AUDREY ROSE
Alas, it pulls a Patch Adams! The horror...
There are little things I just don't get about this movie. I don't get how room 802 finds itself on the seventh floor. I don't get how the film is listed (in the opening credits and on the box) as a Robert Wise production, when he directed but had no hand in production. And I really don't get why an otherwise quite involving film would choose to Patch Adams on us and resolve itself in the courtroom.
A New York (I think it's New York) couple with an 11-year-old daughter (who's having nightmares she can't remember) becomes the target of weird, stalker-like behavior from an Englishman expressing an interest in the girl, Ivy. He turns out to be Anthony Hopkins (well, played by him, at least), and he seems to genuinely believe that Ivy is the reincarnation of his eleven-years-dead daughter, Audrey Rose. (in and out in two minutes. That's gotta be a record.)
You can tell that this movie's two decades old because the box refers to Hopkins as "the acclaimed English actor", and the film has two characters assuming that the notion of a girl menstruating at the age of nine has to be a lie.
It's not much of a horror film - a couple of nightmare scenes in a two-hour flick don't add up to a horror film, especially when said nightmares are viewed from the outside - but it does tell quite an absorbing story for most of its running length. Hopkins is great, as always. Too bad that courtroom-saddled final act has him uttering all of three lines. I also don't get what's with the scene where a class of young children burn (well, melt) a snowman in effigy with a big bonfire. Maybe it's a Catholic thing.
Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh in saying that this pulled a Patch Adams. For after all, at least through most of its running length, Audrey Rose is watchable.