SPECTRES
Where's Blue Oyster Cult when you need them?

  Totally plain-Jane, almost unnoticeable packaging kept me from renting this one til now - not that I was missing all that much.

Donald Pleasance stars - in actuality, his role is rather small - as an archaeologist who finds a tablet in a 2000-year-old Roman tomb that reads "Invoked or not invoked, evil will come".  Kind of makes you want to cancel your weekend plans.  Then everybody starts getting killed in bizarre ways, having weird hallucinations, getting sucked into their beds, ordering Vanilla Hazelnut when they've been sworn Decaf drinkers for twenty years - you know, that sort of thing.

The story of this movie (courtesy of no fewer than seven writers) is a disjointed mess, leaving me kind of half-staring and half-dozing as I couldn't bring myself to bother paying attention to it at all.  But when nasty stuff happens, and that's quite a bit of the time, thinks kick into something enjoyable and I found myself, um, amused.

Pleasance gets to recite the word "evil" (pronounced "E-ville") even more times in this movie than he did in Halloween. I dig the stairway made of intertwining fingers.  There's an unusually convincing scene where a woman appears to be groped, then attacked, by a shadow.  And a little gratuitous nudity doesn't hurt.

Way too much pop music though, and almost all of it's bad.  Argento's movies frequently use way-out-of-place rock music, but at least it tends to be good.

Comes across more as a series of fun little horror vignettes than a movie.  I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it, but you could do worse.

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