The Survivor (1981)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

"The Survivor" is a bizarre, incomprehensible attempt at a horror story that barely registers as that or anything at all.The bits that one assumes are meant to be scary are merely confusing and come out of nowhere. The soundtrack pummels you with frantic music but this is merely irritating since you can't understand what, if anything, you are supposed to be scared by.The plot is fairly simple, so why is it so confusing? It's about a pilot who survives a plane crash that kills everyone else on board. He is visited by some kind of clairvoyant or something, played by Jenny Agutter, who is about as mystical in this role as the CEO of Wendy's. Her role in the plot is obvious on paper (how else is the movie going to get the supernatural bent going?), but when handled this badly, becomes confusing and you may wonder what she is there for.The ending, I admit, was clever. It's just everything that led up to it was so bad that it was completely wasted, like the rest of the movie.

One of only a few James Herbert adaptations to reach the screen (the others being "Deadly Eyes" a.k.a. "The Rats", "Fluke", and "The Haunted"), this is a pretty effective movie overall. Directed by actor David Hemmings ("Blowup", "Deep Red"), it's handled with a large degree of sensitivity and subtlety, and is quite slowly paced as well, focusing on building its atmosphere rather than centering around shocks - all reasons why some horror fans might not care for it too much. But if you're patient with this one, you will be rewarded with a film that succeeds at creating a vague sense of unease and maintaining a level of unpredictability.It certainly begins with a bang: a 747 plane crash lands in the Australian countryside, and its pilot Keller (Robert Powell) walks away without a scratch. Burdened with the guilt of being the only survivor, he's also suffering from amnesia and is determined to discover the cause of the crash. He's eventually assisted by a young woman with psychic abilities, played by an especially beautiful Jenny Agutter.Also in the cast are Australian actress Angela Punch McGregor, whom you may remember as Michael Caine's leading lady in the film version of Peter Benchley's "The Island", and Hollywood legend Joseph Cotten, although Cotten truthfully never gets a whole lot to do as a local priest. Thankfully, Powell and Agutter are so good that they carry the movie quite well.The paranormal is introduced into this moody story a bit at a time, with Hemmings never going for the cheap thrill; whatever violence is in the movie is mostly done off screen. Audiences may well appreciate the incredible work that the production does in creating a crash site, and enjoy the way that things wrap up with a creepy reveal / confrontation and a nifty (if not all that original) final twist.As was said, this may not be to every taste, but genre fans looking for more obscure efforts from decades past are advised to look into it.Seven out of 10.

The late Great British icon David Hemmings didn't just star in Blow Up and model a magnificent pair of eyebrows in later years. It's true, his forehead-thickets really were something to behold, but the bloke the film critic Pauline Kael once described as resembling "a pre-Raphaelite Paul McCartney" was also a noted watercolourist, a member of the Magic Circle, directed a number of episodes of 'The A-Team', 'Airwolf' and 'Magnum PI', and a clutch of feature films into the bargain. These include the David Bowie vehicle Just a Gigolo, the George Peppard adventure yarn The Race For The Yankee Zephyr - and this adaptation of James Herbert's horror novel.It's a pity then, that this real renaissance man couldn't conjure some magic over his own movies. As he later said, "I've done some real stinkers, and I don't regret any of them because I went into them in the full knowledge that they weren't going to win an Academy Award." Which is just as well, as The Survivor remains defiantly unmolested by Oscar's advances. (Although it did pick up the Jury prize at an obscure Catalonian film festival.) This finds commercial airline pilot David Keller (former Messiah Robert Powell) the sole survivor of a massive plane crash in Adelaide, South Australia. As he guiltily observes, "I've just killed 300 people in a field and walked away without a scratch; that makes me pretty special, doesn't it?" While he tries to come to terms with his mixed fortunes and a terrible bout of amnesia concerning the incidents leading up to the disaster, the ghosts of the passengers roam the surrounding territory, grumpily avenging themselves on those ghoulish photographers and grave robbers who've treated their corpses with contempt in the charred, bloody aftermath - while roping in tortured psychic Hobbs (Jenny Agutter) as a go-between. With the screams of the damned reverberating in her eardrums she informs a disbelieving Captain Keller, "They're asking for your help - the men, women and children who died in your aircraft." The Survivor has latterly been compared with the works of M Night Shyamalan, which ought to sound loud and insistent claxons with anybody bored to absolute blazes with promising plots that turn out to be little more than triple-length episodes of 'The Twilight Zone'. In all fairness, Herbert's (comparably restrained) source novel, is simply another variation on Ambrose Bierce's classic short story from 1891 'An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge' - see also: Carnival Of Souls, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Jacob's Ladder and The Escapist, all good films, in fact. Yet Hemmings' movie needlessly fudges a fairly straightforward issue by saddling itself with an even more complicated and ambiguous resolution.The irony, given his later critical and commercial reputation is that the young Manoj Nelliyattu might just have managed to invest this adaptation with the stuff Hemmings conspicuously failed to provide here: suspense. Scares. Dread. Because up until the final, tight 10 minutes, this is a right dreary old bunch of cobblers; Herbert himself admitted in an interview that he'd nodded off during a screening of this weirdly tension-lite affair.Sadly, cinema has rarely done the original Garth Marenghi proud. You long for some fearless Brit-horror director to make a genuinely faithful adaptation of an early period Herbert, such as 'The Spear' or 'The Fog.' Because the results would truly give the BBFC something to think about.Meanwhile, Powell turns in another characteristically aloof performance; Agutter flails about ludicrously as the possessed medium; and in the minor role of a Catholic priest, the legendary Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, Duel In The Sun), mopes around to no great distinction, fervently praying this won't be his final film in a long and distinguished career. His prayers reached voicemail.

Robert Powell and Jenny Agutter star in this Australian production of a pilot and a medium who have need of each other after an air crash.Powell was the pilot of an airliner which crashed on coming in for a landing at an airport. Mysteriously he was the only survivor and he survived with barely a scratch, but with retrograde amnesia, he cannot remember any of the details of the crash.Agutter is a psychic who is having a bad time seeing visions of what happened and apparently communicating with those who died. What they discover about the crash the story for the rest of the film.This film marks the farewell appearance of Joseph Cotten who has a small role as a priest. Soon afterwards this most classy of leading men from the golden days of Hollywood suffered a stroke and was forcibly retired from the cinema.It's not a bad film, Survivor, but it plays like a blown up version of an episode of the TV series One Step Beyond. It might be worth a look if that's how your tastes run.