"You're probably too young. When I was around when Orson Welles told the people over CBS that the Martians were in New Jersey - and believe me, the show was not that convincing, not that good... and you want me to tell them that God is at 57th Street and Madison Avenue, coaching snipers?"
Want to see a priest look out a window? Want to see it again? Have I got the movie for you! This is a slow and funky little walk through a model's life in her Brooklyn brownstone that she happens to share with a creepy old priest. Will hijinks ensue? You bet your bottom dollar! But the most interesting thing that happens is a cat's birthday party. That and a young Christopher Walken but he barely talks.
⭐⭐.5
Trigger Warning Self Harm, Suicide Attempt, Human Beings with Deformities (Used as Props)
So Alison is dating Michael but she is an independent lady so she moves into a brownstone in Brooklyn that happens to house an enormously creepy Priest on the top floor who just stares out over everything even though he is apparently blind. The eclectic neighbors are bothering Alison as well as headaches and fainting. She has fainted at work twice now and is chalking it up to not getting enough sleep because she is visited by the eccentric old man who lives above her (he literally brings his cat and bird into her home) and has a less charming meeting with the highly sexual lesbians downstairs. This is all before there is a birthday party for Jezebel the cat! Hooray! But that night there is a lot of walking around in the apartment just above Allison's and she is stressed out about it so she complains to the realtor about the tenants and… Her and the priest are the only ones living there. Dun dun dun!
They looked in the apartments that had previously been occupied and found nothing which was very shocking to poor Alison who very much remembered singing “Happy Birthday” to a cat. This is distressing to her as well as the fact that she reads a book and all the words are in Latin to her (but not to anyone else). Michael gets it translated and it is a prayer. Spooky! The scheme is that the church is somehow taking people suicidal and then forcing them to live out the rest of their lives as folks of the cloth? Basically the poor sap, I mean, Priest, that is upstairs always watching but not seeing (as Alison so kindly pointed out) used to be a man by a different name who apparently committed suicide BUT really he lived and they made him a priest! Wack! Simply wack! But even worse they find a file saying that the church is going to turn Alison next! They only have one day to save her from the transformation and they don’t even know how it happens exactly!
Okay so basically the people of the cloth are the good guys who stave off the ghosts of the murderers who live in the building and I guess they don’t help the next person who is going to be attached onto by the ghosts because they can only do that dramatically at the end. Seriously, they covered up over the sign that said “this is the entrance to hell” because they want the next nun or priest to waltz in and maybe kill themselves. WACK. They didn't help Alison 'til the end and she went to the door several times! Only at the very end when she is about to end it all do they appear and by then it is too late for any ending other than her becoming the next Sentinel but come ON. She ends up blind and alone, not that Murderer Michael was a keeper but come ON.
Oh yeah, when Michael is killed by the other priest for trying to kill the main creepy priest so he comes back as a spooky ghost and we find out that he got somebody to kill his previous lady! Wack! The most believable thing in this movie was Jeff Goldblum jumping up to help when Alison passed out at a work party. He shoves more food into his mouth and then bursts through the doors with her in his arms and I felt safer than when Tony Todd held Barbara in Night of the Living Dead 1990.
This movie was slow and weird, it took forever to get to the climax which I thought was pretty convoluted. I don’t understand how the ghosts were giving her headaches, I don’t know why she couldn’t have just left, I don’t know why the priests never really helped her even though they are supposed to be the good guys. This was made in 1977 and it still plays on one of my least favorite tropes, that old = scary/bad by making you think the priest is the bad guy. I think it is a lazy misdirection and it is too obvious, the creepy old priest can’t be the bad guy but hey, all I do is watch horror movies so what would I know.
