Piranha (1978)

1978
Directed by Joe Dante
Starring Bradford Dillman, Heather MEnzies, Kevin McCarthy, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Steele and Dick Miller

There is something on the ol' Lick Ness Monster archive that honestly amazes me.  'Memba the summer of 2010, when Alex Oja's remake of the film in question today hit theaters?  I 'memba.  Promising a whole bunch of blood, boobs and general mayhem, it was one of the first films of this great 3D revival that has somehow turned into general practice since then.  I also remember James Cameron in all of his douchebaggery stating that this was "exactly the type of film that SHOULDN'T be in 3D" (/sniff).  Because only stuffy polemics about planets full of giant blue dudes deserve that treatment.  Well, for the first time, I re-watched said movie on TV recently.  And it's pretty bad.  The thing on my blog that amazed me?  I gave it FOUR STARS when it came out.  Man, what was I thinking?

Yeah, that movie is some kind of disaster, alright.  Bad characters, bad script, nonsensical editing, it's all really some kind of beautiful disaster.  It makes me even sadder when you consider that the 1978 original is arguably my second favorite aquatic horror movie of all time.  The remake might be this amazing conglomeration of bad stuff, but this one has everything going for it.  It's produced by Roger Corman, the legendary low-budget guru who once said that he could take a sandal, a loincloth and a spear and recreate the Roman Empire.  It has a cast of actors that actively seem to care.  And it has Joe Dante in the director's chair.  This dude is simply one of my favorites.  By and large, his films all have this great mixture of humor and horror, and 50% of the time, it works every time.  He spent much of the '70s as Corman's protege, and this was his big break into "major" movies.  Quotation marks because this is a movie about mutated killer fish.  Get ready for some fun.

You have to read something an average of seven times before committing it to memory, so here we go again: The most important part of the script is the first ten pages, and Piranha has an opening sequence for the ages.  A happy and horny teenage couple make their way into an abandoned government facility where they find a giant water tank.  Seems like a perfectly good idea to do some skinny dipping, doesn't it?  They strip down, begin the opening stages of macking it, and are then summarily attacked and gutted by an unseen force in the tank before agents try in vain to stop what's going on.  And it's an undisputed masterpiece.  In all seriousness, it certainly catches your attention and lets you know that this isn't your ordinary Jaws ripoff.

This prompts the arrival of insurance investigator Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies).  You wouldn't think that an insurance investigator character would be one of your linchpins in a movie like this, but there she is, and she actually manages to hold her own.  The REAL star of the show, though, is the guy that she hires to guide her around the wilderness.  Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) is kind of this mix between a drunk, a rugged outdoorsman, and a guy who pretty fairly does not give a s**t.  Welcome to the "Ruh-roh, Raggy" portion of the movie (third week in a row!), as they find the facility.  Once there, Maggie wants to see what's in the tank and promptly drains the water.  Derp.  One guess as to where this leads...

Yes, folks, the nearby lake/touristy community and summer camp where Paul's daughter is in attendance.  Yeah, emotional stakes.  There's a bit more buildup before we reach all of the great stuff in Piranha, most of which involving the back story of just how these fish came to be.  The specifics aren't important - it's all Vietnam War government experiment cover-up stuff that you'd see on The X-Files.  What's important about it is that it's quick and painless, and that the "chase" element is actually suspenseful.  Meaning, Maggie and Paul actually chase down the fish on their journey to the lake and try to cut it off, only to get thwarted at every turn - including this one really nifty sequence as the duo, along with the government researcher who has kept this whole project going, rescue a small boy on a raft and then watch in horror as the fish turn on the wood itself.  Great stuff.  They also succeed in shutting off a spillway that opens up their access to the population, and then realize that there is a tributary.  Derp again.  Of course, while ALL of this is going on, we also get graced with the presence of the second best thing to God himself, Dick Miller.

Ahhh...Dick Miller.  A legendary Roger Corman collaborator in front of the camera who has played a character named Walter Paisley something like 67 times in various Corman productions (no joke), the dude is definitely one of my favorite "that guy" actors of all time.  So many memorable characters and lines can be given to this man.  The occult library owner in The Howling, the gun shop dude in The Terminator, Murray Fudderman...he's done everything but Miami Vice.  This time around, he fulfills the Mayor Vaughan quotient, and he does it to PERFECTION, maintaining while all of this mayhem is going on that the tourist situation can be saved.  It really is this character that raises Piranha above its budget and into the realm of the truly awesome, because he's simultaneously hilarious and despicable.

And that third act, where the weaponized fish reach the summer camp and then the water park?  Awesome.

This is one of those movies that is comprised of a lot of different things together that SHOULDN'T work - and yet they somehow do, and they work fantastically.  The acting by both Menzies and Dillman is solid and to the point, and Dick Miller is simply unforgettable.  The kill scenes are genuinely suspenseful, and while you won't be pissing yourself in terror or anything, there are definitely more than a few cringe-worthy moments.  Again, though, I have to go back to that tried-and-true cinematic universal that practically gives me an erection - three-act structure.  This movie has it, and it plays it out to perfection.  When your flick has a defined beginning, middle, and end, it makes the ending actually feel satisfying.  Seeing fish gut a whole bunch of people can be satisfying, believe me.  And not just because I'm a psychopath.

Rating time.  Wait for it...**** out of ****.  This flick is just a damn fun time that I can't recommend enough.  And retroactively, I award the 2010 remake * 1/2 out of ****, and that extra 1/2 * is solely for Kelly Brook's boobs.

Blair Witch (2016)

2016
Directed by Adam Wingard
Starring James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott, Valorie Curry, Corbin Reid and Wes Robinson

I don't know exactly what Dan Myrick and Ed Sanchez had in store for the Blair Witch series when the first movie became such a mammoth phenomenon.  All I know is that they wanted nothing to do with the second film.  And then said film underperformed, and this series laid dormant for a decade and a half.  The Haxan Films crew went their separate ways, doing some of their own movies of varying quality and genre, and the entire world seemed to forget about the little movie from 1999 that came along and wiped the floor with all of the slick, witty postmodern slasher flicks of the era.  Until Adam Wingard came along...

The reports that Wingard was going to be involved with this project had me excited.  He's been one of the supervising producers of the V/H/S films, and while some segments in those are definitely better than others, they're loads of fun regardless.  His movie You're Next is one of my top 10 horror films of the decade so far.  The Guest is also pretty damn good, with Dan "The Man" Stevens turning in a tour-de-force performance.  The advance ad campaign was also pretty creative, with a poster saying merely "The Woods" and Wingard's name attached to it.  And then the reveal that this was Blair Wich 2016.  Hells yeah.  Do people still say that?  I doubt it, but count me in.  In short, everything seemed to be lining up for a big triumphant return of the movie that was such a huge part of my high school days.  The epic conclusion: I went on opening night.  And...it sucked.  Man, I've been on a real negative role lately with this here blog, eh?

Sitting in the theater a few months back, the first thing that jumped out at me was that it had a setup...that was essentially the exact same thing that I would have written.  Meet James Donahue (James Allen McCune), all around nice guy who is, you guessed it, the little brother of Heather Donahue from the original film.  Obviously, the disappearance still haunts him, and the discovery of a weird YouTube video that indicates that his sister may still be alive sets the plot in motion.  We have a logical story device, a solid emotional hook in the sibling searching for his long-list sister, and even a decent-enough actor in McCune playing the lead.  Unfortunately, we soon begin meeting the rest of the characters who head out into Burkitsville woods to solve the mystery (ruh-roh Raggy - second week in a row that I get to dust out that joke!). 

The secondary characters consist mostly of his friends.  There's Ashley (Corbin Reid) and the requisite film student character Lisa (Callie Hernandez), which gives us the reason for the whole being filmed.  She also had the foresight to bring a drone to tail them into the woods as aid in case of being lost, a gimmick that will pay off later in one of the most unintentionally funny kill scenes in horror history.  There's also a couple of locals who know the area in Talia (Valorie Curry) and Lane (Wes Robinson).  All of these people?  Pretty vanilla, and not terribly captivating.  But the person that I want to talk about is Peter. 

Played by Brandon Scott, he's James' best friend and going by what we get in the opening trimester of this flick one has to wonder why he ever agreed to come along in the first place.  Affectionately referred to by someone walking out of my theater viewing as "Mr. McBitchypants," he immediately begins complaining.  About everything.  The walk.  The legend.  The Witch.  Everything is dumb, an everything is a massive waste of time.  In short, the dude screams "cannon fodder" from the second he appears onscreen.  For everyone who complains about how unlikable Heather was in the first film, she ain't got nuthin' on this guy.

You might be wondering what we get from this point on in terms of a story.  Well, this is the most disappointing aspect of the movie to this reporter.  Last week, I admitted that Book of Shadows was a terrible movie in execution but that I give it massive props for at least trying something radically different from the formula.  This one?  If you've seen the first movie, you've seen this one.  Every single beat is repeated, from the getting lost, to the wandering in circles, to the arguing, to a character or characters (spoiler alert) vanishing only to reappear later, to the big finale in the creepy house.  Surely I don't even need to spell out the final scenes, amirite?  Amazingly, though, it's in the particulars and the way that this film differs from the original that depresses me the most.  Not in concept, but in execution, because this is a flick that shows with pitch-perfect accuracy at just how homogenized all of the found footage films that came in the wake of the 1999 film have become.

For starters, we see the witch in this flick.  Fairly regularly.  It looks just as stupid as you would imagine, but we see it, so everyone who hated this aspect of the original, here's your answer.  I hope you're happy.  Secondly, there's a body count this time around.  In true modern-era found footage fashion, there's no less than five onscreen murders captured on the cameras, with the aforementioned death following the drone (which gets caught in a tree for one of the characters to fish out, only for the witch to come along and wreak havoc on said tree) being the Eddie Murphy-esque comedic highlight.  Oh, and jump scares.  Jump scares aplenty.  The first movie was all about agonizing silence.  Even if you hated it, I think you would agree that it was all about psychology over shocks.  This one is all about the shocks.  LOUD NOISES (insert Steve Carell gif).

Now to be a little more constructive.  I can't help but wonder if this movie had come ten years earlier, before the huge wave of found footage movies overtook the marketplace and essentially established all of the techniques that would define the subgenre that this one adheres to like Bible.  I actually think it's kind of a shame, because this movie DOES show glimmers of potential.  Again, McCune is fairly likable as the lead guy, and Ashley is also a pretty likable character despite her decided lack of tree climbing prowess.  With more stuff left offscreen, a severe cut in the amount of sound scare stingers, less blood, less screaming...there's actually the framework of a decent story here.  Oh, and much less stuff at the end about being stuck in an interdimensional time warp.  It happens.  In that regard, Wingard (way too much use of "gard" in consecutive words there) actually did his job.  He injected the modern horror stuff into what had come before.  The problem is that he did this while keeping every single story element of the original, and as a result, all it does is make me want to watch the original.  How many times have I used the word "original" in this review?  Probably too much.

* 1/2 out of ****.  There are definitely horror movies I've seen recently that I disliked more, but this was one of the biggest disappointments I've had considering the name on the poster and the director involved.  Avoid this one.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)

2000
Directed by Joe Berlinger
Starring Kim Director, Jeffrey Donovan, Erica Leerhsen, Tristine Skyler and Stephen Barker Turner

Oh boy, the time has come to review Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.  I reviewed the original movie last November here on the ol' blog, and for those of you who scan right through my reviews on Twitter, message boards or your Facebook feed (for SHAME!), the gist of it is this: I really, really love the first movie.  It's a polarizing movie, to be sure, but I happen to fall in the camp that feels that it was not only scary as f**k back in the day but still holds up in 2017.  When the flick came out, I was borderline obsessed, tracking down all of the tie-in novels and nonfiction/fiction books that went along with it.  And then news comes out that there's a sequel?  Color me there.  And I was - on opening night, no less, with a theater consisting primarily of the remainder of my high school graduating class.  And I thought that it sucked.

It sucked then, much hardly.  I remember walking out of that theater pissed off that they took something that I was really into and "raped" it, or some really profound critical thought process thing.  I re-watched this film for the first time since then late last year and again a few days ago, and I can now report that it sucks...decidedly less than it did back in 2000.  All these years later, now without the prism of how original and fresh the first movie seemed back then totally washed out of my mouth, I can actually appreciate what writer-director Joe Berlinger was trying to accomplish here.  I repeat, trying.  In execution, it was still a failure.  But it's a failure in that oh-so-lovable way that you can see that there is a decent movie desperately trying to escape somewhere here.  Occasionally, that movie does peek through.  Mostly, though, it doesn't.  The film criticism just don't stop here on the Lick Ness Monster blog.  Where did this movie go wrong?  Let's recap and find out.

First things first:  This movie is definitely WAY different from the original Blair Witch Project.  So if you weren't into the found footage thing that the first film didn't exactly invent but definitely popularized, you might be willing to give this movie a bit more of a chance.  Nope, instead, what Joe Berlinger wanted to convey here was an actual narrative, with a full script, characters, three-act structure...you know, all the stuff you hear about in writing class.  I'll give credit to Berlinger for his original idea - he did not simply repeat the story of the original.  Not even conceptually.  The general idea behind the film concerns the impact that the first film had on its group of characters.  This fact depresses me, because it means that I have to talk about them.

Yes, folks, let's talk about the characters in this movie.  It doesn't take long for us to meet them, and they're almost funny in their pitch-perfect stereotypical notes.  Stephen and and his pregnant wife Tristen are your resident nice characters, researching a book about the Blair Witch after the events of the original film become public.  They're not terribly interesting people, but they are definitely the most tolerable people that you're about to meet.  The side characters, however, are your real main eventers.  Believe me, it's for the worse.  We have Jeff, the group's guide who is sort of a mix between Burt Gummer-style survivalist and basic weed-smoking anciliary guy.  We have Erica, a trendy Wiccan who eventually has one of the greatest nude dancing sequences in cinematic history (and it is a Patrick Bateman-style undisputed masterpiece).  And then there's Kim.  Ahhh...Kim.  She's Goth, that Kim.  Even better, she's PSYCHIC.  Talk about a movie that covers all of its bases when it comes to covering all of the high school demographics that it desperately needed to connect with to turn a profit.  Which it did, by the way - as poorly reviewed as this film was, it still grossed almost $50 million worldwide on its $15 million budget.  Call it residual after-effect from 1999's popularity or just the fact that people will go to anything just because it's there (hello Avatar sequels that are about to gross 60 gajillion dollars), it happened.

Halfway through this review, and I've already run off the beaten path.  I will wholeheartedly admit that the movie actually roped me in on that first watch all those years ago, showing us all of the characters' motivations and reasons for being interested in the Blair Witch.  I will also admit to feeling a sense of dread when the characters find the Rustin Parr household from the original movie, set up camp and spend the night.  It also seemed like a logical next step in the screenplay when it plays the Ruh-roh, Raggy card on us and has the group wake up the next morning with no memory of the previous night.  I was very intrigued by where we were going with this as the movie starts to get weird.  Unfortunately, it's also where the movie flies off the rails.

The first curveball that this movie throws at us is Tristen's miscarriage.  Yeah, 'memba Tristen?  'Memba that she was pregnant?  Well, she was.  After this second Ruh-roh, the group head back to Jeff's house (which, amazingly, is in an ABANDONED BROOM FACTORY - now that is some amazing storytelling) to review their tapes from the previous night where we get the first of many hallucination sequences featuring the strange ghostly children.  These kids show up a lot as this movie gets weirder, so get used to them.  We get the aforementioned naked Erica dancing sequence on one of the tapes, as well as each member of the group experiencing visions of themselves doing terrible, terrible things...things that gradually come true.  And, unfortunately, there isn't an ounce of tension to be had with any of it.

It's hard to explain why.  Reportedly, the version of the movie that we got was a very different one than what Joe Berlinger originally intended.  His flick was much more of a slow burn leading up to a horrific climax.  Also, the music and tone of the film he shot was totally different.  There were reportedly no supernatural elements whatsoever to the plot - it was all about media obsession and mass hysteria.  Well, the studio didn't like this and massively re-cut Berlinger's footage, inserting new music and ordering new scenes to be shot.  A good example of what this means is an eerie, atmospheric piano score being replaced by early 2000s heavy metal music.  In short, all of the tone that Berlinger was going for was essentially lost with this re-cut, and it's a damn shame, because all indications are that his vision for this film actually would have been pretty freaky.

Oh, and the actors?  I haven't mentioned them for a reason, because while I'm sure some of them did go on to other things...f**k me if I know what they are.  Yeah, they're pretty bad. 

Still, the movie isn't a total failure.  Yeah, once it gets going with it's "forced amnesia and hallucinations" plot, we can take a guess where it's going.  But the opening 20 minutes or so is actually very well done, even in it's non-director-approved version.  The Stephen and Tristen characters are rendered pretty well, the setup seems like the solid logical thing to do after the massive success of the original film seemed impossible to replicate, and there's even a good air of mystery after the initial night spent at that creepy house in the woods.  In short, it's unique and definitely carves out its own identity - thus, why it was so damn hated back in its day.  And while the movie is a failure in the form that it exists today, I now nonetheless have a soft spot for this entry in the long list of "screwed by studio involvement" feature films.  It had ambition.  That's more than I can say for, say, Rings.

I know it sounds like I've bashed on this movie a lot, but there are parts of it that I actually enjoy.  Thus, I'll give Book of Shadows ** out of ****.  Hopefully, someday Berlinger can give us that director's cut that this film's grand total of seven fans are clamoring for.  Also, amazingly enough, this film is actually better than the follow-up that pretends this one doesn't exist. /teaser

Premonition (2007)

2007
Directed by Mennan Yapo
Starring Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Nia Long, Kate Nelligan, Amber Valletta and Peter Stormare

Let's get in the time machine and take a trip to the not-so-distant past of 2007.  The spring of 2007 is something that I remember quite well, not because of any noteworthy life event or anything, more for the VIBE this time period has.  I was still living in my college town, but that nightmare was only a few months away from ending, and I knew it.  I was pretty much hardcore convalescing while waiting for a fresh start, working a couple low-end jobs and catching a whole bunch of movies at theaters in my spare time.  Hell, I saw just about EVERY mainstream Hollywood release that came out every week for the better part of six months.  This was when I saw Zodiac, a flick that timed up PERFECTLY with my interest in serial killers, and man, what an awesome movie that was.  But it's also when I saw Because I Said So, a movie so generic that it might as well have just been called "Romantic Comedy Movie"...and Premonition.  I really hated this movie when I first saw it, and while it's a BIT better after re-watching it for this review, I've still got to say that it's essentially teh sucksz.

It goes without saying that all actors have at least a few turkeys in them.  I mean...does Robert De Niro even READ scripts anymore?  If so, how do you explain Dirty Grandpa?  The same goes for Sandra Bullock.  First things first, I am a fan.  She's from the generation just before the current crop of actors who just all seem too slackerish/emo to be relatable, but between this and a few other films that I could mention (she has a Razzie and actually showed up to accept it, for f**k's sake), you definitely can't win 'em all.  I can only assume that she took this role because she really believed in it, because it only had a budget of $20 million.  That's probably her whole paycheck in an average movie.  As such, it's weird to see her in sleepwalking mode for 96 minutes, but I digress.  That should about do it for the bibble babble.  Time to delve into the impenetrable web of mystery (/trailer voice) that is this movie.

The basics: Bullock plays Linda Hanson, who has just been surprised with a new house by her husband Jim.  Along with their two daughters, they settle into said house and we get the "getting to know the family for emotional investment" phase of the movie.  It's analysis like this that you can't get at any other blog, folks.  While Bullock tackles this movie with about as much emotion as Daniel Craig on sedatives, Julian McMahon does not, for better or worse.  I say that because there's few guys who play a better douche than him, but it's not like it's hard to buy.  For starters, he has to have some kind of record when it comes to the hotness of his wives.  The dude went from Dannii Minogue to Brooke Burns.  That makes him a legend.  And since this is Julian McMahon playing Sandra Bullock's husband in a familial drama, we can pretty much assume that he's out there banging somebody else.

The plot: If you remember the commercials for this film, I can report that you've pretty much seen the movie already.  One day, Linda is surprised by a knock on the door from a police officer who informs her that Jim has just died in a car accident.  She goes through all of the requisite film stages of grief (read: pained expressions which may or may not include actors manufacturing some tears for the camera), then goes to bed...and Jim is alive and well.  WTF.  The movie's gimmick is that the days are jumbling around, and that Linda is the only one who seems to know about it.  Only since she knows her husband is dying...light bulb...she can try to stop it.  It's actually not too bad of an idea on paper, and could have been pulled off with different execution.  However, the execution here is pretty rough.

The horror scene in 2007 was a bit of a transition period.  The massive wave of remakes were just starting to get rolling, while the Saw series was dominating the box office.  J-horror-styled films were kind of in their last gasp.  That's what the film-makers were definitely going for with Premonition, because the pace in this movie is VERY slow.  A slow pace definitely isn't a bad thing in and of itself; it can be FANTASTIC when we care about the characters or if there is a genuine sense of unpredictablity to what's going on.  This flick has neither of those things. 

For an example of what we're dealing with here, there's this one endless sequence that takes place fairly late in the movie where Linda, after having already flashed to something like six different days in the final week of her husband's life and discovering that he is considering but hasn't quite committed adultery, slowly sits him down on their bed and places a shoe on his foot.  I'm sure that this looked really emotional and profound in the script.  On the screen, it actually made my theatrical audience laugh.  I remember that ten years later, kids.  Speaking of, Jesus, it's been TEN YEARS?  That makes me feel old.

The only other thing I'd like to share about this film's plot is that we get a Peter Stormare sighting.  At a certain point, Linda's actions worry the authorities (on what day this takes place isn't relevant - watch the movie if you want vital details like this) and a psychologist is required in the story.  Said psychologist is played by Stormare.  Even if you don't know his name, I can GUARANTEE that you've seen him from somewhere.  Character actor extraordinaire, this man is.  My personal favorites are the psychotic pancake-obsessed killer in Fargo and Slippery Pete from Seinfeld.  Hey, you owe me a quarter.  Unfortunately, here, he's just another charismaless character who spouts off the scripted lines in very robotic fashion.  Whatever it was about this movie that made everyone go on valium must have been magical.

So...Premonition.  Yeah, this one wasn't good.  Walking out of the theater, I remember hearing this exact conversation between a couple girls walking out at the same time I was: "Wow...I hated it."  "Yeah, you can't win 'em all."  My sentiments exactly, women that I don't know.  It's slow, it's boring, there's almost no tension, the characters aren't interesting, and all of the actors are on autopilot with the exception of McMahon.  But McMahon was basically playing himself, so I don't know if that was much of an accomplishment. 

* 1/2 out of ****.  That might be a bit too generous considering that the film barely managed to hold my attention, both then and now.  But any film that at least tries to have a J-horror tone gets a sympathy half-a-star from me.  Yet more quality film criticism, right there.

Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

1976
Directed by Alfred Sole
Starring Linda Miller, Paula Sheppard, Lillian Roth, Brooke Shields, Niles McMaster and Jane Lowry

Ahhhh...giallo thrillers.  I've reviewed plenty of these pieces of Italian goodness on the blog, and they are truly a uique beast within the great, grand horror genre.  Kind of a gory mix between murder mystery and straight-up slasher flicks, for the uninitiated.  And when I say mystery, these films are genuinely a mindf**k.  For proof, I think my record of predicting killers in giallo films sits comfortably in the 0-171 neighborhood.  And that is some accomplishment, considering Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters (read: take the character who has no other reason to be in the movie than to turn up at the end and be the villain) sits in my mind whenever I'm watching one.

Released in 1976 by director Alfred Sole, Alice, Sweet Alice was one of a wave of American giallo-styled films and it might actually be the first one that I saw.  For the record, it was sometime around 2005-ish on some Saturday afternoon local channel when I was in college, and I'd never seen anything like it in my life before.  At the time that it actually came out, the flick was all kinds of controversial for reasons that I won't bog anyone on here down with.  Me?  I just think that this movie, while it has its flaws, might have the honor of having the single CREEPIEST mask in the history of masked killers.  Just google this movie title, blow some of those babies up and be prepared.  Yeah.  Just...be prepared.

Like a lot of giallo films, this one is a bit of a slow starter.  It's something that I noticed when I first started to seriously get into the Dario Argento and Mario Bava films that launched this wave, and while I am all about the slow burn...some of these movies tread the line and are perhaps a little TOO slow of a burn.  Fortunately, this flick has other things going for it.

For the most part, the film is all about a small nuclear family.  There is a mother character, Catherine (Linda Miller), but for whatever reason I was never particularly into her.  The film's REAL stars are Catherine's two daughters - 9-year-old Karen, played by Brooke Shields in her first film role, and 12-year-old Alice (Paula Sheppard).  Karen is preparing for first Communion, and the elder Alice seems to resent the holy hell out of her younger sister.  She abducts her doll, dons the ungodly translucent mask that will soon be creeping up on you when walking through your halls at night, and then locks her in an abandoned warehouse in what is considered a pretty epic scene within film circles.  Slow build aside, what we've got here is some classic misdirection...and that's most certainly needed when Karen is brutally murdered by someone wearing the same kind of mask that Alice has.

I will admit that I found this movie a bit more emotional than I did upon that initial 2005 watch when I was half-asleep and waiting to go to work at my college town's mall.  Stuff in films that actually deal with family deaths always affect me on some level, and this one is no different.  Karen's murder scene also does a good job setting up various plot threads and multiple suspects.  Is it Alice?  Is it the nun who curiously found Karen at the right time?  Was it Father Tom (Rudolph Wilrich), who definitely had opportunity?  Or somebody else?  Again, I'm sure that plenty of modern audiences will guess who the killer is, but I certainly didn't.  Giallo films can fool me with a Roger Corman puff of smoke.

The movie's middle sections unfortunately meander quite a bit.  The biggest flaw that this movie throws at us is introducing too many supporting adult characters; we meet pathologists, police officers, Catherine's former lover, etc., and none of them are particularly enthralling characters.  Call it glandular, but Alice - and the awesome performance by Sheppard - are just way more interesting than any of these goons.  For an indication of what we're dealing with, there's a side plot where Catherine's long lost sister moves back in with her to help out after the murder and we get all of this subtext about how much the siblings hate each other for...reasons.  Every once in a while, however, Alfred Sole (who also wrote the screenplay) remembers that this is a horror film and delivers well-timed jump scares and close calls to keep us interested, including a couple more murder scenes that aren't quite as effective as Karen's death but nonetheless had to have been pretty jarring to the film audiences of 1976.

Speaking of Alfred Sole, the dude clearly know what he was doing when he was writing this movie.  He started things off with the two fascinating child characters, gave us that Hitchcockian misdirection that I spoke of, shocked us with a murder, and then gives us the good twist two-thirds of the way through that gives us all the answers we need immediately after reaching the government-minimum body count.  I'm not saying that he ripped Psycho off beat-for-beat, because this movie definitely ain't Psycho.  But if you're looking for a template to cull from, you can't ask for a better one.  And that is observation that you can't get from Wikipedia, kids.

I do have a BIT more criticism to level at this film: once the killer's identity becomes known, the suspense pretty much vanishes.  There are some good SHOCKS to be had in the third act, but I don't think you'll be truly frightened like you might have been when, say, Alice was creeping around a warehouse wearing a freaky-looking doll mask.  It's a problem that a lot of mysteries have, actually.  The build-up is fantastic, but it's VERY difficult to craft a story where the solution feels like it lives up to the build. 

I know that it might sound like I've complained a lot about this film, but I really did enjoy it.  One thing that I've barely touched on is this film's atmosphere.  Simply put, it's unreal.  Since most of the film takes place in or around a church, we get lots of candles, dark settings, religious imagery, you name it.  It all adds a kind of classy touch to everything that's happening.  More than anything else, though, this really was Paula Sheppard's movie.  Creepy kids in horror films are always a dicey prospect with me, but she was something else.  It's just a shame that she runs circles around virtually every adult in the film in the acting department.  Still, the execution that Sole put into his script has nothing if it doesn't have conviction.  When this movie is on...it's on, and I guarantee that you'll be on the edge of your seat for at least two scenes.

With that, it's time for the Final Judgment (see what I did there?).  *** out of ****.  Great atmosphere, disturbing themes and the awesomeness of Paula Sheppard make up for a bunch of venial sins (man, I'm on a roll!).  Definitely check this one out if you're into giallo thrillers and/or like some mystery with your kills.