Hi, It’s Burl! You must now deal completely within the
metaphysical system, ha ha! And of course what I mean by that is I’m here to
review a strange and mystical horror picture for you today – a movie you would
do well to consider watching yourself sometime, if you can find it!
From the late 60s into the middle 1970s, there existed a
microgenre I call Hippie Horror! Maintaining the broader definition of the
term, we include under it movies like Hex,
Premonition (the Alan Rudolph
picture, no relation to this one!), A
Name For Evil, Let’s Scare Jessica To
Death and Simon, King of the Witches!
There are lots of others too, and while they don’t all involve hippies, they
generally have a mystical theme or flavor to them!
That’s certainly true of The
Premonition! It begins with a nervous lady, Andrea, newly released from the
bughouse, pairing up with Jude, a clownman at a local circus whom she’d
met while institutionalized! Her goal is to reclaim her daughter (played by Danielle
Brisebois of Big Bad Mama II fame) from
the couple who’d adopted her long ago, and who are certainly her parents now!
With the help of the clown, Andrea makes a nighttime kidnapping attempt, but is
interrupted by the mother, and only manages to kidnap the little girl’s doll!
The clown goes crazy and puts a savage poking on Andrea! But
she’s still very much a part of the movie, as her supernatural influence seems
still to be working overtime! After a number of dreamlike encounters with
Andrea’s shade, the mother gets into an otherworldly car crash and the daughter
disappears! The husband calls in his colleague, an earnest parapsychologist who
has some ideas of her own, and a rumpled cop played by legendary acting coach
Jeff “Curse of the Black Widow” Corey
takes on the case, maintaining his involvement even after other police would
give up because, as he correctly asserts, “There’s too many weird things going
on!” The little girl finds herself at the carnival and in the custody of the
increasingly unhinged and murderous Jude, Andrea ends up playing the piano in a
field near a hay-munching horse, and all of this leads to one of the strangest
concertos ever filmed!
Ha ha, as you can tell, this is an oddball motion picture!
It also manages to be quite gripping and occasionally very scary! It’s about
the bonds of mother love, and if it doesn’t pit the biological against the de
facto varieties, it at least holds them up to comparison! The end of the
picture is ambiguous but completely satisfying, and the strange, bleak
atmosphere of the movie stays with you after it’s over! It’s also got some fine
performances, in particular from Richard “The Sword and the Sorcerer” Lynch as Jude the clown, and Sharon Farrell, who
played a similarly distraught mother in It’s Alive, as the adoptive parent!
It’s got a few shaky moments here and there, and some slow
stretches, and some flaky mysticism too of course, ha ha, but it never loses
your interest! I wholeheartedly recommend The
Premonition, and give it three dancing clowns!
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