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The shape of trauma, the inexplicable and the inescapable. "Some things are more terrible than other things." The false security of a locked bedroom, the heroine (Barbara Hershey) finds out one night after work, suddenly an unseen foul thing is upon her to the rhythm of the pile-driving soundtrack. Not a nightmare but a spectral violator, shaking walls and exploding windows, accelerating her car during traffic. Hysteria, according to the psychiatrist (Ron Silver) who acknowledges no bruises, just the latest in a life full of dubious fellows. (Her father was an intimidating minister, her tough-guy beau bolts in the face of the supernatural.) "Your creature is a symbol." "A symbol of what?" The key is Fuseli, the gremlin is ultimately closer to the id monster from Forbidden Planet. No Freudian rock is left unturned ("delusions, anxieties, hallucinations") until the woman's alarmed truth is recognized, eager young academics take up her case and try to isolate the invisible invader. Sidney J. Furie shoots all of this with unstable angles in charged Panavision frames, pivoting on the evocative image of the suburban home reconstructed as a laboratory experiment. (Cinematic allegories of what can be seen and what should be shown build toward this giant dollhouse scrutinized by monitors, blatantly a set with tanks of liquid helium where the ceiling should be.) The anchor is Hershey's strength and believability in a climax derived from Quatermass and the Pit, with the terrorized protagonist at last able to rage at the abyss made tangible. "I'm so tired of being scared..." Verhoeven takes the wolf's vantage point, as it were, in Hollow Man. With David Labiosa, George Coe, Margaret Blye, Jacqueline Brookes,Raymond Singer, Richard Brestoff, Allan Rich, and Alex Rocco.
--- Fernando F. Croce |