The Entity

Directed by Sidney J. Furie

Starring Barbara Hershey,Ron Silver,Jaquline Brooks,David Lablosa,George Coe,Margaret Blye,Alex Rocco

The first time I saw this film , I was a lot younger and unappreciative of how scary this truly is. I remember Barbara Hershey's breasts being squeezed and fondled by an invisible hand and being in awe of an unseen phantom getting to second base. I also wondered to myself how this unique special effect was brought to  the screen.

This is a fascinating film based on  a true story of the super natural as it unravels , not in a Gothic mansion in the deep south or a decrepit , broken down castle somewhere in the European mountains. This story takes place in sunny Los Angeles. Carla Moran( Hershey ) is a single mother of three, teen age son Bill, and two young girls Kim and Julie. Carla works hard to make ends meet, she is even trying to better herself by taking a typing course at night school. When we are first introduced to Carla we see her going through the motions of working and then off to night school and finally making her way home , it's late, dinner plates still on the table and the girls asleep in their room.Bill out in the garage working away on some project, he sees himself as the man of the house. Carla is everything to these three kids which adds to the horror of the events that we will witness.

 One night as Carla is preparing for bed, out of nowhere she is violently struck across the mouth causing her lip to bleed  repeatedly attacked and raped by some sort of unseen force. Fleeing the house Carla and her children spend the night at her friend Cindy's apartment. Early the next morning Cindy's unsympathetic husband shows his disdain causing Carla and her family to return back to their home.

Carla seems to attract the attention of men with an agenda for ill disputes and their own personal demons. Carla ran away from home when she was sixteen years old  after  her father,a minister became a little too friendly towards her. Carla's mother knew what was going on but refused to do anything about it. Shortly after moving out she  gives birth to her son Bill. Bill's father begins to abuse drugs and alcohol and finally becomes abusive towards Carla. She is a beautiful woman, single but caring mother who loves her children dearly but has made some bad decisions with her choice of men. Could this be the reason for this "Entity " to be attracted to Carla? She is a good person and you want to wish her happiness with a good man, personally I found myself rooting for the psychiatrist that was recommended by her friend Cindy. Carla deserves someone successful, handsome, somebody unlike the previous men in her life.

Even her current boy friend Jerry Anderson ( Rocco ) is never truly there for her, as he is a traveling salesman and spends a great deal of time on the road. Jerry must be one helluva salesman though,apparently Carla bought his sales pitch. Jerry comes across like a sleazeball and we can't put our trust into him, unfortunately Rocco's  typecasting has seen him play this  kind  of character many times in his career.Even Carla joins us in our doubts when Jerry promises her everything will be better when he is promoted and will no longer need to travel.

Whenever Jerry does return back home from the road for the last time, he brings Carla a present, a piece of sexy lingerie. O.K. guys, we all know when a guy gives his better half some satin and lace it's not for her but for himself. A sign of Jerry's selfishness perhaps. His true colours show when he is in the bathroom prepping himself for a night of passion with the lovely Carla. With his exit from the bathroom and into the bedroom he witnesses first hand the rape of his girl friend by the unseen Entity, and it proves too much for this shallow man. In his defence, any male would be devastated to see his wife, girlfriend or daughter violated like that,one can only imagine the emotions racing through your mind, but again when a doctor exclaims  that Carla will need him, Jerry whimpers " I can't, I can't". Like he was the only person to deal with the horror, what a wuss.

Another man in Carla's life during her violent attacks was Dr. Phil Sneiderman ( Silver ). With her painful previous experiences with the men in her life she needs to be able to trust this one.Sneiderman presented himself as someone who showed compassion towards Carla and genuinely  one who could put an end to her unseen attacker.As it turns out Dr. Phil  is an asshole,he wants to treat Carla's poltergeist entity as a mental illness and even going as far to suggest she is suffering from sexual frustration due to wanting sexual relations with her own teen aged son, Billy.

Looking elsewhere  for a solution to put an end to her attacks , she hooks up with a team of ghost hunters from the local university, the same school where Dr. Phil attends. The parapsychologists set up a replica of Carla's house inside the university's auditorium with hopes of capturing the Entity. During one of these experiments Dr. Phil makes an appearance for one last plea to Carla  to leave the ghost hunters and return for his help. Science vs. the supernatural. I believe the doctor had become obsessed with Carla, but not sure of the reason he was there. Was it because he was falling in love with her or more of his own egotistical determination to convince her it really is all in her head. And prove that he was right all along.

As the tanks of liquid helium or was it nitrogen tanks explode causing the fake Moran house to be engulfed in flames, with Carla  trapped inside, Dr. Phil rushes into the burning building to rescue Carla, does he finally see something unnatural, beyond our world ?

My Final Thought: Where do you go? When it's you and not your house that is haunted. As the end credits read Carla moved from Los Angelos to Texas but the attacks continued, though  not as violent and less frequent.  I can't stop thinking about another film that was recently produced, Insideous. With similer themes at least the film makers had the  decency to cast Barbara Hershey in a  small role.

My Rating: Four Go Go Girls out of Five

Hobo With A Shotgun

Directed by Jason Eisner

Starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Molly Dunsworth, Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman, Robb Wells

Back in 2007 sitting in a multiplex theater  which are now popping up in  towns with  any sort of significant population. I sat in a clean seat, in a row with a non- sticky floor eating a frozen yogurt, as Dolby  surround sound fills the auditorium. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's ode to 1970's exploitation films, Grindhouse was lighting up the screen, their experiment to take the audience back to a time when a city's theater would show anything. Blaxploitation, rape- revenge, martial arts, and horror films would play as prostitutes, winos and druggies did their thing. I found this to be ironic as I picked up my mega size drink with a free refill from the cup friendly chair, but still found the movie entertaining. A highlight for me was the fake  trailers between  the two features, Edgar Wright's " Don't", who is best known for directing " Shaun of the Dead" and " Hot Fuzz". Cabin Fever and Hostel's Eli Roth did the faux trailer "Thanksgiving". Machete has since been made into a feature film by Rodriguez, while Rob Zombie's " Werewolf Women of the SS" is in talks of being made into a feature. Another fake trailer shown was Hobo with a Shotgun, it also looked cool, but unknown to me at the time this was the winning entry of a contest that was held for aspiring film makers to do their own fake trailers. Lo and behold a young Canadian from Halifax, Nova Scotia winds up winning , Jason Eisner.

The minute our Hobo friend ( Hauer ) rides into Hopeville, rechristened Scumville by the uncivilized , law breaking citizens this picture screams out Eisner's love for exploitation films. With his choice of the opening credits, the music, and the use of Tenichcolour which was so vibrant I felt like I needed to wear my sunglasses. Spaghetti Westerns, rape - revenge, vigilante and an educational lesson on bears, it's all here. The pacing is fairly quick and wastes no time getting to the first sequence of carnage, which there are many. Gore hounds will be satisfied by the display of  the wet stuff. Drake ( Downey) the  big  boss mobster along with his two sons Slick and Ivan own and run Hopeville. When we are first introduced to the family with a bad case of assholism running through their genes, they are preparing to kill their uncle Logan ,Drake's brother ( Ricky from the Trailer Park Boys ) in what appears to me to be an updated version from the exploitation film " Thriller, They call her One eye". If you haven't seen this Swedish delight, you must check it out. There is an unrated version with explicit sex scenes, but does not propel the plot.

Anyway back to Hobo, it doesn't take long for our hero to discover what kind of Hell hole the rails has brought him to . After averting the potential rape from one of  Drake's sons with sweet mannered prostitute Abby ( Dunsworth ) she and Hobo become friends and  enter a businesss relationship  together. After all he just wants to buy a lawn mower from the local pawn shop and cut some grass. But this dream will crash and burn when thugs decide to hold up the pawn shop on the day Hobo had planned to make his life changing purchase. Eyeing a shotgun on the shelf, he picks up the weapon and begins to deliver justice one shell at a time.

Hobo with a shotgun is a mean spirited movie with it's long list of despicable characters like the low life  scum sucker that enjoys video taping bums fighting in the streets and other acts of degradation, such as paying hobos money to eat shards of broken glass. Scumville has it all I tell ya, naked women beating on a victim strung up by his feet dangling from the ceiling like a pinata, a pedophile Santa and one of the more unpleasant scenes a bus full of  school kids are barbecued alive. Even the police are corrupted, there is no hope in Hopeville. Mean spirited, yes but having said that this is helluva lot of fun. How serious can one take a movie where a head is yanked off from it's body and a bikini clad bimbo gets off showering in the bloody geyser erupting from the neck. Most of the characters are cliches and come across like live action cartoons but this unspools admirably as Rutger Hauer plays the Hobo straight, serious and with total conviction.

Drake becomes more concerned with each daily headline detailing the vigilante hobo's war against crime, until ultimately the Plague is called in for extreme termination. The Plague are a couple of medieval armour wearing, motor cycle riding Angels of death who would'nt look out of place jousting in George Romero's rarely seen gem " Knightriders".

With Abby held hostage, a bloody confrontation explodes between Hobo and just about everyone else who is still alive when our rail riding friend declares enough is enough.

My Final Thought: I'm curious to see what project the young Eisner will tackle next. Hopefully he won't get caught up with the big studios wanting to waste his talents on some sort of a remake, but that does seem to be the norm these days. Whatever he decides,I'm anxiously waiting for the announcement.

My Rating: Four Go Go Girls out of Five.