There are a great
many subjects that Hollywood has traditionally shied away from. Race
is still a cinematic
hot potato, as is homosexuality,
while even explicit displays of heterosexual passion are generally the
preserve of arthouse and foreign movies. But perhaps the most under-represented
social issue in film is the delicate matter of ghost rape.
Indeed, there’s
only ever been one major studio movie dedicated to this terrible problem,
and it’s poor Barbara Hershey who ended up on the receiving end.
Based on a supposedly true story – though the opening credits refer
to the source book as a “novel” and the closing captions
insist the movie has been “fictionalised” – Hershey
plays Carla Moran, an attractive and smart single mother struggling to
bring up her three kids. Her teenage son, Billy, is the product of a
teenage liason with a pill-popping wise guy who died in a motorbike accident,
her two young daughters the offspring of an older man who simply wandered
off. Stability is not her strong suit.
As the movie starts, we see Carla working diligently as a receptionist,
hurrying to her typing class to improve her lot in life, before returning
home to check the mail, tuck in her girls and get ready for bed herself.
Then, without warning, she’s punched in the face, thrown onto the
bed and violently raped by some invisible force. This is a mere five
minutes into the film. Subtle it ain’t. You’ve come for the
ghost rape, so ghost rape is what you’re going to get.
At the sound of her screams, Billy and the girls come running into the
room but – of course – there’s nobody to be found.
Everyone goes back to bed, with Carla half-heartedly believing Billy’s
theory that she just had a bad dream, but moments later the bedroom starts
to shake violently as the entity gears up for a second go. Evil demonic
rapist it may be, but you’ve got to admire the stamina of the thing.
The family flees into the night, and takes temporary refuge at the home
of Carla’s friend, Cindy. Being a no-nonsense Southern belle, Cindy
gives Carla some sage advice. “When men who are not actually there
come into your room and have intercourse with you”, she reasons, “It’s
time to see a good psychiatrist.”
The good psychiatrist in this case is Dr Sneiderman (Ron Silver). He,
being a man of science, attacks the problem under the assumption that
the attack was a physical manifestation of some deep-seated emotional
trauma, and we learn that Carla suspects her devout minister father may
have harboured incestuous feelings towards her – a feeling that
led her to run away from home at the age of 16, never to return. Dr Sneiderman,
like all the male characters in this film, is creepy and ineffectual – a
militant feminist trait which is presumably meant to counterbalance the
lascivious nature of all the explicit ghost rape.
Confident that her problem is being dealt with, Carla returns to normal
life but the attacks soon start up again – bringing with them ever
more violent and graphic rape scenes, including one vile sequence in
which Carla is spreadeagled and defiled in front of her daughters. When
Billy is struck down by flashes of electricity as he tries to save his
mother, it becomes clear that Dr Sneiderman’s endless yakking may
not be the answer after all.
A chance encounter at a book store brings Carla into contact with a trio
of parapsychologists and, after the entity obligingly rattles the house
during their subsequent visit, a whole swarm of hi tech ghost hunting
types descend on the house and try to get tangible evidence of the creature’s
existence. Once again, it obliges – putting on an electrical light
show in Carla’s room, and manifesting as a rather disappointing
luminous green ball. It doesn’t even have any visible genitalia,
let alone anything to back up Carla’s insistence that it was “big”.
After another particularly vicious attack the scientists hatch a somewhat
unlikely plan to cage the invisible beast. They build a replica of Carla’s
home in a gymnasium and suspend a cannon that fires deadly freezing liquid
helium above the roofless dwelling. The idea is that when the entity
arrives, Carla will run to a sealed safe area, while the cannon freezes
everything else – including whatever physical atoms the ghost is
using to molest her down-belows. It all goes wrong, naturally. Dr Sneiderman
bursts in, clumsily proclaiming his love for Carla, and the spirit takes
control of the freeze gun. The lovestruck Doc and Carla leap out of the
fake house just as the whole thing turns into a giant iceberg and explodes.
We end with Carla leaving home, shutting the door on the gravely voice
of the entity (which calls her a very rude name) and driving off into
the sunset with her kids. A series of closing captions inform us that
not only is this a “true account”, but that the real Carla
now lives in Texas where she continues to be diddled by the demon on
a regular basis. Which, when you think about it, is a really shitty ending.
The real tragedy is that Barbara Hershey is fantastic in this movie.
She puts genuine integrity and soul into a character that exists mainly
to be a receptacle for rape, and the early scenes where you can still
kid yourself that maybe the answer will be subtle and psychological in
nature (or at least not involve an exploding iceberg) are quite effective.
But as the rapes add up, and the special effects get ever sillier – including
one notorious scene in which her (clearly fake) rubber boobs are pounded
by invisible fingers – it’s hard to avoid the fact that this
is quite simply a nasty and tasteless little piece of titillating exploitation,
dressed up as a serious supernatural drama.
Need to know: The Entity was directed by Sidney J. Furie, who went from
directing low budget English horrors such as The Snake Woman in 1961
to the critically acclaimed spy thriller The Ipcress File in 1965. He
followed The Entity with the hilariously awful Top Gun rip-off Iron Eagle,
and the even worse Superman IV (see: Jim Broadbent). At the time of writing
The Entity is currently being remade in Japan by Hideo Nakata, creator
of The Ring.
Honourable mention: Hershey actually started out surprisingly strongly
in her career – as well as a bunch of TV work, she starred in one
of Martin Scorsese’s first ever movies, Boxcar Bertha, in 1972.
For a more endearingly daft entry in her filmography, try and track down
a copy of Trial By Combat, a 1976 thriller in which a group of English
aristocrats, led by Donald Pleasance, exact vigilante justice by offering
the guilty the chance to take part in medieval duels to the death.
Availability: The Entity is available on DVD in the UK and US.
