The Hearse

The Hearse is an almost-perfect specimen of B-movie horror writing. The writer, Bill Bleich, clearly possesses genius for the genre. The characters are superbly drawn, and the notion of history repeating itself is perfectly blended into the story. Definitely check out this smart, well-constructed supernatural thriller!

Jane Hardy (Trish Van Devere) is moving to a small town in order to take possession of an aunt's house that's been sitting vacant for many years. Oddly, almost everyone in town is very nasty to her...and she has no idea why. The only ones who are nice are a young guy who is secretly infatuated with her and Tom, a sexy guy who loves her almost at once. The portion of the film involving the town hating her and the finale seems to last a very long time. Oddly, after going on a killing spree, the evil spirit comes after her and it all ends in a car chase...which is kind of weird considering it's a ghost. The problems are the pacing and the finale...both of which left me cold. It's a shame. I wanted to enjoy the movie much more than I ultimately did. At times, it's pretty good. At other times, it looks like the script could have used a re-write.

"The Hearse" is a low-budget, bottom-of-the-barrel little shocker. It's uninvolving throughout, and never terrifying. The hopelessly cliched story, with all the familiar "haunted house" tricks, would be enough to sink this movie, but the job is completed by the poor direction and the murky look of the film, which often makes it hard for us to understand what's happening onscreen. The ending leaves almost everything unexplained and is just as arbitrary and nonsensical as the rest of this film. The good performances can't save it by any means.