Incubo infernale

Before watching it, I decided to give the trailer a look and liked what I saw. But when it came to actually watching the feature. Well that was another story. Even with such a novel idea, it couldn't escape its roots that hang heavily in this old-hat haunted house format. No surprises or shocks here. The pallid story never grips or inserts much interest, as it becomes a wearisome tale of never-ending, suspicious tedium. The slow grinding pace doesn't help matters either. It seems to be all build up, but director George Bowers' predictable touch can't seem to raise much in the way of suspense and really overuses the usual scare tactics with miserable results. This even goes for Webster Lewis' generically telegraphed score. One or two effective surreal set-pieces (involving the hearse and its driver) and Mori Kawa's nicely atmospheric photography, just can't make-up for the lame, weak and overly boring presentation. Performances feel wooden and terribly uninterested, and it seems to show. Trish Van Devere fluffs about, and Joseph Cotton adds his two bobs worth. Put it under the very forgettable files.

As much as I admire Trish VanDevere, this 1980 movie-of-the-week just doesn't cut it. A recently divorced woman moves into her late aunt's old house in the woods, only to be haunted by eerie figures and an old black hearse that appears to want to kill her. As she tries to figure out what's what, the lonely woman meets several locals, including a less-than-friendly general store proprietor, a hulking, horny sheriff, a nasty real estate agent and a guy her age who seems too good to be true. This low-budget effort, slightly reminiscent of a ghost flick VanDevere shot the same year with husband George C. Scott, apparently started out as a slasher flick but was turned into a haunted house/witchcraft thriller. A muddled plot and sloppy editing doesn't help. For genre fans only.

I have read reviews good and bad for this film and find that I cannot disagree with any of them, for The Hearse is good in certain respects and not so good in others. Watching this film recently, for the first time in many years, I was reminded of other stories that came both before and after it, 1963's The Haunting and 2001's The Others coming immediately to mind.

There is nothing better than a good ghost story with mood and imagination and The Hearse claims these properties to some degree. That it is an over-cliched film with comic relief that doesn't quite fit counts against it, as does the unlikely and disappointing ending. Trish Van Devere, a competent if not supremely talented actress, and the always pleasing Joseph Cotton are the lead players, although Ms. Van Devere's screen love interest, David Gautreaux as Tom, came close to stealing it from both of them. I did not feel that Joseph Cotton had enough screen time to please his fans, but as they say, `Always leave them wanting more!' The story: Jane, portrayed by Ms. Van Devere, inherits an old house in the country. Jane's aunt had practiced Satan worship in it and the local town folks were not pleased to see her niece move in. In a nice addition to the storyline, we learn that Jane had a nervous breakdown after a messy divorce and her mental stability quickly comes into question. Jane sees images in the house and is convinced that somebody is stalking her in a sinister looking funeral home hearse. Throughout the course of the story she has interesting encounters with such diverse people as the local estate attorney, hardware store operators and their son, an oddball minister and her new love interest. Who was after her, and why did he/she want Jane out of her aunt's house? There are many red herrings and barely enough chills and thrills to attract the younger audiences that were just then, in 1980, two years after Jamie Lee Curtis and Halloween, making their presence felt at the box office and soon-to-be neighborhood video stores. As stated, the ending was a real letdown after it seemed the film had come to a satisfying conclusion.

Perhaps that is why this film generates strong emotions; it tries to be too much to too many. That it has something for everybody and, for the most part, succeeds in putting it all together is one of it's major strengths. The fact that this also causes it to be disjointed and somewhat awkward at times is the downside of this, but remember, The Hearse was never intended to be a summer blockbuster. That a film such as this can still generate intelligent discussion 22 years after its release is remarkable in itself.

"The Hearse" is a low-budget, bottom-of-the-barrel little shocker. It's uninvolving throughout, and never terrifying. The hopelessly cliched story, with all the familiar "haunted house" tricks, would be enough to sink this movie, but the job is completed by the poor direction and the murky look of the film, which often makes it hard for us to understand what's happening onscreen. The ending leaves almost everything unexplained and is just as arbitrary and nonsensical as the rest of this film. The good performances can't save it by any means.

A woman, Jane, moves to a large house in a small town which she has inherited from a dead aunt. The locals shun her on account of believing her aunt was in league with the devil. Soon, Jane is haunted by the appearances of some ghosts, including a mysterious hearse which constantly menaces her.

This film fits comfortably into the haunted house film bracket, which by 1980 was firmly a popular sub-genre of the horror film with movies such as The Amityville Horror (1979), The Changeling (1980) and The Shining (1980) raking it in at the box office. It would only be fair to say that The Hearse is fairly derivative of some of the big hitters of its day but I have to say I found it to be a pretty good effort on the whole. Trish Van Devere puts in an engaging performance in the lead role, while Joseph Cotton, veteran actor of various classics from the past like Citizen Kane (1941), appears in one of the numerous genre flicks he pitched up in in the last decade of his career. Aside from the ominous black hearse, the sinister events incorporate an odd reverend, a satanic church and ghostly appearances of a woman at a window. By the end of things, it's true that the relevance of everything has not been fully established but when it comes to stories about ghostly goings on, this is not exactly a problem in my book. A bit of ambiguity is not really a bad thing.