Word: occultism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blessing." She invests him with a slightly seedy spirituality by surrounding him with motley religious remnants: an 18-ft.-high statue of the Buddha (flotsam from the hurricane) that he has stashed in his yard; a nuns' shrine to St. Francis that he tends on his island; an occult Mexican medal that dangles from his neck. Spencer's handling of these images leaves the reader conscious at every moment of a high skill and intelligence - indeed, perhaps too conscious. Individual scenes are admirable, as when Arnie's hapless rival Lex, visiting the sanctum of Arnie...
...Warner's version, occult occurrences are almost taken for granted--they appear in almost every scene. But the significance of these scenes is cheapened by Warner's reliance on flashy costumes, anachronistic props, and the original music by Peter Melnick. These external ornaments overshadow the plot, and the three-and-a-half-hour production gathers most of its strength from the attempt to destroy our conceptions of how a Shakespeare play should be performed...
...England and the U.S., a small army of mediums appeared to read the future, speak with deceased relatives and pocket very material fees. With a detached, only faintly ironic tone, Brandon notes some of the more bizarre assurances offered by these experts in the occult: one seer reported that alcohol and cigars were present in paradise; Doyle, after consultation with psychics, wrote that in heaven, "nutrition is of a very light and delicate order." Golf, he thought, was likely to be played...
...young son (Danny Pintauro), isolated from help and into deadly conflict with a possessed spirit. But it is worth waiting for the careful logic of Novelist Stephen King's plot to work itself out. For their demon is not from outer space or the weirder reaches of the occult. No, Cujo is a junkyard dog. But he is huge. And maddened by rabies. And thoroughly implacable in his need to kill. As he proved in Alligator, Director Lewis Teague is a sly and stylish merchant of fear; as she proved in The Howling, Wallace knows how to play...
...rather haunted--by the ghost of his father--who, ironically enough, died while paying Hamlet's father. But Alexander never becomes Hamlet and his mother never truly becomes the deluded Gertrude. Instead, Alexander withstands his father's appearance, and his mother fights for her own escape. Through the semi-occult figure of Grandmother Helena's former lover, the grizzeled Jew Isak (Erland Josephson), the escape proceeds and the magic becomes more pronounced...