Reflets

My review was written in August 1984 after watching the film on Monterey video cassette.

"Mirrors" is a mediocre supernatural horror pic, lensed in New Orleans in 1974 under the title "Marianne". Though rated PG in 1977, film had virtually no theatrical exposure, but xi now available on video cassette.

Poorly developed premise has Marianne Whitman (Kitty Winn) arriving with her young husband Gary (Wiliam Burns) at a New Orleans hotel with a sinister-looking desk clerk Charbonnet (William Swetland) setting the stage for touristy views of the city.

After buying perfume from a sinister-looking (again) black woman, Marianne begins hallucinating freely, seeing images in mirrors and wandering around in her white nightgown (as all good gothic heroines are wont to do). It turns out that an ages-old voodoo specialist Marie Laveau is attempting to take possession of Marianne, with mirrors serving as the instrument to snatch one's soul away.

Following her husband's death (from a presumed asthma attack), Winn is hospitalized after a fainting spell, where kindly Dr. Godard (Peter Donat) befriends her. Considerable filler ensues until she finally is possessed by Marie Laveau.

Pic is technically deficient, with opening reel featuring poorly post-synched dialog that is an immediate turnoff. Winn, fresh from a supporting role in "The Exorcist" is miscast, never expressing the sense of vulnerability and mounting paranoia needed in the role. Sole point of interest here is several scenes which presage Paul Schrader's 1981 "Cat People", also set in New Orleans, such as the heroine fleeing by train.

Renowned fantasy author Ray Bradbury is credited as creative consultant, and as an unfair come-on, his name figures prominently on the home video packaging.

Wow. You know, I was led to a link to "Mirrors" because one of the actresses in it was also in "Manos, The Hands Of Fate(!)".

Yet, I SAW MIRRORS on the big screen at a preview screening at the now

closed "Corenet" theater in Evanston Ill. It was a dreary, depressing experience and when I stayed up years later to see it on late night T.V. I was every bit as depressed.

A hopeless, hapless horror film that is so badly made it is kind of

disorientating. Kitty Winn, who won early glory for "The Panic In Needle Park", said goodbye to movies after whatever happened making this lousy movie. If

you are in to the obscure and the truely awful, you might hunt down a video of Mirrors. Otherwise, just take an hit yourself in the head with a hammer while drunk on malt liquor for the same effect.

There's not a great deal to recommend Mirrors, but it does have a few virtues. Location work in New Orleans naturally gives this film a boost, as does an attractive leading lady in Kitty Winn (this was her last feature to date after flirting with the big time in the first two Exorcist films). Peter Donat is still active of course, and he's well cast as the handsome doctor who takes care of the emotionally shattered Winn. Unfortunately the film can't seem to decide whether it's a purely psychological thriller or a straight ahead horror film, and the ending is unsatisfying and unrevealing.

This very obscure supernatural thriller evidently had a difficult postproduction history--various sources cite it as being made in 1974 and 1978, and it seems not to have been released in any form (theatrical or video) in the U.S. until 1984. It's definitely a misfire, but not unwatchable, and the major participants are talented enough to suggest this might at one point (before script changes? editorial meddling?) looked pretty solid.

It was yet another 70s disappointment for director Noel Black, whose high promise after the excellent 1968 Tuesday Weld/Anthony Hopkins black comedy "Pretty Poison" fizzled out via such little-seen movies as "Cover Me Babe" (a failed counterculture movie with young Robert Forster), "Jennifer On My Mind" (the movie that killed "Love Story" author-scenarist Erich Segal's briefly hot movie career) and Canadian tax-shelter caper flick "A Man, A Woman and a Bank." Likewise, "Mirrors" did no favors for Kitty Winn, who'd been excellent in "Panic in Needle Park" and the first two "Exorcist" movies.

Too bad, because both Black and Winn do some interesting work here that's thwarted by a muddy and ultimately inconsequential story progress. She plays a newlywed who believes she's become possessed by some sort of voodoo spirit during a New Orleans honeymoon. Supernatural visions plague her, especially whenever she looks into a mirror. But everyone, including her husband, thinks she's simply high-strung and delusional.

The mirror motif in itself isn't quite scary or compelling enough to hang a whole thriller on, and "Mirrors" (also known as "Marianne") spends way too much time teasing potential shocks that are seldom really delivered. The film's refusal to deliver easy "horror" highlights is admirable, recalling at various points "Rosemary's Baby," the original "Exorcist," and its contemporary "Audrey Rose."

Still, there's just not enough payoff here, especially as it all leads to a rote final freeze-frame that's supposed to be chilling but just leaves everything dangling.

Nonetheless, Black handles the actors and atmospherics intelligently, and Winn really holds the film together--like Louise Fletcher and Ellen Burstyn, two other 70s actresses who flirted with above-the-title stardom (and got somewhat further), she's rather ordinary and non-glam looking, but exceptionally skilled at creating character empathy and communicating emotions with or without dialogue. Given that Marianne is pretty much panicked, hysterical or paralyzed by dread from start to finish, it's much to Winn's credit that she keeps this narrow range of reactions credible and interesting throughout. With better material, her performance might have been as memorable as Mia Farrow's in "Rosemary," Catherine Deneuve's in "Repulsion" or Nicole Kidman's in "The Others."

Pretty, young Marianne is vacationing with her husband in a New Orleans French Quarter hotel. Nightmares involving mirrors and faces she's seen during her visit begin to plague her, but her suspicions of something sinister are roused when another guest from the hotel ends up mysteriously killed. The following night, her husband dies in his sleep from an evident asthma attack, and Marianne becomes convinced that forces of voodoo are pitted against her. Predictable terror ensues in this pedestrian thriller of the "is it all real, or is she nuts" variety.

It would be a bit of a stretch to call MIRRORS a critically *good* film, yet it does succeed suitably in perpetuating a creeping buildup of tension, and the performances(namely from Kitty Winn and Peter Donat) are fairly solid. Despite being erratically paced and somewhat inconclusive, it draws a voltage of lurking menace from the emotional and psychological duress of its central character...an indwelling nerve-center which fuels a troubling atmospheric carriage variably reminiscent in tone to LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH. Intimacy with the protagonist during her spiral of cruelly-induced confusion is ably effectuated, and marks the chief distinction which saves MIRRORS from sinking like an iron anchor.

4.5/10. THE SKELETON KEY(2005) incorporates several very similar key elements.