Next up in our horror movies is The Devil Commands starring The Grinch. Actually, the next one was The Face Behind the Mask, but I'd seen it before. It was a real movie, and it was sad. I remembered I'd seen it partway through, but it's not that long, and it was too late to turn back. When it ended, it wasn't that late, my oldest daughter was home, and we needed to watch a cheesy movie. Our hopes were high with this one.
The Grinch is doing weird things with a balloon-shaped helmet to measure brain waves. He feels like eventually, we'll be able to know other people's thoughts and communicate with each other. So far, all I saw was some seismograph-looking peaks on a piece of paper. He also hooks up his wife, and they're all agog at how her peaks are so much higher than the previous guy. WOW!
A car accident kills the wife, and The Grinch goes nutty. One night, he accidentally turns on his machine and part of his wife's pattern appears on the wall. His friend, (?) Karl, convinces him to go to a medium, Mrs. Walters. She's a charlatan, but apparently, she's also creating electricity? So, when The Grinch hooks her up to his balloon, she continues a seismograph that's identical to The Grinch's wife. When Karl is added, he's zapped and basically turned into an Igor.
After that, The Grinch moves away and starts doing really weird stuff. He starts stealing bodies and putting balloon helmets on them so he can create a spirit tornado to contact his wife. I think. It's all very confusing to be honest. The end is just insanity.
I think the thing that shocked me the most about this movie is that it's based on a book. The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane somehow spawned this movie. I have to say, I am extremely interested to learn how any book could create something this strange. I didn't understand so many things about this movie. How did the dead people help the tornado? Why was Mrs. Walters so invested? She wasn't a real medium, and she said she was only doing it for money. Once she found out she was electrical, she was all in. She was a bulldog protecting The Grinch.
Overall, I'm on the fence with this one. It was so confusing, I'm not sure it was entertaining. The dead people around the table were something. How did The Grinch go from thinking that he needed live, conscious people to substituting dead folk? And it worked? I found a Kindle version of the book, and I'll keep an eye on it. I'm glad it wasn't one of those out of print books that only has copies circulating with unreasonable prices. I hate that.
No comments:
Post a Comment