Watch The Seventh Victim For Free

So much average

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

"The Seventh Victim" includes some interesting literary allusions and references, and it provides a parade of actors who are fun to identify for modern viewers, but otherwise it is not worth viewing.The story is about a young woman, Mary (Kim Hunter), who goes to New York City to find her sister, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). It seems Jacqueline has fallen in with a satanic cult that does little more than try to keep its members from resigning. The story is mostly filmed at night, of course, which allows for plenty of scenes with abundant shadows--so the viewer can be frightened (?) by animals running into trash cans and irrelevant characters standing under street lights.Evidently other viewers disagree, but I found many reasons to find this film superficial and ineffective. Some call it a suspense drama, but I felt no suspense. There is a minimal amount of mystery involving Jacqueline's whereabouts, but the resolution of that mystery is a tremendous letdown, as is the film's ending.I blame the director and the screenwriter for most of the film's failures. It feels like each actor was given directions unrelated to other characters, like "You behave as if you are always close to going over the edge. You act like nothing much matters. You ignore the concerns of the others and make offhand remarks about your apartment. You sit in the half shadows and every once in a while you can shift your eyes from side to side." Of course the script is primarily responsible for the disjointed nature of the film.A much more effective and unified film, for example, is "Rosemary's Baby".I would much rather read about this film than watch it. For its time, I think it tried to be modern. Symbolism is used throughout in an attempt to directly access the emotions of viewers, but the film in its entirety is too silly to support that attempt. Furthermore, the childish use of religion undercuts that effort. Does anyone really seriously fear or find heinous a group of cultists who are intimidated and cowed by the reading of a Bible passage?

Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is told that her older sister Jacqueline has disappeared. Instead of staying at her school to work, Mary sets off to find her sister. She finds a hangman's noose in Jacqueline's room. Private eye Irving August offers to help but he gets a warning. Then she finds Gregory Ward who was inquiring at the morgue. She joins August on his investigation and he's killed. On the subway, she encounters two men carrying August. The police won't believe her. Psychiatrist Dr. Judd claims to have Jacqueline but she sees her run away. She also finds out that Ward is actually Jacqueline's husband. Poet Jason Hoag offers to help.I love the paranoid darkness that runs through this movie. The shadowy look is great. There are all kinds of murky secrets and dangerous conspiracies. It's young Kim Hunter's first feature. She's a bit stiff and naive which fits the character very well. The story is very convoluted which keeps taking sharp turns with a few too many characters. Mary is overwhelmed and I would be too. It's highly questionable whether the movie makes complete sense. At the very least, there are a lot of coincidences.

It's best not to know too much about the plot before sitting down to watch this interesting and offbeat little film, a nice combination of noir and horror that is written, acted, and directed in style. It's got some marvelously scary and suspenseful moments - especially near the end - and is overall quite the potent meditation on loneliness. It's got a memorable shower sequence that Hitchcock may well have seen and remembered before making "Psycho" 17 years later. Lewton and director Mark Robson (this was the first of the five features that Robson directed for Lewton) do a fine job of keeping our innocent heroine, and the viewer, in the dark for a fair amount of the running time, and create a memorably enigmatic character in Jacqueline Gibson.Kim Hunter debuts as Mary Gibson, a schoolgirl who learns that her sister Jacqueline has gone missing. So she travels to Greenwich Village in search of her, meeting various characters along the way, including lawyer Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), who initially doesn't play it quite straight with her, published poet Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), psychiatrist Louis Judd (Tom Conway), and beauty shop proprietress Mrs. Redi (Mary Newton)."The Seventh Victim" gets very philosophical, and poignant, in the end, with two opposing sides engaging in a rather civil disagreement. But before we get there, there's a very creepy subway ride about which it's best not to reveal too much. Hunter is appealing in the lead. In addition to those actors mentioned, others lending fine support are Isabel Jewell as Frances and the distinctively featured Lou Lubin as concerned private eye Irving August. Jean Brooks as lost soul Jacqueline is excellent once the focus of the story finally shifts to her.Although this entry in Lewtons' filmography underperformed at the box office compared to hits like "Cat People", and wasn't well received at the time, it's very well done and certainly deserving of another look from film fans.Eight out of 10.

A young woman (Kim Hunter) in search of her missing sister (Jean Brooks) uncovers a Satanic cult in New York's Greenwich Village, and finds that they may have something to do with her sibling's random disappearance.Purported homosexual undercurrents run through the film and it has a generally dreadful story without the happiness that should accompany a film of its era. Today's audiences may not fully appreciate the darkness or the subtle sexual messages, but they are there and brilliant.This is one you need to see repeatedly to really get the depth and beauty. Lewton had a unique way to approach horror. He was given titles by the studio and was forced to make movies somehow related to the titles. Well, he did not go for the in-your-face horror. Even here, with a Satanic cult, it is not as obvious as we might see today.