Rent The Entity (1981)

LAYING A GHOST - The Entity review by Frank TALKER™

Above-average horror movie which alternates between a psychological explanation of the events depicted and a para-psychological one.

First, we are presented with an oddly-lascivious ghost whom repeatedly rapes the heroine (brilliantly played by Barbara HERSHEY) in her imagination, but with real bruises to substantiate her claims - yet no police involvement?

We are then told that the heroine's parents were sexual perverts, that she has an Electra complex, that she wants to have sex with her handsome teenage-son and there is even an implication that her psychiatrist is getting personally involved in her case. And HERSHEY's self-evident sex-appeal makes the plot's sexual implications all-too-believable.

There is an ideological battle here between those whom believe HERSHEY's character to be a hysterical female, troubled by deep-seated sexual fears, and those whom believe that the entity stalking her is a tangible presence. This ambivalence is resolved in a slightly-underwhelming ending which is deliberately left ambiguous.

Underpinning the sexual tension on show here is a feminist allegory about a woman's proper place in a Judeo-Christian Western society and the necessarily-sexist and -misogynist incubus - with poltergeist tendencies - being a metaphor for the gender oppression of women in Caucasian and Jewish cultures.

The writing here is first class, the characters clearly differentiated & everyone involved offers-up convincing performances which very much helps the suspension-of-disbelief required in a somewhat bizarre tale loosely-based on a true story. And the Dutch angles the director Sidney J FURIE loves to use actually add to the melodramatic sense of emotional disorientation rather than potentially irritating or bemusing the audience.

What "The Entity" lacks is a musical score that is less insistent on getting your attention than the somewhat grating one presented here. It also needed a motivation for the sexual behaviour of the titular entity which rises above the merely lecherous, although it is strongly-implied that the entity is her late, sexually-creepy father.