Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Briefly : Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) Scary Movies 7

not Jessica and not dead

Jessica, her husband and a friend move to a small town. When they arrive at the house they find a squater living there. They invite her to stay. During the first night together they hold an impromtu seance calling on the spirits of anyone who died in the house.  After that strange events begin happening and Jessica begins to see bodies. Is Jessica going insane once more?

What was once probably a scary little film, now is a quaint little curio with a great name. While the film has some great moments and a nice sense of is she crazy or not, the film suffers from Zohra Lampert's performance as Jessica. A collection of ticks and weird turns that are suppose to show her as a woman on the edge, the result is to make her kind of unlikable.

The other problem is that what is going on, kind of doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. Sure you could argue that the film is from the point of view of a crazy woman, but at the same time there is more going on and it never quite comes together (a curse that many early 1970's horror films suffer from).

This isn't to say that the film doesn't have some chills, it does, but the things that work seem to have been brought in from another movie. If only I had come in about half way in I would have loved this film.

The film screens Saturday at Lincoln Center.

No comments:

Post a Comment