FEAR NO EVIL (1969)

It's around midnight on a big city street. We hear spooky voices chanting as a sweaty man races out of an apartment building and bangs on the door of a closed antique shop. The owner is still there so he lets the man in. Disoriented (the shopkeeper later describes him as "high on something"), the man heads for a large mirror. As he stands there, he sees a creepy image of himself dressed in black against an infinitely regressing background. He pays $300 for the mirror and has it delivered to his apartment. The next day, we learn the man (Bradford Dillman, pictured at right) is a physicist, he has a semi-live-in girlfriend (Lynda Day George), and is friendly with a coworker (Carroll O'Connor). The three go to a late-night cocktail party where psychologist Louis Jourdan touches on the topic of the occult, one of his areas of interest, and is surprised that Dillman has knowledge of an obscure demon named Rakashi. The party doesn't break up until dawn, and later that morning, Dillman and George are on the road when Dillman sees the black-clad image of himself in his car's side view mirror. He freaks out, wrecks the car and is killed. George moves in with his rich mother and takes the mirror with her. One night, while brushing her hair, time seems to stop (the clock stops ticking) and she sees the black-clad Dillman in the mirror beckoning to her. They embrace, seemingly with Dillman entering the real world, and make love, and afterwards there is blood on her neck. These experiences keep happening so she goes to see Jourdan. Though she's disturbed by them, she admits that she doesn't want them to stop. Jourdan investigates and discovers Dillman belonged to a Satanic group that bit off more than they could chew when they tried to conjure up Rakashi in order to find him, in the words of one character, a "chalice of flesh."

There is a general consensus that this was the first made-for-TV horror movie, and it was a pilot for a show called Bedeviled that would follow Jourdan's adventures in the paranormal. (His character name is David Sorrell, and there was a sequel, RITUAL OF EVIL, which I’ll review tomorrow, but no series ever came of it.) I have a great fondness for the horror TV movies of the 70s, and this one holds up pretty well with good performances, an interesting storyline, an inventive visual style, and one of the more memorable Satanic ritual scenes in any devil worship movie. Jourdan is handsome and oozes European charm as the doctor, and Dillman brings a nice intensity to his role. In our first glimpse of Lynda Day George (going by Lynda Day), she looks a bit like a human-sized Barbie, but she's fine as the confused girlfriend who doesn't quite want to lose contact with her fiancé. It's difficult not to see Archie Bunker in Carrol O'Connor, but eventually he disappears into his character and has a great scene near the climax. The wonderful Wilfrid Hyde-White is Jourdan's old friend and mentor. Marsha Hunt, a classic-era actress who died earlier this year at the age of 104, is very good as Dillman's mother, who has a surprise up her sleeve near the end. This would have to rank highly on any list of black magic movies of the 60s and 70s, TV or otherwise. [DVD]