HAUNTING FEAR (1990)

 

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

Leading lady Brinke Stevens has stated that she felt that her role in HAUNTING FEAR was her best performance. And she does well in the central role of a woman consumed by the Poesque fear of being buried alive-- though her sentiments might be skewed by the fact that another actress, Delia Sheppard, was relegated to perform the sex scenes for this steamy DTV production.

FEAR does look a little better than the average flick directed by Fred Olen Ray-- though since he's also the writer, no one should expect much from the script. Despite allusions to Poe's "Premature Burial," the overall structure has greater resemblance to "Fall of the House of Usher," where a woman's buried alive due to masculine interference.

Rich lady Victoria (Stevens), married to "kept husband" Terry (Jay Richardson), has had a deathly fear of premature burial since the untimely death of her father. She nurtures the unproven belief that her father's physician Carlton (Robert Clarke) conspired to use his medical knowledge to off Victoria's father. This trope, in which a woman divides paternal influence into a "good father" and a "bad father," is in the end wasted by Ray, turning out to be nothing but a lousy red herring. Husband Terry not only doesn't credence Victoria's irrational fears, he even insists that she continue seeing Carlton for medication.

Meanwhile, Terry's got a couple of skeletons in his private closet. He's racked up big gambling debts, causing a mobster (Robert Quarry) to hire a private detective (Jan-Michael Vincent) to surveil the couple's house. More importantly, Terry's banging his secretary Lisa (Sheppard) on the side, and Lisa urges Terry to off his wife so that she Lisa can take over.

There's some time-wasting folderol in which a psychiatrist (top billed Karen Black) uses hypnotic regression to solve Victoria's obsession. Victoria supposedly imagines that in a past life she was raped by her husband's brother, though nothing in the narrative validates this vision. In any case, Terry and Lisa finally get down to brass tacks, consigning Victoria to a coffin, hoping she'll perish of a "natural" heart attack. Instead, what doesn't kill Victoria makes her stronger, and like Madeleine from HOUSE OF USHER, she inexplicably breaks out of the coffin and wreaks bloody vengeance on her would-be killers. Just to give Vincent something to do, he tries to capture Victoria and gets cut up a bit, after which she simply escapes, possibly in a riff on HALLOWEEN's ending.

Like a lot of Ray movies, the story's just an excuse to let his stock company players strut their stuff, some with very small roles, like Hoke Howell and Michael Berryman. But there's enough gratuitous sex and gore to keep things from getting too dull.