Michael Winner's 1977 "The Sentinel" has kind of gotten lost over the years, and of course it's a shameless ride on the pea-soup-stained coat-tails of "The Exorcist," not to mention "Rosemary's Baby." But it is also creepy and so darned 70s that it has taken on the shine of a horror gem, (you might have to scrub past the needlessly convoluted investigation that ruins the second half.) A fashionable New York model (Cristina Raines) dating a catch of a lawyer (Chris Sarandon) decides to move into a suspiciously available apartment building where her neighbors include a blind priest, twin old ladies, an old fruit played by Burgess Meredith:
and a masturbation-prone French ballerina played by a young Beverly D'Angelo:
Probably the first thing you'll notice beside the pervasive lack of supportive underwear (thank you, bra-burning feminism!) is the AMAZING CAST, perhaps the best ever accidentally assembled for a minor scary movie. I say accidentally because half of the actors are either exiting fame (Burgess Meredith, John Carradine, Jose Ferrer, Eli Wallach, Ava FREAKIN' Gardner) or hadn't entered it yet ( Beverly D'Angelo, Jerry Orbach, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken.) The other thing you should take away is that, while most of the movie is just cats-jumping-at-you atmosphere, LITERALLY, there is one final scene that makes it into my nightmare canon. Director Winner draws on his inner, freakish Todd Browning and gives us a parade of deformities: some of it is Hollywood make-up, some of it is actual genetic misfortune, all of it disturbing as fuck. This is one to catch at 3 in the morning, when nothing else is distracting you.
And kindly file Cristina Raines under: "Hotties Lost to Time."
1 comment:
OH, and Tom Berenger randomly appears in the final scene, too.
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