jadavix "The Survivor" is a bizarre, incomprehensible attempt at a horror story that barely registers as that or anything at all.The bits that one assumes are meant to be scary are merely confusing and come out of nowhere. The soundtrack pummels you with frantic music but this is merely irritating since you can't understand what, if anything, you are supposed to be scared by.The plot is fairly simple, so why is it so confusing? It's about a pilot who survives a plane crash that kills everyone else on board. He is visited by some kind of clairvoyant or something, played by Jenny Agutter, who is about as mystical in this role as the CEO of Wendy's. Her role in the plot is obvious on paper (how else is the movie going to get the supernatural bent going?), but when handled this badly, becomes confusing and you may wonder what she is there for.The ending, I admit, was clever. It's just everything that led up to it was so bad that it was completely wasted, like the rest of the movie.

meddlecore A woman experiences a premonition about a devastating plane crash in the suburbs. This turns out to be accurate, when a plane crashes next to the home of a photographer- who is one of the first responders on the scene. A pilot is the sole remaining survivor of the wreck. He manages to walk away from the disaster virtually unscathed- suffering only from retrograde amnesia and survivor's guilt. He becomes obsessed with piecing together exactly what happened.A few days after the crash, the photographer becomes haunted by premonitions of a young girl with burns all over her face. Meanwhile, the pilot does his best to follow the investigation...but it's getting him nowhere. His most solid lead is a mysterious woman who claims to have advanced knowledge about the incident.When he tries to get information from her, however, she suffers from a hysterical fit and attacks him. Despite the fact that it was her that approached him to help...while looking for some help herself.Eventually she comes around, and claims that she was present at the crash...but not in a typical way. She seems to be a psychic medium through which victims of the crash (or something) are (is) trying to contact the pilot.Subsequently, when the photographer leaves his photographs to develop, his wife looks at them...only to discover they are filled with ghastly images of some sort of demonic entity. Obviously she dies.The psychic woman then approaches the pilot for a second time, now suggesting he trigger regression by returning to the site, with hopes that it will evoke his lost memories. He agrees to participate.Together, they seek help from a local priest and return to the cockpit, where his memories begin to return...to her.By now, the photographer has stumbled upon the crime scene that used to be his darkroom...and gotten himself killed- slasher style- in the process, just like his wife.It's at this point that the pilot gets a chance to meet the demon responsible for all of this death and destruction face-to-face...and he's coming for his soul! This film is short and sweet. Packed into 1 hour and 15 minutes, it's an Aussie flick that seems like it was made-for-TV. At first I thought it was going to suck hard, because it has what is probably one of the most hilariously bad plane crash sequences in cinematic history (it literally looks like a camera tracking in unison with a plane wing that is moving through a movie studio). But that aside, the ending really redeems this awesome little film.It's quite evident that ---SPOILER--- The Sixth Sense stole it's twist from this screenplay. With this one being a bit more supernatural, overall. I particularly love the way the filmmaker denotes our entrance into and exit from the "Other World". Great little flick that is definitely worth a watch.6 out of 10

Scott LeBrun One of only a few James Herbert adaptations to reach the screen (the others being "Deadly Eyes" a.k.a. "The Rats", "Fluke", and "The Haunted"), this is a pretty effective movie overall. Directed by actor David Hemmings ("Blowup", "Deep Red"), it's handled with a large degree of sensitivity and subtlety, and is quite slowly paced as well, focusing on building its atmosphere rather than centering around shocks - all reasons why some horror fans might not care for it too much. But if you're patient with this one, you will be rewarded with a film that succeeds at creating a vague sense of unease and maintaining a level of unpredictability.It certainly begins with a bang: a 747 plane crash lands in the Australian countryside, and its pilot Keller (Robert Powell) walks away without a scratch. Burdened with the guilt of being the only survivor, he's also suffering from amnesia and is determined to discover the cause of the crash. He's eventually assisted by a young woman with psychic abilities, played by an especially beautiful Jenny Agutter.Also in the cast are Australian actress Angela Punch McGregor, whom you may remember as Michael Caine's leading lady in the film version of Peter Benchley's "The Island", and Hollywood legend Joseph Cotten, although Cotten truthfully never gets a whole lot to do as a local priest. Thankfully, Powell and Agutter are so good that they carry the movie quite well.The paranormal is introduced into this moody story a bit at a time, with Hemmings never going for the cheap thrill; whatever violence is in the movie is mostly done off screen. Audiences may well appreciate the incredible work that the production does in creating a crash site, and enjoy the way that things wrap up with a creepy reveal / confrontation and a nifty (if not all that original) final twist.As was said, this may not be to every taste, but genre fans looking for more obscure efforts from decades past are advised to look into it.Seven out of 10.

MARIO GAUCI David Hemmings is perhaps best-known for starring in Michelangelo Antonioni's BLOW-UP (1966) and Dario Argento's DEEP RED (1975), so it's rather unsurprising that elements from these two movies find themselves in his fifth directorial stint shot entirely in Australia.Robert Powell plays the title role - the pilot of a plane which crashlands but who managed to evade an even greater tragedy by bringing it down in a field (which occasionally serves as a children's playground); Jenny Agutter is an enigmatic medium and eyewitness to the crash who uneasily teams with an amnesiac Powell to find the real cause of the accident; and, in a mere couple of scenes, Joseph Cotten adds a modicum of dignity to the proceedings as the local priest.Being adapted from a James Herbert novel, it can't help but involve the supernatural as everything is definitely not as it seems on the surface: the investigating officials are being killed off by the vengeful spirits of the dead passengers, a high-ranking airline official is somehow involved in the crash and Robert Powell is shown at the very end to have not survived the disaster after all! Intriguing? Definitely. Confusing? You bet. Exciting? Not really. Unfortunately, the right ingredients are there but the soufflé obstinately fails to rise, as it were. For what it's worth, Brian May's electronic score (not the Queen guitarist, mind you) is quite effective and the version I watched was edited down to 87 minutes from an original length of 99 or 110, depending on which sources you believe!