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| Horror |
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THE HEARSE
Rating: 
USA. 1980.
Director – George Bowers, Screenplay – Bill Belch, Story/Producer – Mark Tenser, Photography – Mori Kava, Music – Webster Lewis, Art Direction – Keith Michi. Production Company – Marimark.
Cast:
Trish Van Devere (Jane Hardy), David Gautreaux (Tom Sullivan), Perry Lang (Paul Gordon), Donald Hotton (Reverend Winston), Joseph Cotten (Walter Pritchard), Ned Florey (Sheriff Denton)
Plot: Schoolteacher Jane Hardy inherits the home of a recently deceased aunt in the town of Blackford. But as soon as she moves into the house strange things begin to happen. The townspeople treat her with antipathy and accuse her of witchcraft, and she is haunted by a mysterious hearse that keeps trying to run her off the road. She finds a diary written by her aunt in which she describes meeting a handsome stranger who offered her an immortality pact with The Devil. And soon after a similar stranger appears to Jane, entrancing her with his charms.
The Hearse is a fairly ridiculous but not entirely unentertaining B effort. The main surprises are fairly predictable and the script suffers from an overall vagueness and dearth of logic – Why, for example, did Trish Van Devere’s aunt die if she signed an immortality pact? Why does the Devil’s emissary want Van Devere in particular – reincarnation? family lineage? What purpose do the attacks by the hearse serve?
Trish Van Devere (Mrs George C. Scott) is adequate, but the scene stealers are all in the supporting cast, including taciturn Joseph Cotten, Donald Hotton of particularly unsettling laugh, and the appealing boyish Perry Lang. David Gatreaux (whose main claim to fame is that he was once selected as Leonard Nimoy’s replacement in a planned 1970s tv revival of Star Trek) is laughably wooden. A passable degree of atmosphere is sustained, but the shaky contrivation of the premise soon becomes evident.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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