I just love running across old buried treasures from my youth. Sometimes I find something that I completely forgot about and rediscover it all over again. The cobwebbed consciousness of Manitou is a dungeon of memories and there are some things I have not had the fortune of experiencing for many years, but they are far from buried or forgotten. All part of that selective memory thing.
Perfect case in point would be this long thought gone, and completely forgotten by most, television movie that aired in 1977 and has managed to stay in my mind all this time for some reason. I sometimes have a hard time remembering what I ate for dinner the night before. But I can certainly remember being a demonic little pimple freshly popped from the neck of Susan Strasberg and dumped right down in front of the tv set to see this creepy little thriller.
The Possessed is somewhat of a cross between The Exorcist and an afterschool special. Wow, remember them things? It's short on detail and not much in the special fx department, being a tv movie and all, but it certainly had a special effect on me and has managed to leave me wondering all these years later why it has never been released anywhere.
Jump forward to 2010 and then lets jump up and down for the Warner Brothers archive collection. Last year Warner Brothers Pictures opened up their vaults and began to sell homemade dvd burns of films that have never seen a proper digital release. Some of these films have never been released in any format never ever ever. How awesome is that?
Basically what we have here is a catalog of professionally done, but authorized, bootleg releases. There are all sorts of films in their inventory from all eras of film history. A large portion of them are from the golden ages of cinema. Golden, as in more like molden. Way before my time. This demented slice of afterschool flavored terror has the honor of being the first film of theirs released to actually have me salivating and jumping up and down like a giddy little hellspawn.
The film revolves around a defrocked minister brought back to life from an accident to seek out evil and conquer it. The storyline of the film is short on facts and big on speculation, so one is only left to assume their way through much of the happenings.
James Farentino plays the man of god who has fallen from grace and grapples with his reclamation of faith in order to battle the forces of evil that appear to have settled in to the Helen Page girlschool in Salem, Oregon and are causing a lot of unexplained fires.
Pages in a typewriter ignite. Curtains burst into flame. The class president becomes a pyro-enhanced princess. A womanizing biology teacher, played by a pre-Han Solo Harrison Ford, explodes into a ball of flames. It all leads up to a climax between Mr. yo of no no faith and the demonic forces that manifests itself in the body of the crusty headmistress.
The battle between good and evil rages poolside as the horrified girls watch on. Along with Harrison Ford bursting into a fiery marshmellow, this was one of the moments that I always remembered from the film. For some reason I imagine they were unable to explore the joys of chunking up pea soup on network television so the producers had to improvise. The evil bitch mistress spits forth a demonic cocktail of nails and what appears to be pool water into the face of the unenthused god pappy. Sure it's not as cool as getting a gooey green face wash. I just always thought this was a great scene though. The whole climax in the pool room, though rushed due to being a tv movie, is quite intense and entertaining.
I think the simple storytelling and its vagueness as to who and what exactly is the motivation and origin of Farentino's character works well for this movie. Obviously it could have been something way epic with a more elaborately executed plot structure. But it's short and to the point and its Exorcist themed bad self, even still today, hits the viewer in far more effective ways than any of the current crap crop of exorcism flicks.
This movie is by no means anything spectacular as it's pretty basic and quite tame as horror films go. But it's an interesting film none the less and if you care to track it down it's well worth a viewing. It's subtle and it's creepy. It also has a nice cheesy 70's cast of actors.
As previously mentioned it features Harrison Ford in a minor role. It was aired only a few weeks before the release of Star Wars and the rest, as they say, is history for Mr. Solo.
Oh, and for horror fans it also features one of our all time scream queens, the always fabulous PJ Soles in a small role too, post Carrie and pre-Halloween.
Sadly this movie would not prosper like Mr. Ford's career and it would slink off into obscurity to be virtually forgotten. Until now that is. Warner Brothers and their archives collection have treated this little known treasure with some well deserved respect. The transfer is very good. It also comes in a nicely made dvd case too.
Many times when I run across one of those long gone, but never forgotten, flicks of my youth I wind up yawning and scratching my head as I wonder what the hell I was thinking. In many cases, it doesn't appear that I was thinking at all. The Possessed is hardly the classic that I remember it to be. It's dated as hell and quite heavy on the afterschool special aspect. But running across this film all these years later put a smile on my lips and after watching it again that smile managed to stay put. Can't ask for more than that.
***Original post date 3/21/10***
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