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"Our Blessing," reads the sign over the farm's fence, the subjective camera prowls beneath it in patented slasher fashion. The young heartland widow (Maren Jensen), related by marriage to a fundamentalist sect that "makes the Amish look like swingers." (As the fearsome patriarch, Ernest Borgnine gray-bearded and beetle-browed reverses the besieged pacifist of Fleischer's Violent Saturday.) City pals (Sharon Stone, Susan Buckner) visit for support, extra attention comes from the neighbor (Lisa Hartman) whose mother (Lois Nettleton) has no use for the male gender. Deaths follow, shrouded in shadow and tinged with superstition: "Hellfire to the incubus!" Wes Craven and warped families (Michael Berryman is on hand for the link to The Hills Have Eyes), as much a private reckoning with repressive upbringing as Schrader's Hardcore. A feeling for the poisonous pastorale, for the pearlescent field dotted with black-clad figures, for the tenebrous netherworld inside a barn on a sunny day. (Wyeth is a mainstay, with Thomas Hart Benton for the swirls on the neighbor's canvases.) Stone's monologue about the arachnoid violator evokes Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, the Reaper becomes her idée fixe in the wake of frightful reveries: "You can't lock him out. He comes in whenever he wants." Buckner meanwhile takes up with the severe clan's straying scion (Jeff East), a screening of Craven's own Summer of Fear and an earful of Rod Stewart comprise the joyride cut bloodily short. The snake in the bathtub anticipates a key image in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Castle's Homicidal is brought to bear on the culprit's identity. "You are a stench in the nostrils of God!" The punchline is out of Dreyer's Day of Wrath, the incubus really is an incubus. With Colleen Riley, Douglas Barr, Lawrence Montaigne, and Kevin Cooney.
--- Fernando F. Croce |