Possessed by the Night

Erotica can reach to a level that is intensifying and scary at the same time. In "Possessed by the Night", it says it all. Here you have a horror script writer(Ted Prior) who goes to Chinatown and buys a strange pickled one-eyed creature. The thing in the jar does something to him both good and bad. He works on his scripts better, and he's an animal in bed. However, his wife began to get scared by his actions. It gets worse when the live-in secretary, Carol (Shannon Tweed-Simmons) enters the picture. When the supernatural aura gets to Carol, the sex games become very intense. Brought in by his boss Murray (Frank Sivero), Carol was not only sent to live with the couple, but to steal the scripts as well. Murray may be a sleaze, but he was about to get something in return he'll never forget: Double-crossed! Along with Tweed, and Sandhal Bergman, Chad McQueen plays a collector who want to go out on his own, and not take any guff from his boss. Other than sex, firepower has its part of the movie. Everyone decided to take out one another. This movie is indefinitely a class of its own. No one will ever see an erotic thriller like this one! 3 out of 5 stars.

"Possessed by a brain-like one-eyed thing in a jar" would be a more accurate title for this one, but I guess "the night" is shorter. Anyway, besides this "creature", the movie offers: a sweaty Shannon Tweed giving us fitness tips, a (then) 42-year-old Sandahl Bergman still sporting a PHENOMENAL athletic body, irrelevant martial arts fights with Chad McQueen, and timeless movie villain Henry Silva mostly sitting behind a desk and saying things like "I love bimbos!" and "Greed makes the world go round". So fans of B-movies should enjoy it, despite its pointless story and redundant subplots. Fred Olen Ray makes the most out of a probably tiny budget, and smartly keeps the running time short too. (**1/2)

Pure gold for hard core fans of B-movies. What else can you ask for? You got Shannon Tweed in all of her sexy glory. Her looks are extremely hot. You got a supernatural plot that involves a cheesy but gross "thing" (a brain with an eye or something) that awakens people's sexual instincts. Weird but effective. And last but not least you got hot sex scenes including of one Shannon's most famous moments where she is forced at first to have sex and then enjoys it in a savage manner.

Well this is not the best erotic B-movie but it's a damn entertaining erotic flick to have. Buy, rent, or watch it on cable, it's worth the watch.

There are some high profile names and faces in this movie, or at least some very recognizable ones. How did they come to be involved in this? The concept certainly comes across as the sort that has filled many anthologies, and been beloved by many writers over the years in a variety of media. The mystical MacGuffin of chaos is classic, and this specific creation looks really great. There are tinges of both humor and abject creepiness as the course of events progresses: a little horror, a little comedy, a little mystery. I think Mark Thomas McGee's screenplay is surprisingly well balanced between its component parts. Only - where is the plot? The character of Howard Hansen, a struggling writer, seems to have been somewhat autobiographical for McGee, as we're greeted with a surfeit of characters and a deficit of story. We're introduced to him, her, and the other person, but instead of narrative threads weaving together, it seems more like they're mostly just pointlessly laid out scattershot on a table, and going nowhere. To ask my third question in one paragraph, what happened here?

Fred Olen Ray's name is a little infamous when it comes to film-making, love him or hate him. I'm not inclined to have any especial opinion, yet here his direction shares the same qualities as the editing of Steven Nielson and Fima Noveck, and perhaps also Gary Graver's cinematography: overzealous, incohesive, and unconvincing. Perhaps that slant is intentional in light of the marginally tongue-in-cheek tone of the production, so often shared by other tales similarly centering such a singular, story-driving thingamajig, but even at that the result is unimpressive. And it should be said that the what's-it in a jar is so loosely tied into the plot in the first place, only occasionally having relevance to specific scenes until more than halfway through the runtime, that one is truly left to wonder just what McGee was actually doing at the time he wrote this. Scenes, characters, dialogue, and the narrative and its development are all over the place, making sense only in the most vague of terms. And truly, Ray's direction here is no better. As if to emphasize the point, there's a moment when a character is killed, and their blood slowly pools on a glass surface. However, in the shot where we watch that crimson spread, I feel like we're looking at an M. C. Escher painting, because there's no easy discernment of how the body is actually positioned relative to the glass surface and the objects around it.

Sloppy as the writing and film-making are on a fundamental level, the cast are pretty much wasted. The version of 'Possessed by the night' I watched was sadly chopped up to remove a few minutes, tiny segments at a time (specifically, any of the eroticism in this so-called "erotic thriller"), but I really don't feel like I missed anything: as terribly as this is made, I'm glad to have been spared a few minutes of my time, and a little bit of nudity isn't nearly enough to begin to compensate for all the astounding, flailing weakness. Even the effects are plainly overdone to an extent that wrecks suspension of disbelief. I'm sure there's probably someone out there that thinks this feature is a whole lot of fun, but I'm absolutely not one of them. Points awarded for a few good ideas, but a finished film can't be sold merely only on What Could Have Been. Whatever it is you think you're going to get out of 'Possessed by the night,' you'll get much more of it, and better examples thereof, in many, many other movies. There's no reason to waste your time on this one.

Last week I found in Possessed by the night in the thrift store. A long time ago I had once seen the film on a Friday night on TV. In the 90s and 00s, many commercial channels broadcast 16+ films late on Friday evenings: B-Horror and Erothrillers. Possesed by the night is a marriage between these two genres, an odd couple of 16+ genres aimed at diffrent audiences.

The plot very briefly summarized: A writer with a writer's block visits an antique shop in search of inspiration and becomes fascinated by a glass jar containing a spirit in spirit. Meanwhile, his publisher has gambling debts, so he sends a secretary, played by Shannon Tweed, to help speed up the writing. But the secretary becomes possessed by the glass jar and forces the author to have misogynistic sex with his wife. And then an unhinged Mafia hitman walks in.

I'll start with the good news: the movie is pretty fun to watch, even in 2023. As far-fetched as the plot is, compared to a mass of other B-roll erotic thrillers from the '90s, Possessed by the night has a pretty suspenseful, constructive story instead of the usual wafer-thin story mixed inbetween a succession of sex scenes.

Also more original given the horror impact, although the horror remains below average and will not attract demanding horrorfans: Special effects are largely absent and the film never gets scary nor gorry.

Acting performances remain below average and frankly I don't think Shannon Tweed had much more talent than these kinds of roles. The other actors do it even weaker if possible, though the Asian shop owner came over as genuin to me...

Anyway, set all cons apart, I was able to watch this odd cross between Horror and Erothriller without frustrations and had quite a bit of fun with it, so a well-considered 6/10. For those with nostalgia to 90s tv-thrillers.