hide that on daily, I imagine.
Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Her father concerned that her departure goes looking for her and finds her on the bathroom floor and manages to get her help before she passes away.
Stephen: Of course there was a cru Of course, one of my thoughts right there was, oh, is this a Tim Robbins thing in the Jacob’s ladder? Is she really dead?
And this is all happening? Yeah. That was a thought at one point
Rhys: back in 77, that would’ve been super cutting edge. Yeah. During her scuffle with her father, he pulls a crucifix off of her. Now she’s alone in the house. She actually finds it in a box in her mother’s room and she takes it and she’s gonna wear it from here on out.
And you can see how wealthy they are. One, because the house looks like a museum. Yeah. It looks like you’re walking through a furnished palace in France or something like that. And then two, they’re sitting at dinner at this large table, her and her mother with probably about a football field between them.
And there’s a guy coming and serving them. And just so you know how wealthy she came from a background she came from, they don’t even bulk about talking about personal things while the servant’s in there. ’cause he’s not even really a person in their eyes. Really?
Stephen: That’s probably more, more disturbing than the disabled at the end of the movie.
Yeah.
Rhys: So she’s sitting there talking to her mom. She’s like, why did you stay with them? And her mom said, because I had nowhere else to go. And then the very next scene, that phrase comes back to haunt Michael because he is like, why don’t you just stay here? Just marry me. And she’s no, I don’t ever wanna find myself where I have nowhere else to go.
We cut back to Michael and he’s telling her that every real estate agent in New York is called she brings him monogram cuff links, which, it’s like chekhov’s gun, if it shows up on screen, it’s gonna be used. When he opens the cuff links, oh, that’s gonna be something important.
Eventually she calls this Ms. Logan Ava Gardner about a brownstone overlooking Manhattan and asks if it’s gone yet. Ms. Logan informs her isn’t. And so she is off to the office. It’s. Ironic because when she gets to the office, she’s filling out this form and Ava Gardner’s character Ms. Logan is looking at and she’s oh, a model.
What a luxurious profession that might be. And I’m like, Okay, Mrs. Sinatra and talk about a luxurious
Stephen: life. Yeah. Yeah. And that made me think too, her mother said I had nowhere else to go. You have plenty of money. You know why, obviously. Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: I, and one of these things like Ava Gardner and a little bit, Burgess Meredith, the character, the actors are so well known and for specific roles, they are difficult to see in something that’s not a role that they’re in.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. It would, I it would be like seeing Harrison Ford in a sitcom. You’d be like, what’s Indiana Jones doing in this new Year compartment?
Stephen: He was in Sabrina, the remake of Sabrina, which is a rom-com. Yeah. We get the glimpse of and six phase seven nights, which is definitely action comedy.
Sorry.
Rhys: No, it’s fine. We get a glimpse of this ivy color covered building as the yellow cab pulls up. They go in through these doors. There’s a little step down to get into the ground floor. Her apartment’s on the second. The main door to her apartment. I just find it fascinating. Was a sliding door. Yeah, it was like
Stephen: a barn.
Rhys: Yeah, it, that would not fly today because it’s against fire code. But still. I thought that’s cool. The apartment comes furnished and again, it’s like a full of museum-like antiques.
Stephen: Yeah. It’s not just furnished. It has paintings on the wall. It has the lamps, it has rugs, it has every little end table.
It is like someone’s been living there. It was, that was weird too. Yeah.
Rhys: The only thing that really bugged me about the apartment was that there’s a set of stairs that go up in the apartment and she never goes up those stairs. We don’t know what’s up there. And then there’s this whole thing coming up later about somebody being in the apartment above her.
So much so that the chandelier in her bedroom wiggles while they’re walking around up there. And I’m like, but
Stephen: she’s got stairs going up. It’s like the Winchester house. Yeah. They just don’t go
Rhys: anywhere. Yeah. Ms. Logan says there’ll be $500 and Allison’s oh, that’s too much. And Ms. Logan says $400 is not excessive.
And then pretends like she never did save 500. So Allison is getting the apartment while they’re leaving, they look up to see this old man staring down from this window at the top apartment. It seems to unnerve Allison a bit, and Ms. Logan says, oh, he’s a blind priest and he is senile and he doesn’t do anything.
And Allison wonders what he’s looking at then as he’s sitting there looking out the window.
Stephen: So you gotta wonder, and this is jumping from, the end, knowing the end the real estate lady, she’s definitely in on this, a hundred percent. It was so clear right from that point there, but.
She’s like in supernatural the crossroads demons that get you to sign on the bottom line. She’s the, just the grunt lackey that goes out to do this job.
Rhys: Yeah. Only you don’t have to sign for this one. No. They’re gonna make, they’re gonna make you take this
Stephen: job. You have no choice.
Rhys: There’s a new photo shoot. It’s not going well. Mostly ’cause the animals are all being ridiculous. Horses and dogs and peacocks and everything. They’re trying to get everything under control and while they’re trying to get reset, Allison gets a phone call, Michael checking in she hangs up the phone and starts to walk away and she’s rubbing the back of her neck and then just
Stephen: collapses.
And that part of it was one of the things I thought was unclear throughout the movie why that was happening. What was making it happen. Exactly. That’s one of the things that if they did a remake, they could probably clarify a little better. Yeah. I,
Rhys: so at the end of the film, She’s Allison at the start of the night, and then she’s like an old lady by the next morning.
And so I always saw it as like her physical transition into this form. Okay. As started now since she’s taken the apartment, I don’t know, but you’re right, they could definitely extrapolate on that. Yeah. She’s telling Jennifer about her passing out. She said it didn’t last very long.
They gave her some medicine. She seems fine with it. She really blows off any problems with her health throughout this thing. Yeah,
Stephen: she certainly does.
Rhys: Jenny’s in the new apartment with her. She’s gonna take off before Michael gets there. She must have something to do. She leaves and then the doorbell rings, and Allison thinks it’s Michael opens the door only to meet Mr. Charles Chason complete with parakeet on his shoulder and a cat in his hands.
Grumpy cat. Yes. He claims to be the neighbor from four B. His bird’s name is Mortimer and the cat’s name is Jebel. And he lets himself into her apartment. Just comes on in,
Stephen: lets the cat loose.
Rhys: Yep. He does a great job playing an eccentric old man. Yeah. It’s just phenomenal. He talks about how no, go ahead.
Oh, Herbert Hoover was his favorite president, only to find out where he’s actually talking about Eisenhower. And then Alison calls this bluff quoting Patrick Henry, and he’s oh, that’s what Hoover said.
Stephen: I did like the, these interesting characters they bring into it because the other denizens of the apartment, they are some really interesting characters that are not stereotypical, that are they definitely did very well with that.
That was one of the, my favorite parts of the whole movie was all the other characters in the building supposedly. Yeah,
Rhys: I was actually really bummed when they disappeared in the second half. Yeah. It was like, where’d they all go? He informs, he asks if she’s going out. She says she’s got a friend coming over and he says friendships often blossom into bliss, which is like gonna end up being his catchphrase by the end of this
Stephen: movie.
Rhys: She asks if he knows the neighbors and he says he knows them all. They’re all very nice except for that priest who lives above him. He’s if there’s anything you need, just ask. And she’s oh, okay. Can I use your phone until mine gets hooked up? He is oh, you could, but I don’t have a phone.
Then he leaves, and when he leaves she finds that he is somehow subtly left a framed photograph of himself on her bureau in the living room. Just
Stephen: subtle. Yeah. And which was one of the things that I was waiting for more to come back with that. And not a whole lot did, but,
Rhys: We cut to a party and back in the seventies people would’ve parties where they would show slides from their trips.
And that’s what this guy’s doing. Oh, my showing slides Michael and Allison aren’t paying much attention. They’re canoodling in this chair. He asked her to come back to his apartment and marry him, and she is it’s only been two years, so we know she was in a hospital two years ago. She’s been with him ever since.
But she says it’s only been two years since Karen. We’ve never heard of Karen. We don’t know what this is. Turns out Karen was Michael’s previous wife. We don’t know what happened to her yet, but the
Stephen: slideshow’s over. So we’re gonna move on. No. Didn’t he say something about there’s more, he wants to do more, and they’re like, Nope, we’re outta here.
We’re done.
Rhys: Yeah. Michael finds a picture of Charles and he is like, who’s this? And she is it’s Charles Chason. And they’re starting to get more comfortable in her apartment, and he notices the crucifix that she brought back from her father’s house. The next day. She’s bringing in some groceries.
There’s actually, if you ever actually talk to anyone who knows this film, there’s two scenes that are very famous from the scene. The, from this movie. The End is very famous, and this next one is very famous.
Stephen: I can understand why.
Rhys: Yeah. She’s coming in with her groceries. She walks to the stairs.
She finds an apartment door open on the first floor, and she goes inside carrying her groceries and asking if anyone’s home. And we are introduced to two dancers. Who are her neighbors? GHA and Sandra Gha is the only one who says anything. She’s the older of the two. She insists that Allison stay for coffee.
So Allison sits down. Sandra says nothing. She just stares bizarrely right at Allison. Garth says, don’t worry about it. She seldom speaks. Garth notices the cross on Allison’s neck and she says, it looks like it’s French. And then she tells her that Michael, who she saw leave looks like he was an adequate lover, which is a way I hope people talk about me when I’m not around.
Stephen: Sure. Whatever you want you, because, that’s what Brian and Bob are doing when everybody’s sitting around playing d and d. Yep. That’s exactly the conversation.
Rhys: Allison doesn’t really seem to like this track of conversation while she’s sitting there, GHA puts her hand on Sandra’s knee and kind of caresses up towards her thigh, and then she gets a phone call and she leaves and Sandra just continues to masturbate right in front of Allison.
Stephen: Very Allison, very expressively. Yeah and again I can’t think of another movie with a scene like this, off top in any genre.
Rhys: I was watching, and I’m sorry again, I was watching a couple. Who reviewing this film and the guy’s talking to the girl that’s with him and he is this has to be one of your top five female masturbatory scenes in cinema.
Stephen: Because there’s probably, I’d be hard pressed coming up with the other four. Really? Yeah. There’s probably less than five. Yeah.
Rhys: Allison is just as uncomfortable at the whole thing as most audience members would be while watching it, I’m sure.
Stephen: And that was weird ’cause she just keeps looking away.
It’s get up and leave. It’s just like pen to go. Yeah. Where’s the
Rhys: level of politeness? Gotta drop to Exactly.
Stephen: Oh, but she said
Rhys: she was making coffee,
Stephen: which you didn’t want in the first place.
Rhys: Yeah. Sandra just goes, finishes, she’s all done and she sits there and coily looks at Allison as gr that comes back.
Allison asks what they do for a living and Grita says We fondle each other and, so it’s oh, lovely. That’s finally the point where Allison’s had too much, she grabs her groceries and leaves the apartment. As she’s going up the stairs Charles comes in and the two of them go upstairs.
Stephen: Yeah. He just ingratiates himself right into her life. Just oop. Yes.
Rhys: Yeah. He seems like a really nice guy. That Charles
Stephen: Chaon. Yes.
Rhys: Allison is at another photo shot with Jen, photo shoot with Jennifer. She starts to get a headache. The art directors. Really sufficiently slimy for an art director. He’s they’re not even really people, they’re just the models.
It’s a video, so they’re pouring a glass of wine. She just has to pour the wine, smile and put the wine on the table so you can read the label. She does finally get that done after 14 takes, ’cause she keeps getting it turned too far when they finally get one after 14 takes his camera was out of focus.
So they go to take a break and Allison faints. When she faints, she breaks a window. Everyone’s
Stephen: oh yeah. The one lady that screams like somebody just blew up and something erupted out of the gates of hell from the, she just so over overact. That was the favorite part there too.
Especially
Rhys: in the seventies, models, were doing all kinds of cocaine. Staying out at studios all night long and stuff. They’re passing out all over the place. Yeah. The
Stephen: director’s barely flinch. Okay, I guess we’re gonna have to change this now. She’s like foaming up the mouth and convulsing on the ground in front of him.
Rhys: Yeah. She’s telling Michael all about it from a payphone outside of her apartment. ’cause she still doesn’t have a functional
Stephen: phone. Take a look. She ins she’s young folks. This is what a payphone looked like and was used for.
Rhys: Yes. She insist she’s okay. She’s with Jennifer and the medicine she has from the hospital seems to be working.
She. And then she heads up to her apartment and she’s watching television and it doesn’t look like Jennifer came in with her. So is she really with Jennifer? But
Stephen: yeah.
Rhys: Her doorbell rings and she opens it to find Charles standing there with a
Stephen: carnation. And that’s a good, he insists That’s a good point actually, because nobody else sees these other characters.
So you almost gotta wonder, is she like even going into another realm or is she back falling asleep again? If you start paying attention though, who’s with who? A dream state. Yeah. Yeah. I hadn’t thought about that.
Rhys: Charleston says she come up with him to his apartment before she goes in. He insists she wear a red blindfold that he puts on her.
His door is adorned with the Christmas wreath. Everything is very red and green about Charles Jason here. He goes inside and takes the blindfold off her and introduces her to the other guests. Sandra and Greta are there, as well as Mrs. Clark, who he says lives on the fourth floor with him. Ms. Emma and Ms.
Lillian are from three B and Malcolm and Rebecca Skinner, who moved out because their apartment leaked. That was the apartment directly above hers. The ceiling above them leaked into their apartment. It’s empty now. And
Stephen: they said, and it can’t be fixed so nobody can rent it out. I’d be wondering about this whole place at that point, yeah. But they do say they come back quite often. Yes, they do. They
Rhys: like to hang out with the other people here. It’s a birthday party for the cat, Jezebel. Charles puts on a record on a Victrola. It’s a polka. He and Allison start to dance. Everyone else seems to be enjoying it. They’re clapping, they’re clanking spoons together.
The two old ladies from three B say it’s bringing back memories. I remember like they’re like suffering from senility
Stephen: or something. And this is another Alice in Wonderland type scene. He very much acts like the Mad Hatter.
Rhys: Yeah, he does. Sandra and Gothe get up and they’re, they want more music.
The record is, starts skipping and Charles just seems to have lost his patience for it. So he just stops and they all seem kind of petulant. Like they want the party to keep going. And it makes a lot of sense when you get to the end of the film because these are people who haven’t partied in a very long time.
So Mrs. Clark says black and white cat, black and white cake. This phrase becomes important just because it’s one of the few things Allison can remember about this party when it’s over. Yeah. Everyone sings Happy Birthday to Jezebel, and then we cut to Allison in bed. She’s having a hard time sleeping.
She has this nightmare and it’s all in a green filter. She gets up off a floor in her nightmare and Greta and Sandra are naked playing symbols and all the people from the party are there, including Michael, and they’re just staring at her. She’s wearing a white dress, which Sandra just rips off of her.
Then she’s seated at the couch by the door. There’s two prostitutes she caught her father with. She’s all embarrassed him and comfortable, and she runs to Michael’s arms, but he doesn’t seem to care. And then she wakes up from this nightmare.
Stephen: It’s annoying. I was gonna say, and this is so interesting and different than the memory from earlier the way it was filmed and portrayed.
So any thoughts of any of this being the dream? Get blown away here because we had a dream and that dream sequence was way different than, so it is one a little bit plain on what’s real, what’s not, but it does change it up here, which I liked. I thought that was cool putting those two different ways of doing it and techniques in there.
Yeah, everything’s very monochrome and yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: There is noise from the apartment above her, which she knows is empty because she was just told so much noise that her chandelier in her room is actively swaying back and forth. So she gets out of bed, runs to her door, puts the chains across the lock.
The noise that was above her bedroom ceiling seems to follow her into the, her living room. But nothing really seems to happen right. She locks the house up and we get a new scene. The next day, Michael is making a phone call to this guy Jim Brenner, who’s a private investigator and asks him to look into the noise above Allison’s apartment.
Stephen: And that’s Jim Brenner, one of another. That whole above her apartment. That’s another area of the whole story. Overall, they could have made clearer and cleared up some answered a few questions on it throughout the movie because it kinda hangs without definite answers by the end,
Rhys: it could have very easily turned into like a room 2 37 out of the shining kind of deal where yeah.
But so we have this guy that he’s asking to look into Jim Brenner, but Jim Brenner does.
Stephen: Oh. You cut out. I can’t hear you. You got really loud and then you cut out.
Nope. Nope.
I heard you for a second and then you were like really loud and then nothing. I see your lips moving. I can assign words to you.
I heard something. Yeah.
Rhys: Okay. There. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I was just saying that Jim Brenner doesn’t actually say anything like throughout this entire film, the private investigator. Not that he really gets much of a chance, but
Allison for her part goes to meet Ms. Logan for coffee and she’s asking her about the neighbors. And there’s this party at Charles’s, there’s this noise in the apartment over hers. Ms. Logan just looks puzzled and then she informs her, aside from the priest, Allison is the only person living in the apartment,
Stephen: which knowing that this real estate lady’s an agent of the whatever, this organization or the devil, whatever, knowing that, it’s weird that she said that she wouldn’t keep stringing Allison along a bit.
Rhys: Part of me thinks that, the building is owned by the diocese and that maybe they just pay her to push the apartment onto whoever they sent. She doesn’t know anything else about it. That’s
Stephen: true. Yeah.
Rhys: Ms. Logan goes with Allison afraid that there might be squatters in the building and We get this view of the priest in his apartment from his apartment instead of from the ground floor.
Like usual, everything is dusty. Everything’s covered in cobwebs, including the priest himself. Yes. And then the monsignor is in there with the priest and he says that he’s there to relieve him of his burden. Allison and Ms. Logan go into GTA’s and Sandra’s apartment and everything is falling apart and covered in cobwebs, so it’s not it’s nowhere near the nice place that she stopped in at the start of the day.
The apartment above hers is equally empty. Charles’s apartment, dusty, cobwebs empty, nothing there. Ms. Logan doesn’t really seem like she believes her, but Allison is sticking to her guns, she says. She wants to see the old priest knocks on the door. No one answers. Allison insists, Ms. Logan let her in.
And she’s I’m not doing that. That’s highly improper. And then that was probably the most Ava Gabor thing she could have possibly said.
Stephen: And then she walks away. Yeah.
Rhys: And yeah, she leaves. Jim Brenner has a picture of Allison heads off to investigate her apartment building. Allison calls Michael finds out from his secretary that he’ll be outta town for the evening.
So she puts on a record glass of wine and she must fall asleep. Because the needle’s just bouncing off the edge of the record when she wakes up in the middle of the night to turn off
Stephen: a record player. So for all you young people, you could pay attention. This is how records work, the Victrola and this one.
Yes. This one’s a little
Rhys: fancier than the Victrola didn’t have
Stephen: to wind anything up. And I even thought that, they were showing the one scene she was walking up and they had the record players sitting there, and I’m like, yeah, I remember those days when you had a big console system sitting there that was like, yeah.
Pride moment. It was a piece of furniture. Yeah.
Rhys: She’s heading into her bedroom. We can see Jim Brenner walking up to the building. The noises start over her apartment at about three 30 in the morning. Chandelier’s just swinging back and forth. So she heads back, grabs a flashlight, goes to the kitchen, grabs a knife, and heads upstairs.
Oddly enough, doesn’t actually put on much in the way of clothes. Which is weird to me. If you’re gonna gird up to possibly, confront somebody. Put some clothes on, but she’s shining her flashlight on the second floor. The flashlight comes upon Jezebel, who is busy eating Mortimer the canary.
Pretty gruesomely in fact. Yes. They have an we hate each other moment between them and then it grabs the canary and takes off. So she goes up to the apartment on floor three and heads inside shining the flashlight around. It appears to be empty now.
Stephen: Hold. Wait, I got thought so. Okay. I’m jumping ahead a bit.
You know the whole thing’s Spoiler. So who caress? They talk about the murderers later. That’s why the cat’s there. The cat’s a murderer also. I didn’t catch that too. I was just thinking about it while you were saying it.
Rhys: Yeah. It just appears to be a cat, right? Yeah. She continues deeper into the apartment.
She finds it’s just as empty as it was the day before. Her flashlight starts to die. Apparently Leslie Vernon takes care of her flashlights for her.
Stephen: She’s trying to get it. It’s a big universe. We only watch all, everything we watch is one big Universe
Rhys: movie all connected. Yeah. She’s trying to get it started again.
And then the door behind her opens and a slender, seemingly naked figure goes right past her. She shrieks a little, says hello, but the figure completely ignores her. She follows asking what it wants from her. Who is it? But it doesn’t say anything thing. Staring into the darkness, she turns on her flashlight only to illuminate her father standing like a corpse covered with his cancer.
She shines the light on the bed and sees the two prostitutes sitting on the bed as he reaches out for her. And she runs. As she’s running, she knocks over a table onto the carpet. It’s got razor blades all across the top of it, which I thought was a really nice little subtle symbolism thing going on there.
She ignores it, runs for the exit, and then her father comes around the corner and grabs her by the hair. She then proceeds to jack him up, stabs him in the eye, cuts off his nose, slices his arm, stabs him in the chest, runs out of the building with blood on her nighty. The old priest who is blind is looking on as she collapses in the street, screaming as neighbors from surrounding buildings come out
Stephen: now.
Now, the part with this whole scene that a little confused and wondering was. They made it her father and she got to stab him. So it’s kinda like getting those pent up feelings, getting revenge or, back at him or whatever. I think that took away from everything else in the film.
It almost made it a little confusing as to why her father was in there. Also at first, it is just one of those areas I think could be cleaned up a little bit. If they redid it, hint, hint, somebody should redo it. I think it’d make a great movie if they did it right.
Rhys: I think if you look at the main goal of the devils in this, where they’re trying to get her to commit suicide using a demon that looks or is her father which was the first time she committed suicide and going back to that memory over and over again.
Stephen: That’s true. That’s true.
Rhys: Yeah. Maybe I’m just talking out my ass.
Stephen: No, I think you’re right. I think that’s a valid point. Maybe it just could have been as the story more overt. Yeah. I don’t know. A little clearer, cleaner, or done just differently give it a different feel. May you know that could just be me.
Rhys: Yeah. Michael is waiting in the waiting room. And then in comes Detective Gatz and Christopher Walken. And Gatz seems to know Michael. Gatz already knows all the details of this case. We find out from this conversation that Michael’s previous wife, Karen, committed suicide at which the detective so lovingly like illustrates with the gesture as he jumped off a bridge.
And Christopher Walkins seems to find that kind of funny. He doesn’t say much in this movie, but he just hangs out looking
Stephen: cool. And we also find out that Michael has a type.
Rhys: Yes. Yeah. It turns out that Karen jumped off the bridge because Michael was having an affair with Allison, his mistress at the time.
And when she found out that Karen jumped off a bridge, she tried to overdose on pills. That’s why she was in the hospital two years ago. Yeah, there’s some people need to take a step back from the drama of their lives and say it out loud and then realize, wow, that really does sound ridiculous. I need to change my ways.
The doctor comes in telling them they can have five minutes. Michael goes straight to her on the bed and she is not waking up and the doctor says she’s not going to, she’s heavily sedated. She’ll be fine in a few days. Thanks for the
Stephen: five minutes.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. Also thanks for just letting me go in with my fiance.
Oh, and the police too. They can come in. Sure. Why not? Michael calls Brenner’s office. He hasn’t been in his office. His secretary doesn’t know where he is or when will be back. I think the secretary was an interesting enough character. They should have given her own spinoff.
Yeah, I dunno what Mr. Brenna is
doing. Her nails. Yeah. The detective ends up getting vaguely chewed out by his superior officer because Michael’s a lawyer and the lawyer’s office called to complain that this guy’s hounding his guy. The captain just wants the case dropped. Goetz isn’t ready to do that. He says that the, they say that the blood on the girl was her own.
And back then people, there was no d n a evidence, so it was just blood type. It matched her blood type. And all the people who, everybody that she says was in the building, none of them actually exist. Although one of the names the captain seems to remember Anna Clark, but he’s not sure why. Michael has this book that he shows to Allison, and it’s got a picture of Anna Clark in it.
Turns out she was a convicted murderer who was executed in Sing in 1949. And so now this whole thing where you had these spooky things and these very bizarre people, now they’re gone. You’re like, oh, is it just a haunted house? Is this a haunted house movie,
Stephen: Or is she crazy? She’s tried to make site
Rhys: twice.
There is a car found in a construction site a week later that has a body that looks an awful like Jim Brenner, and the wounds on it seem to line up with the wounds that Allison performed on her father. So it does kinda look like maybe he popped up and she just lashed out with a knife, which was my first thought actually
Stephen: when that happened.
But, and then shoved him in a trunk and took him to the audio yard. That, yeah.
Rhys: That would be the Catholic diocese that did all that.
Stephen: Yeah. That’s a common everyday thing.
Rhys: Common everyday thing for church. Yeah. Allison is staying at Michael’s apartment. Now Michael calls Brenner’s office, but this time Christopher Walken answers the phone because the police are there.
When Michael hears the Dulcet tones of Mr. Walk and he just hangs the phone up, Goetz takes photographs of the captain and points out that now this, he’s got a body and this body is the same blood type as the girl. And he also points out the Breer has information about Michael. Turns out Brenner was a dirty cop who got kicked off the force for extortion.
And Goetz has this theory that Brenner’s always worked for Michael, who he says is a shady lawyer and had his wife killed. That’s a theory, but okay.
Stephen: Yeah. And that’s another one maybe that could have been made stronger to make us question whether he is telling, think he’s got the right thing. It’s just a movie thing.
Rhys: A lot of the people that I watched talk about this film were talking about how, what a good job they did with Michael so that while you’re watching it, you really don’t know if you can trust him.
Stephen: That’s true. It was this whole
Rhys: mystery with his first wife. She’s dead. He’s got these people on the side. He knows lots of shady people.
Stephen: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. But that also, but again I don’t feel that was as strong as it could have been to really make that argument. Yeah.
Rhys: The detectives end up back at Michael’s apartment. Getz says he hopes Allison’s feeling better. He now has permission from his captain to talk to Michael.
Allison says she’ll go out for a walk. So GETT shows Michael pictures of Brenner. Michael says he has no idea what who he is. Gett seems really happy with that answer. I don’t know why, but he seems really happy with it. Allison ends up at a cathedral, goes in lights, a candle, starts to pray, and this priest comes up behind her with a funny looking ring and turns out it’s the Monsignor.
And he hears her confession. She says she’s committed adultery. She’s tried to take her own life twice. She says she saw her father and stabbed him, but he’s already dead. So I don’t know, is that a sin or not? Help me father?
Stephen: Yeah. But, and then she immediately goes to the and I felt like killing myself again because of this.
It’s wow you really need to get some help there. If you know you’re jumping that quick, that’s always your solution.
Rhys: Yeah. The priest tells her she’s been lost, but once she re-embrace Christ, all those horrible feelings will go away.
Stephen: That’s what the marketing
Rhys: says. Yeah. And this is one of those things.
It happened several times, but this scene is one of those where it really reminds me of Ty West from House of the Devil, because they do that slow pan right up to their face. Yeah. Which was so common back then. The priest informs her that if she has any doubts or fears, she should go back to him and he will alleviate them, which is stupid because she tries and he is not there later.
But
Stephen: whatever, he’ll just follow her the whole time. Yeah.
Rhys: She shows back up at the apartment and she’s been gone for three hours. Michael’s been worried and she says it helped. Michael ends up with a giant ring of keys for the entire building of that apartment, so he’s
Stephen: shady. I’ll give him.
Rhys: We, they go through apartment to apartment.
The apartment right above her apartment, she’s reenacting the murder of her already dead father. They’re wondering where the blood is. And then Allison remembers the carpet used to be gold, but now it’s green. So not only did they take the body away, they also got rid of all
Stephen: the evidence. That’s a pretty darn good job.
Those Catholics work fast.
Rhys: Yeah. When you got that much gold lit sitting around the Vatican, you can afford the best. Yeah. They head up to Charles’s apartment, they find nothing. Allison starts pulling books off the shelves, reading titles off, and they’re all like dead people on hooks and charnel house mysteries and all kinds of weird stuff like that.
She tosses this book to Michael. She says You’ll like it for the variety. He’s like, why? And she says All the pages are the same and he opens it up. And that’s not at all how he sees it. He’s they’re all different. She’s they’re all the same and they’re all written in Latin. And she’s
Stephen: so your bodily transformation thing from earlier.
That’s really what seems to be going on here, building up.
Rhys: He brilliantly, he’s read it out, write it down. And so she does. And what she writes down actually translates to the fate of thy watch for whom the task is strict, which is not really a sentence, I don’t think. It’s a collection of words.
We do find out what they meant it to be translated as later on in the film, right? They head up to the priest’s room, they knock on the door, no one answers. Michael is sure the priest knows what’s going on, but the lock’s been changed. So his shady ring of keys don’t work here. So they head back to his apartment, he plans on getting the quote translated, and then going to see the diocese to see if someone will talk to him.
So now we go see this senile old professor who was actually played by a ridiculous, preeminent actor of the mid 20th century. Just to prove how senile he is, he keeps referring to Michael as Etheridge or Eldridge. Michael is fine, help me translate this. And the professor pulls a few books from the shelf and the way they say it translates to the thy course thine lot is given charge in strict.
Watch that to this happy place. No evil thing shall approach or enter in. They claim it’s Milton from Paradise Lost, which I know like Milton and Dante, a lot of times in movies, people take what they say for Bud verbatim, but they were just authors, they work for friction fiction. So I don’t really know that necessarily over the gates of hell.
It actually does say abandon all hope ye who enter here, unless the devil’s sitting around going, you know what? That, that Milton guy, I think he’s got some good ideas.
Stephen: Yeah. It may be more to, how to portray the feeling in a written line. Yeah.
Rhys: Allison’s back of the church and a new priest comes up.
He says, it’s my church. I’m the only one here. And she’s all upset and then takes off and he’s like trying to get her back. Maybe he was a visitor.
Michael’s about to see the guy though that she’s been looking for. ’cause he goes to the diocese and there’s a whole bunch of colorful cardinals from Italy there, but Monsignor Fino is there, and that’s who Michael’s talking to. He’s asking about the priest lives on the fifth floor, Matthew Hollerin, and he says, I have an inheritance that’s due to him.
I need to speak with him. The Monsignor’s no. Basically, he’s no. Michael asked if you have a copy of the monsignor of the priest’s file. Monsignor says no.
He shows the monsignor, the Latin translation that he just had made and says, have you seen this? And the Monsignor says, no,
Stephen: he’s very helpful. I
Rhys: am the only Catholic priest who has never read the works of Milton. I’ve read Milton, for God’s sake.
I don’t walk around in black robes
Stephen: that we know of. Yeah.
Rhys: Michael’s back at his apartment and Jennifer’s there. Allison looks horrible. She’s nauseous, she’s losing control of her senses. She says, Michael says he is gonna be gone for the evening and asks Jennifer if she can keep an eye on her. And he meets this guy named Perry.
He gives Perry this envelope full of money. And Perry is a professional lock picker. They go into the diocese and there is not a lock that Perry can’t just magically open up. He’s amazing.
Stephen: And when you’re a lawyer, these are the things you just do. He’s the people you know.
Rhys: Yeah, he was played by William Hink, ley Perry, the lock pick.
And he was in a ton of stuff, 94 different movies dating clear back to. 1952. So I didn’t wanna leave him out of the lineup of everyone who’s in this freaking movie. ’cause he looks really familiar to me. I kept chewing on it. Yeah. Michael finds among these papers a whole list of people who have attempted to suicide.
Then they disappear and then reappear as priests or nuns. And as he’s flipping through these things, it goes from photographs clear back to like drawings of the people. He’s putting the file back and he finds a new folder in the back. It’s like a new folder, like not some ancient crusty thing.
Inside is a photo of Allison. She is apparently to become Sister Theresa. And it’s supposed to happen the very next night. Of course.
Stephen: Done Friday the 13th, I’m sure. Yes.
Rhys: So he shows up in Jennifer’s apartment and he tells Jennifer he thinks Allison’s gonna die the next day. He doesn’t wanna explain it.
I don’t wanna, your model is not capable of understanding.
Stephen: That
Rhys: was pretty good. So he’s heading out this evening. He needs Jennifer to watch her tonight. Jennifer’s I’ve got, I’m hosting a party, but I’ll watch Allison for you. So then we see the Monsignor praying and the cardinals tell him, God be with you this night.
So it really is, stuff’s going down tonight, right? Allison tells Michael, she doesn’t think she can go to the party, but he insists she needs people around her. He professes his love for her and they hug, but he still doesn’t tell her what’s going on
Stephen: and he leaves her alone. Yeah.
Rhys: We get the shot.
The detectives are going through all these index cards. They have photographs of all these people who she met at the house. They were all murderers. They’re all dead. So now we’ve got a house that’s full of dead murderers.
Stephen: Which I thought was a pretty cool, interesting little thought.
Rhys: Yeah. Jeff Goldblum shows Jeff Goldblum.
Allison goes to Jennifer’s apartment and Jeff Goldblum sees her and it’s like there’s
Stephen: something wrong with her. A little bit too much Coke.
Rhys: Yeah. He asked Michael and Michael’s there’s nothing wrong with her. Whatcha talking about the Monsignor is back of the house looking up at the father in the window.
The, we’re gonna have a bunch of scene bouncing here as they’re trying to pick the pace up at the, yeah. Michael heads out leaving Allison and Jennifer’s hands. She doesn’t look good. She lays on this couch just subtly weeping to herself. Michael’s now at her apartment. He opens his glove compartment and pulls out the snubbed nose pistol again.
Real good lawyer. Is that line from Breaking Bad? No. You don’t want a criminal lawyer. You want a criminal. Lawyer.
Stephen: It’s kind of Michael in this
Rhys: case. Yeah. He goes into the house, there’s a reflection of him on a mirror behind the door. There’s a little jump scare there.
Stephen: Woohoo. Yeah.
Rhys: And he goes in and opens the first floor apartment.
There’s no one there back at the party. Allison screams and collapses on the floor and Jennifer’s call the doctor while Michael’s still going through her house, searching empty room. After empty room. Jeff Goldblum takes Allison to Jennifer’s bed, lays her down on the bed. We get a shot of the clock.
It is one minute till midnight. Michael checks his watch, notices something odd about a panel in the distance, and he starts ripping this wooden panel apart in the hallway. I. In the meantime, Allison manages to give everyone at the party the slip by going out a window that was a little weak. ’cause we all know where she’s going.
Why doesn’t somebody
Stephen: just go after her? Yeah.
Rhys: Michael removes the boards revealing this gate to hell with Milton quoted directly over the gate to hell. Again, just an author people.
Michael is startled by the priest who tells him this is fa father Halloran, who tells him this is the gate to hell. And then Michael starts badgering him the entire time. The priest is going upstairs, downstairs, Allison is approaching the front door. But the priest is, father Hallan is not only old and decrepit looking.
He’s covered in dust and cobwebs, and he just sits on this chair not moving for. Who knows how long,
Stephen: long and I have a comment on that at the end. Just something about that, I
Rhys: just wonder how long you have to sit before dust would actually accumulate on you.
Stephen: That statue that the Monsignor leaned against earlier had cobwebs and stuff all over it, so it’s been a couple minutes.
Rhys: Michael threatens to kill him if he doesn’t tell him what’s going on and he doesn’t say anything. He just sits there and Michael actively starts strangling him and he doesn’t seem to react at
Stephen: all. Again. A good lawyer move.
Rhys: Yeah. They knock over this light. The camera scrolls with the light as it falls.
Then we see these statues and a hand looks vaguely like the Monsignor’s hand grabs this statue and apparently beans Michael in the head with it.
Stephen: So knowing the end, this is a little jump. Was that really the Monsignor or was that just another one of the demons?
Rhys: I would think it was actually the Monsignor.
’cause I think if you have someone specifically watching the Gate to hell, who somehow through their own per personal powers are keeping the gate closed, if you could kill that person, wouldn’t it make the gate open? I would think so. Yeah. And granted, the demons don’t seem to actually be able to do any physical violence to anyone because like we find out that they can’t actually hurt Allison.
She has to do it herself. But here’s some other guy who is actively strangling the priest. Just let it go.
Stephen: The whole thing is an interesting twist to the story and what’s going on and all that. But again, I just felt many parts of it could have been a little stronger in the story.
Rhys: Yeah. It’s one of those things, looking back on it I went to the drive-in this weekend and watched two, two and a half hour long films, which, oh my God, did that make a long Sunday? But, in this day of 150 minute films, you can look back on this 92 minute film and say, you know what, it really could have done with an additional 25 minutes of stuff.
Yeah.
Stephen: Filling things out. Yeah. Again I’d love to see this as a remake like some of the other ones we’ve had.
Rhys: Allison approaches the stairs and a drop of blood falls on her nightgown and it freaks her out. And then she sees a puddle of blood on the floor and picks up one of Michael’s cuff, links out the bottle of blood there.
We finally came back to the
Stephen: cuff links.
Rhys: There you go. She then locks herself into her own apartment. She tries the lights, the overhead lights don’t work. There’s a side table lamp that works. She tries to get through her apartment. One of the doors is locked. She can’t get through it, so she kneels at her bread bed.
Neil set her bed and prays for an angel of God to help her.
Stephen: She should have just tried the stairs. Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. The stairs to go nowhere. Something’s rattling her door. So she crawls into a word room and closes it, clutching her crucifix, waiting to see what happens. Then the door opens and much to her surprise, and the first time I saw this, my surprise as well.
It’s Michael and he helps her out of the wardrobe. There. Jezebel is prowling about and Michael starts to seemingly ramble about the angel Uel and the angel Michael and watching over the gate to Eden.
Stephen: And he’s very mu much more cold and stuff than he has been. And I thought he had been quite cold and a little standoffish throughout the whole movie, but he is really that way now.
Yeah. He’s like
Rhys: lecturing, just spitting out facts is what he is doing. Yeah. Allison is confused. He continues to say that there are always these guardians, a sentinel to guard the gate of hell to keep the devils at bay. And he tells her that everyone she met in here were devils. The only way to stop her from becoming the next sentinel is to get her to kill herself.
It becomes really painfully clear when the cat comes in and she’s freaked out. She sees Jezebel, asks Michael to kill him. And the cat just jumps up in his arms indicating that he now too is the devil. Yes. He admits having a private investigator kill his wife and he turns, and you can see that part of his head is bloodied from the blow the monsignor gave him, which killed him.
Allison screams and like his skin visibly just cracks. Yeah, like bloody blood starts to be seen through his skin
Stephen: again. Pre-computer, so
Rhys: Yeah. If you watch it slowly, you can actually see the string. Ah, it was string over probably the latex. Yeah, the color. And you can see it just as they pull it out, it just crackles.
It’s cool. Allison screams and starts to run through the apartment building and as she does, she comes face to face with Charles and he says, welcome home. He tells her, don’t be afraid. We’ve been waiting for her, waiting for you. He reaches out to her and she turns and runs up the stairs. As she does, various other devils start to appear and she screams and Charles tells her she’s too loud, hush.
And he summons the denizens of hell. And many of them are really just physically deformed people who are coming in. This is where all of the controversy happens, and I don’t even know that this is the striking scene at the end of the movie for me, but maybe for other people it is. She goes up the stairs to find the lesbians from the first floor sitting on the floor next to Michael’s body, pulling chunks of his brain out and eating them.
Charles is everywhere, like she left him on the floor below. She’s up here and he is coming out of this door on the same floor she’s at, and Denison’s continued Just flood into the hallway. Yeah, these doubles. They chase her upstairs. She runs into the spirit of her father. He reaches out and grabs her hair again, but she breaks free and continues up at the top of the stairs.
She finds the prostitutes who were with her father when in she tried her first suicide. And then she goes into hollerin room and it’s quiet. There’s just this one beat where like it’s quiet and there’s a lit candle. Then she turns and hears. She turns. When she hears Jezebel brow at her, she turns to find Charles and the denisons of hell.
And he’s bringing her a dagger and he’s giving this whole speech, telling her to join them, be the queen of their palace. Here he turns the dagger and hands it to her, telling her to take it. And remember that friendships can blossom into bliss. Michael’s standing there holding Jezebel and Charles says, be with him.
And she gets into this kneeling position. He repositions the knife to put it on her wrists and says, just be well again. And just as the knife touches her skin, you hear this voice say, stop Ed Gandalf’s there saying, no, Trump.
Stephen: Yeah. We need all the quotes like that.
Rhys: It’s the Monsignor and he is there with Father Halleran, who is care who’s lifting up this cross in all of the various denizens of hell approach and try and attack him, strip the cross from him. Charles is telling them to attack and resist. And this is the part, this is the scene that really stands out to me. ’cause you have the father moving and all these hands reaching for him, and then you have it from the camera’s point of view and you see them like they’re reaching for you.
And it really does. It feels like there’s just this surrounding crowd trying to get it to you. But he does, he manages to get all the way through. Charles is telling him to resist and the priest gets to Allison and hands the cross off to her and as soon as she gets ahold of it, the devil start to back up.
They start bleeding. They’re tearing at their own, their skin does that crackling thing that happened to Michael. And they all start to re recoil and when they do, Charles is like down, all of you. Down. Because it turns out he is not just a devil. He is like the devil, right? Of course, he throws a dagger that sinks into Michael’s neck.
He’s down all of you until he’s the last one in the room.
Stephen: I love this effect too, because again if it was modern with computers, it would’ve been them like a big portal and they’re disappearing into it or something. But here they show a bunch of them backing up and they flip to showing the Catholic guys switch back and it, they’re still backing up, but there’s less of them.
It’s like they’re decision into the wall. I thought it was a wonderful effect and being able to do it effectively without all the modern computer stuff. I loved it. Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah, it was awesome. Charles is the last one in the room, and then he disappears and the Monsignor leads Father Haller and out leaving, I’ll send a loan to sit at the window.
You cut to a wrecking ball now smashing down the walls of the building. There’s a new building where the old one stood. I don’t know how that works. How do you have somebody sitting in an apartment while you’re destroying everything
Stephen: around them? That’s, the mystical nature of it, it’s a spiritual thing, so they could knock the building down and that doesn’t change the gate to hell.
That’s still there, yeah. That’s what I, but the funny thing I thought was here at the end this last scene where the the real estate lady shows back up and she’s showing a new couple the thing, and it’s oh, the whole cycle’s gonna start. It’s one of those things it’s Allison hasn’t been up there that long.
Her tenure is just a day or two, or a couple months maybe, whereas the other guy was here for like decades. I thought that was like, eh, I understand why they did it. It’s a cycle going on, but seemed a little short.
Rhys: It seemed interesting to me when they did it. ’cause I thought the same thing.
She’s only been there five minutes, but then they actually give you a shot of her and she looks like she’s 80 years
Stephen: old. Yeah. So it could have been decades, they put the building up. Yeah. And the real estate lady doesn’t age, she’s one of those denizens. Oh yeah.
That’s a good idea.
Yeah.
Rhys: It’s Tom Beringer, who she’s showing the apartment to, and she’s there’s a violinist on this floor, and there’s a nun on the top floor, and the camera pans in to show Allison through the window, and then it jumps into the apartment with her and does that 70 slow pan into her face.
And you can see like she’s got wrinkles and her eyes are clouded by cataracts sitting just like hollerin did, staring out the window and then you roll credits. Yeah.
Stephen: So I like the story, I like the what it did and all that, a lot. I just really see it as needing an update unlike the remake is hisperia, which is eh, they didn’t do anything better with the remake, yeah. I think they could do a lot of good things with this. Someone
Rhys: had listed this as those religious horror movies of the seventies. You’ll watch all of the a-listers like the Omen and the Exorcist. Do watch this one. It doesn’t hold up as well as those ones did, but it’s still a really good movie.
Yeah. And it’s also like most people have no idea that this movie even exists,
Stephen: so Yeah. It’s hard to find. It’s very, it’s difficult, and this is, Netflix is getting rid of its D V D subscription stuff, so they’re only going streaming and all the streaming services. A lot of these old movies do exist on D V D, but now they’re gonna be even harder to get ahold of, yep. ’cause people I’m sure are just cleaning out, oh, we don’t watch DVDs anymore. We got streaming and they just toss, a hundred movies or something. So it’s a shame some of this stuff’s going to get lost for a while at least. So if
Rhys: five years from now you were listening to this or watching this and you’re like, Ooh, I’d really like to watch The Sentinel go to the library.
Yeah. And request it. They’ll let you know when it’s in. That’s how I started this whole list, was getting stuff through the library. I didn’t have any streaming services, and it looks like eventually we’re gonna be going back there just because, the ridiculousness of what happens to be on a streaming service when, and then migrating off and going to another one.
It’s just, it’s asinine. It’s almost impossible to keep
Stephen: up with. It’s crazy. Yeah, absolutely. There are so many things I’ve marked on some watch list and then went back and it’s not available now. And I’m like, are you kidding me? And Spotify’s the same way. I got the foot loose anniversary, 15th anniversary album, which has extra songs and I just looked it up on Spotify.
They don’t have the 15th anniversary edition and one of the songs isn’t available anyway. It’s come on.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. And as far as the jobs go, Here she was applying for a job. She didn’t even know.
Stephen: Didn’t even know it. Yep. It’s forced on her. It’s a little rougher than being the babysitter.
Absolutely.
Rhys: I don’t know. Not necessarily good things for the babysitter at the end of that
Stephen: either. All right, so what’s next? Next, we
Rhys: have our last for this season movie about job with the police. This is last shift, an American film from the mid 2010s.
Stephen: Alright, last shift. It is. Cool. Alright, talk to you later man.
Alright. Take
Rhys: easy.
