"Home? This is your home. You're dead."
So here's a film that will get under your skin.
We open on Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a soldier stationed in Vietnam whose unit abruptly comes under heavy fire. As Jacob makes for cover he cannot help but notice that many of his fellow soldiers are exhibiting strange behavior: foaming at the mouth, suffering seizures, or crying uncontrollably rather than fighting back. Before he can make sense of it all, however, he is stabbed in the gut by an unseen foe.
Flash forward to 1975. Jacob has survived the war and now lives in Brooklyn with his co-worker / girlfriend Jezebel (Elizabeth Pena), working as a postman. But Jacob seems to be seeing . . . things . . . demonic things that can't possibly be human, and who seem to be out to end his life. To compound his distress he can't seem to stop dwelling on his dead son Gabe (played by an uncredited Macaulay Culkin), and keeps dreaming about the day he was stabbed in the jungle. But is Jacob really being haunted by demons, or is he merely succumbing to post-traumatic stress disorder?
I have to say, when this film is firing on all cylinders it seriously creeps me out. Like many great horror films, it's as much a mystery story as anything else, and I'm not going to ruin the film by explaining it to you. Its creature design was incredibly unique for the time, and the director, Adrian Lyne, really knows how to show just enough to let your own imagination fill in what you don't see. It's hard to think of another movie that so perfectly recreates the feeling of being inside of a nightmare- the early subway scene, and the gurney trip through the hospital stand out as particularly brilliant set pieces.
The performances are really quite good- particularly Robbins and Elizabeth Pena. You also have to love Danny Aiello as Jacob's one ray of hope: the angelic chiropractor Louis. If I ever have a chiropractor I would definitely want it to be this man.
At times the film is a little heavy-handed when it comes to its religious symbolism, but I find it pretty easy to forgive. My only real complaint regards how the film ends. Again, I won't spoil it, but let's just say that it really makes you wonder what you were just watching for the last couple of hours.
Check in tomorrow for # 18!
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