MartinHafer This film begins in 1692 with the Salem witch trials. Ann Putnam is a young girl who has accused several people of witchcraft. This scene is actually based on real events and characters and the real life Putnam was a young girl who ultimately accused 62 people of witchcraft! At first, folks believed her rants and several folks were put to death or imprisoned but after a while it became apparent that Ann was just a nasty piece of work!The scene then switches to the present. Loreen Graham (also Susan Swift) is on a class field trip to Salem and soon weird stuff starts happening all around Loreen. A guy dressed in stereotypical Puritan garb chases after her and he keeps appearing and reappearing. And, the girls' teacher is killed right before their eyes in a weird 'accident'! Eventually, this same Puritan guy appears IN Loreen's home and he's shot several times...with no effect whatsoever! The police arrive and handcuff the guy (which is odd in light of the bullets) and tossed him in jail...and there the man out of time languishes!! Later in the film, Loreen starts acting like Ann...as if she is somehow becoming this hellishly awful person.Considering the film was directed by Bert I. Gordon, I automatically assumed it would be crap. After all, he's responsible for crap such as "Empire of the Ants", "Food of the Gods" and "Picture Mommy Dead"...and quite few other genuinely bad films. But despite this and a rather low overall score of 4.3, it's pretty good for what it is...and has several interesting twists that help it stand apart from dozens of other Satanism films (a VERY popular genre in the 70s and early 80s). Overall, a tad silly but quite entertaining for this sort of thing.FYI--The Salem Witch Museum portrayed in this film is an actual museum which brings the trials to life. I visited there myself many many years ago.

Leofwine_draca While hardly for all tastes, THE COMING is an interesting and thoughtful possession/reincarnation horror film which gets complicated when a time-travel element is introduced. There aren't nearly enough films made these days about the witch-hunts of centuries past anyway, so any that do get made must have something going for them. Directed, somewhat surprisingly, by '50s monster-maker Bert I. Gordon, this breathes a breath of fresh air into a genre which, at the time, was being besieged by masked killers and inane teenagers dicing with death. I'm pleased to say that there isn't a single teen to be found anywhere in this movie! The film is not brilliant, with the low-budget often showing in the poor quality of the production, and many scenes take place in the dark which often makes it difficult to see what's going on (or maybe it's just the quality of the tape I saw...).One of the things I liked most about this film was the acting, which was surprisingly good for a no-budget genre. Nobody is brilliant, but the film is packed with affectionate, obscure characters and nobody puts a foot wrong either. Susan Swift, a child actress who resembles and recalls ALICE SWEET ALICE's Paula Sheppard, mixing the same childhood innocence with an adult evil to scary effect. Although Swift is often hysterically over the top and her incessant whiny crying is enough to make the viewer join in, she's a lot better than many other child actresses I could mention. Albert Salmi is underused as the town Sheriff but nonetheless creates a warm and gently amusing character, the likes of which have almost died out these days in films.Also deserving of praise are David Rounds, playing a confused time traveller who puts in an appreciated understated performance and John Peters, playing the inherently evil Reverend, a great "boo! hiss!" type villain. Tisha Sterling shows promise but is wasted in a nothing role as Swift's perplexed mother. The film focuses on plot and atmosphere rather than action and in-your-face horror, although there are a couple of tacked-on gore sequences which look like they belong in a different film. I guess Gordon couldn't resist inserting a couple of his patented cheap but cheerful special effects into the film, including a briefly-seen spider demon which enters a cadaver, but these are used sparingly and to good effect.The film is full of flashbacks and most of it is set at night, which was enough to confuse this viewer. However, the cast of quirky characters and odd situations, the smattering of gore and the fairly original plot was enough to make me enjoy this movie, even if it is a little slow-going in spots. And hell, in a week in which I've watched the triple distilled evil of NINJA HUNT, THE MUTANT KID, and, to top it off (and nearly me in the process), the godawful TROLL 2, anything with an ounce of sense or intelligence would look good to me.

HumanoidOfFlesh In the Salem of 1692,a group of witches are burned at the stake.In present-day Salem,the spirit of young witch Ann possesses schoolgirl Loreen Graham during a class trip to the museum.Loreen then enters a cross-temporal battle to stop the evil Reverend Samuel Parris sending another innocent victim to the stake."Burned at the Stake" by Bert I.Gordon is a pretty tame witchcraft horror in the vein of "Crowhaven Farm".There are some huge lapses in logic,the characters appear and disappear with ease and there is really no resolution if witchcraft is being real or not.There is very little blood and absolutely no nudity,so fans of exploitation cinema will be disappointed.6 stakes out of 10.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) Bert I. Gordon's BURNED AT THE STAKE, inexplicably titled THE COMING on the British made video I managed to see, is essentially a chick-flick horror movie tapping into both THE EXORCIST and the legendary Salem Witch Fiasco with an interesting angle on time travel. Others have described the plot in enough detail, my interest in how the film essentially boiled down into a clever little manipulation aimed at 17 to 25 year old females who still remember the angst of their adolescent years. It's quite watchable, has some decent shock sequences, but ultimately raises more questions than it answers when viewed in a contemporary light that sees through the film's contrivances.For instance, you have to wonder about any horror movie that casts a 17 year old girl as a 12 - 14 year old who's age is never really established. At one point lead actress Susan Swift -- who is superb, given the material -- is playing hopscotch when I realized she was perhaps a bit too old for that sort of thing. Or at least a bit too well developed as the film takes great pains time & again to provide her with costuming that seems to be more interested in showing us how she was maturing into an attractive young lady. They tap into the Linda Blair thing by having her spend the bulk of the film either dressed up as a Puritan serving girl, a schoolgirl, or running around present day Salem in her nightgown so much that you wonder why nobody seems to notice & ask if she needs a ride home.She also spends an awful lot of the film writhing around on the floor in a demonic frenzy, which is where I suspect a lot of the interest in the film lies. Then the movie goes out of it's way to be respectable, showing it's true colors of having it's cake and eating it too by lacking the traditional nudity and explicit gore that early 1980s horror movies are so well known for. Yet make no mistake, the film is an exploitation exercise, albeit one in surprisingly good enough taste to appeal to a female audience who will very quickly come to identify with the poor young thing as she realizes that she is a modern day reincarnation of one of the young hysterical liars at the focus of the Salem Witch Fiasco. Then there is the scene where she sits on the steps of her school bus unsupervised while the rest of her class is being given a tour of a colonial era haunted cemetery, the improbability of which is only underscored by having her teacher literally struck dead from above by a coincidence of the most extreme kind.Then again all of the adults in the film are ineffectual, stupid, or at best well-meaning but ultimately wrong. All that is except for one of the resident present day witches who walks around dressed like Elvira and is the only one with any hope of getting to the bottom of the mystery at hand. Which is, how can a 17th century Puritan farmer suddenly find himself transported to 1981 era Salem? The farmer is the only truly sympathetic character in the film (even the local investigative journalist carries a flask of whiskey with him for a quick nip to get him through some research work) and yet the filmmakers have the clod invade the young woman's bedroom where he is understandably shot at point blank range by her mother, who doesn't seem to understand that good Massachusetts liberals don't keep loaded handguns in their bed stands. The scene is creepy but for the wrong reasons, since after all this is supposed to be a 12 to 14 year old girl. Couldn't he have just invaded the kitchen while she was fixing a snack?Perhaps this is the key to understanding the film, which is more or less a young woman's fantasy vision of a horror film world, replete with cobblestone streets, Gothic churches, cloistered old cemeteries, fetching costumes, and authority figures who are too caught up in their adult function roles to understand her inner turmoil. Good old Albert Salmi has a thankless role as a police officer who is nice enough to re-unite our heroic witch with her "familiar" Rottweiler hound but intellectually ill-equipped to understand what is going on around him. He's like an ineffective father figure, concerned and empowered but ultimately unable to comprehend what he's found himself in the middle of. The finale also has enough fire & brimstone yet ultimately fails to answer the basic question at the heart of the film: Was there actually a supernatural force at work in Salem in 1692? Damned if I know.5/10