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The stratospheric aspiration is evident from the beginning, the introductory vision between the celestial guardian (John Huston) and the moppet-wraith is modeled after nothing less than Murnau's Faust. "Beyond the imagination," this fable told by a blond-surfer Jesus Christ (Franco Nero) to bald-headed cherubs, the fate of galaxies brought to bear on Atlanta, Georgia. The fateful pregnancy concerns the lover (Joanne Nail) of a sports impresario (Lance Henriksen), the plan is to sire an unholy son to go with her unholy daughter (Paige Conner), everything is arranged by satanists in boardrooms. (The little girl flexes her powers during a basketball game by detonating the ball during a climactic slam dunk, then makes short work of her young rivals at an ice rink.) "Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But we must have that power." A candid joke writ cosmic, a woman's control of her magical womb at the tail end of the paranoid Seventies, quite barmy and overflowing with imagistic lushness. Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic shares the avian element, an investigator (Glenn Ford) snoops into the heroine's gilded cage and gets his peepers pecked for his trouble. The chase through the sex shop suddenly yields to a Wellesian hall of mirrors, a trip to the clinic offers Sam Peckinpah as the abortionist, the giant green monitor of a Pong game finds its echo in an illuminated landing strip for a little lampoon of Spielberg's spaceships. Amid the madness, the poignancy of a quiet moment shared between Huston and Shelley Winters like old Hollywood professionals in a Cinecittà farrago. "You know, we need a magician on this case." After this, Hooper simply had to make Lifeforce. With Mel Ferrer, J.A. Townsend, and Joe Dorsey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |