Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

hotrodps3 it is 2.30am now. before watching his i thought that "this movie is like the exorcist! COOL" well I ended up. "i wish i saw the room instead". this is a very very VERY boring movie with no redeeming quality. the story is so bad that a 10 year old can make up a much better one. just put some racism and pedophilia in a blender and thats it. I wonder how the guy who gave it a ten said "it is like the exorcist predecessor". this is not even a hack and slash movie. the exorcist is a million times better. this is plain ZERo.well not even close. it is also not "so bad it is awesome" movies. it is simply plain boring. there isn't even one cheap jump scare. this should not be classified in horror movies categories. even if you want to watch it like the room or troll 2 you won't find any enjoyment. the movie is about 90 minutes. until the last minutes there is NOTHING. just a worried women going here and there for more than 70 minutes!. this is not like those detective movies. also there is not even 1 single special effect. at least troll 2 HAD special effects. non here.it is just a 5 minute story stretched into 90 minutes. Warning. just skip this movie and watch anything else.

martin-1415 After reading a few reviews here on IMDb I thought I'd give this one a shot. This movie started out promising, but quickly became tedious and boring. This one is far too long and wastes way too much time on scenes that have nothing to do with moving the story forward. I am a huge fan of movies about possession, but this was very disappointing. It was interesting to see Shirley McClain so young, and the acting in general is competent, but unfortunately it's just not a very good example of the genre. The only really enjoyable feature of this movie for me was watching the scenery of New York from back in 1972. It doesn't change that much, really. Go rent The Eyes of Laura Mars, or The Exorcist, and skip this one.

fedor8 Shirley MacLaine may look beautiful here, but this is quite possibly her worst role. In the utterly unconvincing, boring and badly directed Puerto Rican séance sequence she manages to be even sillier than the overly manic Puerto Ricans. The film's first half is solid, but from that hopeless séance onwards it's all downhill. The possessed, Spanish-speaking Joel is badly dubbed. The police arrive to the beach house quite inexplicably; though this is forgivable, i.e. the script can get away with this, basically. What the script can't get away with is the way the police just stand there, doing absolutely nothing, even though they are faced with only one man, who has just a knife. MacLaine's character's reaction to Joel beating up her son is ludicrous: she just stands there (much like the utterly apathetic, sleepy police). Any mother would rush towards the attacker to protect her child, but she just stands there and watches. This is just another in a series of rather weak horror movies of the early 70s, until "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Exorcist" refreshed the genre.If you're interested in reading my "biographies" of Shirley MacLaine and other Hollywood intellectuals, contact me by e-mail.

Sturgeon54 This movie pushes an obvious agenda, and fails. It is supposed to be some kind of commentary on the conflict between traditional supernatural beliefs of immigrants and the cold superficial rationalism of urban secular America, and the gap between the upper and lower classes. But I didn't feel while watching it that the director had any real concern for these worthy subjects - he just wanted to scare the audience with cheap shocks and distasteful taboos, and those don't create a better horror movie than the usual run-of-the-mill slasher/exploitation. The reason why the horror movies of Cronenberg, Polanski, and Craven work so well is that their very-real sociological subtext is buried just under the surface - the director is one step ahead of the audience, and the audience feels disturbed and helpless but can't fathom why. Their movies don't feel the need to rub the audience's nose in it in every scene like this one does. In fact, it seems as if this movie is working from some master-list of taboo subjects to cover - so it can proudly put check marks next to incest, mental illness, drug abuse, classism, divorce, suicide, Latino stereotypes, child nudity, possibly homosexuality, and dog food consumption. Very much a product of its time - the early '70s, when better movies pushed the social boundaries to enhance rather than replace a strong storyline like this one does. The movie also just doesn't make sense. The sound is lousy, and the editing is simply bizarre - sometimes cross-cutting head shots of Shirley MacLaine with completely different facial expressions. There are unimportant scenes and subplots that don't belong in the movie, and many others that belong in it but inextricably aren't there (such as the entire backstory about Perry King's character - he seems to walk into the movie already half-crazy). Is there supposed to be an unexpressed incestuous relationship between Shirley MacLaine's character and her brother? Who cares? Are all the Puerto Ricans in NYC part of a creepy religious cult? Looks like it. With some of the most lazy direction I've ever seen in a big budget film, I really wonder whether the director wasn't on drugs or something. The one worthy scene in the movie is a "traditional" Puerto Rican exorcism with drums and dancing which forms a very different counterpoint to the Max Von Sydow scenes in "The Exorcist."