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Simply Perfect

Memorable, crazy movie

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A woman experiences a premonition about a devastating plane crash in the suburbs. This turns out to be accurate, when a plane crashes next to the home of a photographer- who is one of the first responders on the scene. A pilot is the sole remaining survivor of the wreck. He manages to walk away from the disaster virtually unscathed- suffering only from retrograde amnesia and survivor's guilt. He becomes obsessed with piecing together exactly what happened.A few days after the crash, the photographer becomes haunted by premonitions of a young girl with burns all over her face. Meanwhile, the pilot does his best to follow the investigation...but it's getting him nowhere. His most solid lead is a mysterious woman who claims to have advanced knowledge about the incident.When he tries to get information from her, however, she suffers from a hysterical fit and attacks him. Despite the fact that it was her that approached him to help...while looking for some help herself.Eventually she comes around, and claims that she was present at the crash...but not in a typical way. She seems to be a psychic medium through which victims of the crash (or something) are (is) trying to contact the pilot.Subsequently, when the photographer leaves his photographs to develop, his wife looks at them...only to discover they are filled with ghastly images of some sort of demonic entity. Obviously she dies.The psychic woman then approaches the pilot for a second time, now suggesting he trigger regression by returning to the site, with hopes that it will evoke his lost memories. He agrees to participate.Together, they seek help from a local priest and return to the cockpit, where his memories begin to return...to her.By now, the photographer has stumbled upon the crime scene that used to be his darkroom...and gotten himself killed- slasher style- in the process, just like his wife.It's at this point that the pilot gets a chance to meet the demon responsible for all of this death and destruction face-to-face...and he's coming for his soul! This film is short and sweet. Packed into 1 hour and 15 minutes, it's an Aussie flick that seems like it was made-for-TV. At first I thought it was going to suck hard, because it has what is probably one of the most hilariously bad plane crash sequences in cinematic history (it literally looks like a camera tracking in unison with a plane wing that is moving through a movie studio). But that aside, the ending really redeems this awesome little film.It's quite evident that ---SPOILER--- The Sixth Sense stole it's twist from this screenplay. With this one being a bit more supernatural, overall. I particularly love the way the filmmaker denotes our entrance into and exit from the "Other World". Great little flick that is definitely worth a watch.6 out of 10

The late Great British icon David Hemmings didn't just star in Blow Up and model a magnificent pair of eyebrows in later years. It's true, his forehead-thickets really were something to behold, but the bloke the film critic Pauline Kael once described as resembling "a pre-Raphaelite Paul McCartney" was also a noted watercolourist, a member of the Magic Circle, directed a number of episodes of 'The A-Team', 'Airwolf' and 'Magnum PI', and a clutch of feature films into the bargain. These include the David Bowie vehicle Just a Gigolo, the George Peppard adventure yarn The Race For The Yankee Zephyr - and this adaptation of James Herbert's horror novel.It's a pity then, that this real renaissance man couldn't conjure some magic over his own movies. As he later said, "I've done some real stinkers, and I don't regret any of them because I went into them in the full knowledge that they weren't going to win an Academy Award." Which is just as well, as The Survivor remains defiantly unmolested by Oscar's advances. (Although it did pick up the Jury prize at an obscure Catalonian film festival.) This finds commercial airline pilot David Keller (former Messiah Robert Powell) the sole survivor of a massive plane crash in Adelaide, South Australia. As he guiltily observes, "I've just killed 300 people in a field and walked away without a scratch; that makes me pretty special, doesn't it?" While he tries to come to terms with his mixed fortunes and a terrible bout of amnesia concerning the incidents leading up to the disaster, the ghosts of the passengers roam the surrounding territory, grumpily avenging themselves on those ghoulish photographers and grave robbers who've treated their corpses with contempt in the charred, bloody aftermath - while roping in tortured psychic Hobbs (Jenny Agutter) as a go-between. With the screams of the damned reverberating in her eardrums she informs a disbelieving Captain Keller, "They're asking for your help - the men, women and children who died in your aircraft." The Survivor has latterly been compared with the works of M Night Shyamalan, which ought to sound loud and insistent claxons with anybody bored to absolute blazes with promising plots that turn out to be little more than triple-length episodes of 'The Twilight Zone'. In all fairness, Herbert's (comparably restrained) source novel, is simply another variation on Ambrose Bierce's classic short story from 1891 'An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge' - see also: Carnival Of Souls, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Jacob's Ladder and The Escapist, all good films, in fact. Yet Hemmings' movie needlessly fudges a fairly straightforward issue by saddling itself with an even more complicated and ambiguous resolution.The irony, given his later critical and commercial reputation is that the young Manoj Nelliyattu might just have managed to invest this adaptation with the stuff Hemmings conspicuously failed to provide here: suspense. Scares. Dread. Because up until the final, tight 10 minutes, this is a right dreary old bunch of cobblers; Herbert himself admitted in an interview that he'd nodded off during a screening of this weirdly tension-lite affair.Sadly, cinema has rarely done the original Garth Marenghi proud. You long for some fearless Brit-horror director to make a genuinely faithful adaptation of an early period Herbert, such as 'The Spear' or 'The Fog.' Because the results would truly give the BBFC something to think about.Meanwhile, Powell turns in another characteristically aloof performance; Agutter flails about ludicrously as the possessed medium; and in the minor role of a Catholic priest, the legendary Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, Duel In The Sun), mopes around to no great distinction, fervently praying this won't be his final film in a long and distinguished career. His prayers reached voicemail.

747-airliner crashes just outside a little town but of the 400 people aboard, one man (the pilot) miraculously walks out of the disaster alive…Even more so, he walks out completely unharmed! Does this basic premise sound familiar to anyone? No, it's not M. Night Shyamalan's overrated blockbuster "Unbreakable"! This is a shamefully underrated Australian thriller, directed by David Hemmings and based on a novel by shlock-expert James Herbert. The story continues being supernatural when the confused survivor (a very convincing Robert Powell) is approached by a female eyewitness (the cherubic Jenny Agutter) who serves as some sort of medium for the unfortunate passengers that want to get in contact with their pilot. David Hemmings is mostly known for some terrific acting roles ("Blow-Up", "Profondo Rosso") but he handles directing very well, too, and builds up a chilling tension using only a limited amount of set pieces. The actual plane crash, for example, is filmed at night and in flashes, but still it comes across as quite realistic since Hemmings splendidly focuses on the panicky reactions of the people on the ground. The film also contains a couple efficient shock-moments, notably the sequence in which a noisy journalist is lured into death by the appearance of a young girl that died in the air disaster. "The Survivor" suffers from more and bigger plot holes near the end, but the eventual climax will surely satisfy fans of paranormal and freaky horror films. The atmospheric music by Brian May makes the wholesome even spookier and the remote Australian location guarantees some really beautiful images. Horror veteran Joseph Cotton ("Baron Blood", "The Abominable Dr. Phibes", "Lady Frankenstein") has a small but intriguing role as the town's priest. "The Survivor" is much scarier and involving than "Harlequin", which was another supernatural horror film, made by pretty much the same cast & crew one year earlier. Recommended!

For some reason this film never won the affection of either its peers or the viewing audience at the time. It played to half empty theaters, barely covered its production cost and was unceremoniously tossed out of everyone's subconscious. Yet its not even a bad film, I would venture to suggest a most interesting study of the paranormal and well directed by former BLOW UP star David Hemmings.Robert Powell is Captain Keller who's 747 suffers a bomb explosion just before take-off and 300 odd passengers are incinerated as the plane explodes in flames. A short time later Keller is found wandering from the burning wreckage unharmed and quite unable to fathom how he has survived. The mystery deepens when a rapidly convened investigation concludes that there is no possible way ANYONE could have survived the explosion and heat blast, wherever they were in the plane.As Keller embarks on his fateful odyssey, he and the audience are taken down lanes that both THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE may have trodden..and this was almost a generation earlier! The viewer needs to suspend belief and take things for what he sees (or thinks he sees) A really intelligent Aussie flick that you will get as much out of as you are prepared to put in. Always good to see Joseph Cotton and Jenny Agutter!