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Now THIS is more like it, this feels like the waxwork of old. Weirdo little title, good art and layout, purposeful double LP, under seen and under exposed composer etc etc.
My mother, having forgotten a lot of the content of this film and mostly just remembering how nice the apartment was, showed this movie to me when i was perhaps a tad too young for it. not terribly too young but maybe another year or two would have been prudent. well, damage was done. Probably the grodiest of the satanic cycle. If Rosemary's Baby and the Exorcist were New Hollywood gothic auteur pieces, and The Omen was more of an old Hollywood studio schlock picture, then The Sentinel was the gasping drive-in mean-spirited cousin to those other three. A film that is, much like its director, a nasty piece of work but compelling nonetheless, with a central antagonistic performance by Burgess Meredith that to this day creeps me the hell out. Not to mention the legitimately exploitative ending sequence and the layer of slime over every interaction, this is a film that leaves you feeling more than a little off at the end, with a cast of supporting actors so absurd when seen today that many of them would easily break the budget of this film many times over.
The score itself is an eerie and compelling listen, and my copy sounds pretty clean for one of the busier splatter designs. GIl Melle doesn't get a lot of love for his scoring,, and i myself often gloss over his work, limited that it is, but this one is a delight from side to side. classier than the film by far, but with an undercurrent of camp that plays nicely as a solo listen even without the nightmarish and skeezy images it's associated with. Who doesn't love a sinister oboe one in a while.
Now let’s get some liner notes in these releases again and we'd really be cooking! (I charge very reasonable rates for copy I'm passionate about if any of you label heads still lurk around here lol)
Edit: speaking of this absurd cast, I’m rewatching the film right now and forgot the Richard Dreyfus is literally an extra standing on the street at one point early on for about a second and a half, and Goldblum is BAFFLINGLY dubbed.
I have been in this business a long time. Now if I don't want to do a show, it's not because I got stage fright. It's because some creature from beyond doesn't want me to do the show. Now gangway.