Jenny Seagrove, whose beauty was positively pelagic in "Local Hero", is here a nanny hired by an upscale yuppie couple (Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell). She's still striking, sinewy and phocine, but the movie makes no sense whatever. It incorporates all kinds of generic devices, mostly from "The Omen," but, really, from all over the slasher area. The director, William Friedkin, has turned into one of those folk artists who assembles pieces of scrap iron and other detritus and welds them together into a sculpture so abstract that it loses all meaning except that of an assemblage of pieces of misshapen junk. And this from the guy who gave us "The Exorcist."
Is it really necessary to outline this so-called plot? Okay, but briefly.
Seagrove has these supernatural powers -- surprise! -- and has a pack of wolves to act as instruments of her will. She causes the death of the yuppies' first nanny choice, gets the job, moves in, and begins to take over the child. It's not clear why she has designs on the baby. Something to do with a sacred tree. She can cleanse her body of wounds at the tree and apparently sacrifices babies to it. Maybe the movie should have been called "Yggdrasil." That would have been the most original thing about it.
You want nonsense? Here's nonsense. The baby is unnaturally quiescent. It respondeth not to stimuli. The baby is in a room in a hospital with a doctor bending over it ("maybe encephalitis", he mutters) and the two anxious parents clutching each other in the background. The nanny enters wreathlike into the room and goes to the little baby container. She stares down at the kid, murmurs "I can make you immortal," unplugs the leads from the EKG, and begins to walk out with the wrapped-up tike. The parents yank the kid from Seagrove's arms, push her to the floor, and scoot screeching out the door. So they're in a big hospital corridor, with docs and nurses and other staff walking around, and what do they do? They RUSH OUT and GO HOME! That's so Seagrove and the wolves or coyotes can find them and harass them further because it's not yet time for the movie to end and a few more shock scenes are required to make the quota.
Two good points. (1) A couple of shots of Jenny Seagrove nude in the bathtub and being cured by the tree and standing by a brook in a moonlit glade. Very artistic, I thought. (2) The production design, which really IS good, and the photography. A pop-up illustration in a child's fairy tale book, evoking the frighteningly prickly forest that Hansel and Gretl stumble through, turns into the real thing. And that shot of Seagrove in the moonlight by the brook really IS impressive, despite the fact that you would search forever without finding a non-cultivated tree anywhere in the neighborhood of Los Angeles, never mind a spooky woodland. The rooms are unobtrusively decorated with prickly plants and various cacti. Nicely done and giving evidence of having some thought put into it, which the screenplay lacks.
Is it really necessary to outline this so-called plot? Okay, but briefly.
Seagrove has these supernatural powers -- surprise! -- and has a pack of wolves to act as instruments of her will. She causes the death of the yuppies' first nanny choice, gets the job, moves in, and begins to take over the child. It's not clear why she has designs on the baby. Something to do with a sacred tree. She can cleanse her body of wounds at the tree and apparently sacrifices babies to it. Maybe the movie should have been called "Yggdrasil." That would have been the most original thing about it.
You want nonsense? Here's nonsense. The baby is unnaturally quiescent. It respondeth not to stimuli. The baby is in a room in a hospital with a doctor bending over it ("maybe encephalitis", he mutters) and the two anxious parents clutching each other in the background. The nanny enters wreathlike into the room and goes to the little baby container. She stares down at the kid, murmurs "I can make you immortal," unplugs the leads from the EKG, and begins to walk out with the wrapped-up tike. The parents yank the kid from Seagrove's arms, push her to the floor, and scoot screeching out the door. So they're in a big hospital corridor, with docs and nurses and other staff walking around, and what do they do? They RUSH OUT and GO HOME! That's so Seagrove and the wolves or coyotes can find them and harass them further because it's not yet time for the movie to end and a few more shock scenes are required to make the quota.
Two good points. (1) A couple of shots of Jenny Seagrove nude in the bathtub and being cured by the tree and standing by a brook in a moonlit glade. Very artistic, I thought. (2) The production design, which really IS good, and the photography. A pop-up illustration in a child's fairy tale book, evoking the frighteningly prickly forest that Hansel and Gretl stumble through, turns into the real thing. And that shot of Seagrove in the moonlight by the brook really IS impressive, despite the fact that you would search forever without finding a non-cultivated tree anywhere in the neighborhood of Los Angeles, never mind a spooky woodland. The rooms are unobtrusively decorated with prickly plants and various cacti. Nicely done and giving evidence of having some thought put into it, which the screenplay lacks.