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The pregnant image finds hands on a TV screen's blue static, swiftly repurposed in Godard's Prénom Carmen. The California cul-de-sac of dead pet canaries and Star Wars merchandise, as much "a perpetual dream state" as the unearthly zones surrounding it. Mom (JoBeth Williams) tokes in bed while Dad (Craig T. Nelson) pores over a Reagan biography, their tiny daughter (Heather O'Rourke) is fixated on the flickering boob tube, the ideal interdimensional portal for a slew of unsettled specters. "People who got lost on the way to the light" tickle Mom with furniture tricks, it's all fun and games until the moppet gets sucked into the roaring vortex inside the bedroom closet. "It knows what scares you. It has from the very beginning." Tobe Hooper in Steven Spielberg territory, the curious harmony of the director's grungy humanism and the producer's secret desire to demolish suburbia. (The Thing from Another World is the precedent in terms of authorship, the apt joke has warring neighbors wielding remote controls.) The paranormal expert (Beatrice Straight) arrives to study the haunting, the parents patiently hear about the case of a toy moving bit by bit for hours and then open the door to reveal an indoors maelstrom of levitating playthings. A raw steak slithering across the kitchen counter, a visage ripped before the bathroom mirror, "far beyond the creaking doors or cold spots I've experienced." The gnarled oak reaches through the window in an invocation of The Wizard of Oz, Zelda Rubinstein as the spiritual medium updates Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit for the Industrial Light & Magic onslaught. "You're jammin' my frequencies." The upshot is that the manicured lawn turns out to be a gentrified cemetery, rampant capitalism really is an unfinished swimming pool filled with muddy corpses, n'est-ce pas? Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse overhauls the "ghostly hobby." With Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robins, Michael McManus, Martin Casella, Richard Lawson, Virginia Kiser, and James Karen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |