The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Not even bad in a good way

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Downloaded this movie because it came out when I was 10 and remember seeing it at the theater with my 18 y/o sister. Nostalgia caused my peaked interest. The acting is subpar. The characters are not convincing, especially the paranormal PHD. The dialogue failed to hold my interest during this very slow-paced yarn. I certainly qualify this flick as the proverbial B movie and all that this label entails. Brenda Lee Scott was especially horrible and meaningless to the story. Don't waste your time on this one.

Director J Lee Thompson is a long way from Tiger Bay, The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear with this cheap looking, lurid, would be thriller that could be described as an ABC Movie of the Week channeling soft core porn. Even the reincarnation theme is redolent of those Movies of the Week as is the flat dialog, lack of atmosphere and perfunctory performances by a bland Jennifer O'Neil, a charmless Michael Sarrazin who looks bad or is badly photographed and Cornelia Sharpe who struggles unsuccessfully to make two consecutive syllables sound persuasive. Unpersuasive too is Margot Kidder's make-up. She plays O'Neil's mother and has a scene masturbating in a bathtub that would be at home in any porn film.

I certainly think so. I've never seen anything with Kidder that didn't make me cringe with embarrassment while wanting to spritz with Holy Water.Now, let's back-track to the review I was planning to write.J. Lee Thompson's The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, based on a novel by Max S. Ehrlich, is a perfect reason for people to giggle and point at the 1970s. It's a dopey, overly-dramatic, performance-free glob of hippie-dippy spiritulalism, perfect for anyone who wants to get in touch with the silliest of the Me Decade. If you know anything at all about the Hindu belief in the journey of souls through reincarnation, don't be shocked when Hooey-wood takes the idea and turns it into a lugubrious chunk of nonsense about some rich New England dimebag who gets murdered by his wife, and his soul pops up- -for totally no reason at all--thirty years later in a young university professor.If it weren't for the mystery that Michael Sarrazin's Peter Proud has to unravel to explain his out-of-his-body-and-in-somebody-else's dreams, all we would have would be lots of naked people swimming and sexing, principal characters driving around Massachusetts in gigantic Chevrolets, everyone looking as if they are in the death throes of painful mortification, and Margot Kidder, painted up with flour in her hair to make her look old, swilling bourbon, and, I am not kidding, soaking in her bathtub while masturbating to the memory of her no-good-nik husband raping her in 1947. On occasion, there is some real mystery here, but every time the story begins to treat the audience as a group of adults--instead of dim teens--Thompson and screenwriter Ehrlich throw in some nonsense that stops everything dead in its tracks.Sarrazin goes to the house of his previous self (good time for mysteriousness, right?) and we spend more time gawping at the pudgy teenager in the tight shorts who wants to jump Peter's peter.We're adults here, right J.? Then treat us as such!By the end--and if you didn't see it coming, you must be new to movies--we're left with nothing solved but for Kidder's character's liver glowing in the dark. 105 minutes of nonsense and nothing to show for it.Unless watching Kidder play with herself is all you need in a motion picture.

I have to say,this movie is Excellent,Excellent,Excellent!I saw the movie at the theatre back when it originally showed and I was so scared.Margot Kidder was downright evil and quite scary.Jennifer O'Neill was absolutely lovely as the girlfriend/daughter.Jennifer O'Neill was the beautiful actress in the lead part in the 1972 movie "Summer Of 42".Jennifer O' Neill was also an early super model cover girl with incredible looks that put the so called super models of the last 30 years to shame.Michael Sarrazin played his part as Peter Proud with intensity and also an aloofness that was just the right combination.I feel like it was not necessary for the foul language and the nude scenes in the movie,but the middle 1970s is when theatre productions started that bad trend.Otherwise the movie was well done.The location scenery and cinema photography was lovely to look at.If you want to see a real scary unusual horror movie check this one out.I have this movie on DVD.