Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Jenna Walter
The film may be flawed, but its message is not.
Philippa
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
goods116
As a 70s film buff I have plenty of tolerance for genre films, slow moving European fare, B and Z movies, etc. This movie has potential, with some nice 70s atmosphere and decent acting, but the plot is thin and the movie is simply boring. After 30 minutes, I struggled to get through this. It's just not that interesting. Only see if you are a 70s horror / satanic movie completist, into the Canadian film scene (which has many 70s gems), or like the actors.
Rainey Dawn
Detective Sgt. Paquette is called to the murder case of prostitute and heroine attic Elizabeth Lucy. The story flops back and forth between the police investigation and the life of Elizabeth. The deeper they search the more interested Sgt. Paquette becomes interested in learning more about what has happened to Elizabeth. He will soon learn that it's more than a simple murder case, it's a case of a Devil Cult.It's pretty good movie but they do carry the on longer than is necessary, 20 to 30 minutes could be cut off easily but it does showcase Karen Black and that is one of the highlights of her films - herself. *Guys might enjoy the fact you can see her bear butt. lol.Not Karen's best film -- but certainly not her worst. This one you'd just have to continue to to watch (get over the lagging hump) and wait for the ending! 7/10
Woodyanders
Tough, cynical lapsed Catholic police detective Jim Henderson (a typically superb Christopher Plummer) investigates the mysterious death of forlorn heroin addict prostitute Elizabeth Lucy (a fine and heartbreaking performance by the divine Karen Black, who also sings a few hauntingly melancholy songs on the soundtrack). Henderson uncovers a nefarious Satanic cult and experiences a downward spiritual spiral similar to the one which led Lucy to her grim and untimely end. Strongly directed by Harvey Hart, crisply shot in sumptuous widescreen by Rene Verzier, elegantly scored to shivery perfection by Harry Freedman, and well acted by a stellar cast (Jean-Louis Roux is especially impressive as the evil sect's suavely sinister leader), with a chilly and depressing tone, an intriguing, if somewhat muddled script by Robert Schlitt, plenty of spooky, uneasy and unnerving atmosphere, an interesting and imaginative back-and-forth nonlinear narrative structure, gritty Montreal locations, and a truly shocking zinger of a bummer ending, this engrossingly gloomy horror mystery thriller delivers a quite potent and lingering punch while provocatively exploring with unflinching severity the dire consequences beget by falling markedly short of one's religious principles.
whynot2
I picked this up in a cheap DVD bin. I immediately recognized as 1 of 2 movies that I saw when I was a starving (pretty much literally) student living away from home for the first time, in 1973, and couldn't resist picking it up and giving it a look, that many years later.As other reviewers have noted, the promotion for the movie is pretty, ahem, imaginative. There's not a lot of sex (hardly any, actually), very little nudity, any reference to homosexuality is passing and irrelevant, there is no horror other than the horror of murder and violent death by knife and gun (we need more???), and it is not oriented towards the supernatural beyond the fact that the villains dabble in black masses -- there are no otherworldly events, no actual contact with the devil a la Rosemary's Baby or Devil's Advocate.So it's really a detective story. The device of tracking parallel time-lines does add some suspense and tension (exactly what did happen to this girl, and will the detective crack the case); however, I found that the tension peaked somewhere around mid-movie, and the trip to the end more or less plodded to anti-climatic conclusions to both time-lines.Unrealistic (as I imagine them) scenes certainly contributed to that plodding effect. At one point, amidst wild gunfire, a uniformed policeman tells the arriving detective, "he's up there and he's got one of our men as hostage", and then resumes shooting in the general direction. Uh, yea.Now, there are unexpected pleasures to be wrought from watching obscure movies now and then, and while I generally am pretty resistant to the 'oh wow, I've been there' effect, I did find the 1972 vintage shots of 'Place Jacques Cartier' and 'Rue St. Paul Est', well before the resurrection of the area as "Old Montreal' to be such a surprise.
