Review of The Passing

The Passing (1983)
8/10
Much better then I thought
27 September 2003
*****************SPOILERS******************* Weird movie about two elderly army buddies who, after living together and looking after each other for years, come to the realization that the end is near and how their getting too old and sick to look after and help each other as the thought of death or suicide starts enter their minds.

The movie then cuts to an unnamed big city where we see a brutal murder and the man who committed the murder is later brought to justice. It then strikes me that the movie plot takes place in the future when it turns that one of the men in the beginning of the movie, Ernie, James Plaster, has submitted his name to a state program that takes the soul of a terminally ill or dying person and somehow puts it into the body of a healthy executed convict.

Ernie is worried about his friend Leviticus, Walton Benjamin, who's already tried to commit suicide and because of Ernie's failing health he feels that if he's not around to take care of Leviticus the worst would happen to him. It seems that during WWII Leviticus saved Ernie's life in Europe an Ernie feels that he owes Leviticus at least that much.

Ernie gets his "Body change" but when he returns back home to Leviticus as a different and much younger person he finds that what Ernie thought it, the body change, would do wasn't exactly what he expected or hoped for.

Very good story about a subject that's been done before with bigger budgets and top actors about dying and coming back as someone else, but not under the same conditions as the movie "The Passing" has with a more realistic outcome. Too bad this movie is almost impossible to find in the video stores and I doubt we'll ever see it on TV because it's a lot better then most movies about the same subject are.
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