The Entity Review

Entity, The
Barbara Hershey plays Carla Moran, a young mother who undergoes the terrifying experience of being raped and abused by an invisible being, an entity, if you will. Friends scoff, parapsychologists puzzle, but Carla knows what she felt. Or does she?

by Gavin Bainbridge |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1981

Running Time:

125 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

Entity, The

A young mother is repeatedly raped and assaulted by an invisible demon. This is the unflinching premise to an unapologetic shocker of a film. That it comes with the ‘based on a true story’ tag means the director has less of a chance of hanging himself, but he goes pretty close, showing graphic rape scenes with a slightly unsettling abandon and rescuing himself only with some well-staged set-pieces (the invisible breast-fondling scene is, at least, a subversion of cinematic etiquette – think the invisible man with a psycho-sexual twist).

This raises the question of the entity itself. Presumably it's male, but neither Carla’s friends nor the bespectacled quacks can offer any suggestions, other than the token pseudo-psychological gambit that films like this have hardwired, that it could be something inside her and, by definition, something inside all of us. Yawn. Thankfully this film doesn’t look for too many answers, and leaves us undecided as it closes as to how bad of a film it really is. The answer: not that bad.

A lengthy, sometimes painful film that manages to find a few shocks left unplucked by The Exorcist, turning the special effects from the usually-tame invisibility sub-genre to it's own nefarious ends.
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