EVIL SPIRITS (1991), MIRROR MIRROR (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Both of these Karen Black horror-flicks are schlocky productions, but in markedly different ways.

Though director/cinematographer Gary Graver worked on an assortment of interesting B-movies, EVIL SPIRITS is not one of them. Nevertheless, at least SPIRITS flies its schlock flag free for all to see. 

Ella Purdy (Karen Black) runs a rental house in which most of her renters are older people, and in exchange for their room and board Ella collects their social security checks. However, Ella, who has one odd habit of talking to her dead husband, has the even worse habit of killing off her tenants, after which she continues to collect the checks. Eventually a social security worker named Potts (Arte Johnson) becomes suspicious when some of his charges don't report for physicals, and he begins looking into the case. 

The tenants and ancillary characters are all played either by well-known former stars (Black, Johnson, and Virginia Mayo) or by players who were always just B-actors (Yvette Vickers, Michael Berryman, Robert Quarry). The script by Mikel Angel, who also wrote a handful of notable B-flicks, gives all of the actors some quirky types to play, but the parts don't add up to a pleasing whole. Most of the murders are not very inventive except for an injury-to-the-eye scene, and so the dominant phenomenality would be uncanny, except that there are a couple of scenes suggesting that the husband's spirit might actually be more than Ella's imagination. Ella's often one-sided conversations may remind some of Norman Bates' talks with his mother in PSYCHO, and SPIRITS' one real merit is that it boasts a twist on the PSYCHO theme that I didn't see coming. That said, the only real pleasure here is star-watching.

Still, SPIRITS is much more fun to watch than another contemporaneous Karen Black horror-flick, MIRROR MIRROR, though the latter film was popular enough to spawn a loose franchise of three sequels, mostly about a demon-haunted mirror that fulfilled evil wishes.

Black is not the star of MIRROR, though. She plays the mother of high-schooler Megan (Rainbow Harvest), and at first the film flirts with the notion that it's going to concern their invidious relationship, not unlike the one between Stephen King's Carrie White and her mother. However, despite the fact that the film had a female director and two female writers, the script quickly abandons the conflict between mother and daughter (though Black does her best to enliven her character with quirky touches). 

In contrast, misfit Megan quickly becomes just another abuser of demonic powers, calling upon the mirror's forces to confer evil fates upon the mean girls at school and that sort of thing. Again, there may have been some notion of centering the film around female power, even abusive power, since the few males in the story are negligible in their influence. But neither Megan, her one friend at school (another "Carrie" parallel), or the old lady who suspects the mirror's evil secret (Yvonne deCarlo) can keep MIRROR from reflecting the tedium at the heart of its creators. In the case of these two flicks, the purely schlocky film is a bit more entertaining than the one that looks classier thanks to higher production values.