Premonition

Yep, this is it.. a new candidate for my worst film of all time. A dopey hippy touches a skeleton of an old Native American while out in the desert with his buddy, and he starts getting disturbing visions. Nothing however, could be as disturbing as this self-indulgent crap, which is wall to wall with bad folk music, painful dialogue and acting so bad it has to been seen to believed. The plot is completely incoherent: Just what is the point of all those endless flashbacks featuring angels? They mean NOTHING.

Never has there been a more annoying on screen presence than the character portrayed by Carl Crow, who is just like Bob Dylan.. except for the intelligence and talent. His mumbling platitudes about life and love will have you climbing the wall in seconds, and we have him to 'thank' for the dreadful opening song. Oh joy.

To be honest, after the first 30 minutes I couldn't stomach anymore of the pain. Off the TV went, and I hurried into the garden to do a spot of weeding. Ignore anybody who says they enjoyed it, because they are lying. This is a movie destined to float through history, unloved and unwanted by everybody. It's only possible function is as an extreme form of torture for enemies of the state. Even then, it might be a bit much.. 0/10

I last saw this movie about ten years ago, so my review will probably come off as a bit sketchy. Briefly, "Premonition" centers around a group of hippie musicians who discover some unusual red flowers, smoke them, and experience terrifying hallucinations. Or ARE they just hallucinations? As a horror film, "Premonition" is very understated--almost too much so. (Much of the script is preoccupied with character development but the characters are dull, so you never really feel involved with them.) But what it lacks in excitement, it more than makes up for in terms of atmosphere and mood. The "hallucination" scenes are quite disturbing and, as the members of the hippie troupe start to become obsessed with what they see under the influence of the red flowers (and with what it all could mean), the viewer is overtaken by a flesh-crawling sensation of slow, certain doom. This is precisely what I look for, but find so rarely, in a horror movie. "Premonition" was never easy to find, and will be even less so in the post-VHS age. But if you ever run across a copy, snatch it up. The soundtrack is terrific (even the corny, ersatz-folk theme song is used to chilling effect) and perfectly complements the general theme of the film...i.e., the nature of reality and what lies beyond the limits of our normal, everyday perception. Congratulations to Alan Rudolph for putting together a creepy, effective, one-of-a-kind genre picture!

I found a VHS copy of this film for the equivalent of 50c when I was a kid at a junk sale with the title "Tales of Terror - The Impure - Wild Rider" and it became a mystery to be unravelled for this particular small town boy from England. It seemed so strange and other-worldy. The film itself is a hippie-fied self indulgent psychedelic mess but is entertaining all the same, especialy the freak out festival scene. This got played in the background at more than a few parties of my youth. I always wondered who would make and appear in such a film and now thanks to imdb I know. It was sad to hear Carl Crow drowned in 1978.But I'm interested to find out more about what the rest of the cast went on to. Be warned the electronic music which starts up when the deadly flower comes into view and that accompanies a lot of the dream sequences is very annoying to 21st century ears. That said your chances of finding a copy of this film and seeing it or of reading this review are pretty slim.

"Premonition" (aka "Head") is a living proof that you don't need much to make a decent horror film with a limited budget as long as you know what you're doing and you know how to built suspense and thrills without overcomplicating with your story. What appealed to me the most in this film was that it was a compelling drama with glances of horror rather than creatures/gore shocker show common in the 1970's. Disciple of one of the godfathers of the Independent Cinema, the late Robert Altman, the undervalued Alan Rudolph started his director career with this film which is far from everything he would make in the years to come (examples: the unconventional romcom "Choose Me; "Mortal Thoughts" (1991) and "Afterglow").

Anyway, to the heart of the matter. It tells the story of three musician friends who start to have recurring dreams that predict their deaths, and the probably cause in at least two of the guys is that they made some experimentations with a drug plant found by one of them during a mysterious expedition on an indigenous territory. The leader of the group desperately tries to make them stay sober and focus on their music but getting rid off of those images won't be that easy.

"Head" (as I prefer to call it) is a concrete drama about addiction and how it affects not only the addicted person but everyone around him. I think the horror, represented in the fuzzy, noisy and scary images of a group of small women slaying the men, is just a way to approach viewers from such a story. You care about the characters and what they go through, it looks real and not some imaginative and complex monstrosity. Rudolph doesn't need much to haunt you, sure it has that 1970's B horror movie kind of feel, stiff acting but there's some strong effects as well - the use of sound itself in the dreams and the expedition sequences are terrifying. I liked Carl Crow's performance as the main character, he was the most convincing on scene, and sad to know that it was his last performance - no much information about what happened to him except that he died at a young age.

There's plenty of things to be learned with this film, film students pay attention to it. It's conciseness is very hard to be found these days. The version available comes from a poor VHS version but manageable to watch nonetheless. 7/10

A sidestepped horror film mostly noted as an early effort from Alan Rudolph, PREMONITION is a hazy, mystical horror outing which involves a hippie music group taking residence in the pastoral outlands of the San Francisco Bay Area. Various interpersonal hostilities are vented, and numerous doobies passed around before they begin experiencing collective nightmares/hallucinations of impending doom. It's implied that this is a paranormal brain response triggered by exposure to strange red wildflowers, though there may be some nebulous connection to a malformed skeleton unearthed by one of the band members during an archaeological excavation some years earlier.

PREMONITION is a distinctly early-70s product, alight with post-psychedelic artistic pushiness and intermittent brushes of electronic music by pre-famed Harold Budd. It's an ambling, occasionally intriguing work of psychotomimetic vagary, and probably too experimental and ambiguous for mainstream audience appreciation. While the film has definite handicaps, primarily with pacing and concatenation, it does possess a gauzy "will-o'-the-wisp" eeriness which is unique and variably effective.

Possibly the most tranquil horror film you'll ever see...it's a peculiar one, to be sure. 4.5/10