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BEASTS
BREASTS
Directed by:
J. Lee Thompson
Starring:
Michael Sarrazin ... Peter Proud
Jennifer O'Neill ... Ann Curtis
Margot Kidder ... Marcia Curtis
Cornelia Sharpe ... Nora Hayes
Country: USA
Runtime: 105 min
J. Lee Thompson
Starring:
Michael Sarrazin ... Peter Proud
Jennifer O'Neill ... Ann Curtis
Margot Kidder ... Marcia Curtis
Cornelia Sharpe ... Nora Hayes
Country: USA
Runtime: 105 min
THE REINCARNATION OF PETER PROUD (1975)
This 1975 film based on the novel of the same name by Max Ehrlich, tries to ride the wave of the start
of the New Age culture by playing on the hopes and dreams of believers in reincarnation, but delivers
instead a soggy, boring lump of movie. But on the plus side, there are a lot of boobies and you get to
see Margot Kidder (Superman's Lois Lane) masturbate naked in a bathtub! Oh, and incest. Don't forget
the incest.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the plot of this movie, because it is paper thin to begin with, but
somehow Ehrlich, who wrote the script, and director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone, Death
Wish 4) manage to stretch the barely-there plot to its greatest limits of tedium. Basically, there is this
guy named Peter (played by Michael Sarrazin) who keeps having dreams of this naked guy swimming.
First thought is Peter is a homo and this is his subconscious talking to him. However, this naked guy
ends up getting killed by Margot Kidder. The visions plague him so much that he decides to use his
"dreams" as a road map and try and track down the actual locations he saw so he can find out once and
for all if he is crazy or if maybe he's been reincarnated.
He tracks the bits and pieces he can remember of his "dreams" to a small town in Massachusetts. He
slowly comes to find that he had indeed lived before and his name was Jeffery Curtis. He had a wife
named Marcia (Kidder) and she still lives in the area. He finds Marcia, now an old woman, and discovers
Ann, the daughter Marcia and Jeffery had before Jeff was found mysteriously "drowned" in the aptly
titled Crystal Lake. Peter starts to stalk Ann and soon starts hanging out with her.
Marcia and he are introduced and she gets instant bad feelings from him. Peter and Ann see more and
more of each other, and at first you think he just wants to spend time with his "daughter", but then they
fuck in the woods! That's right, Peter fucks his daughter in his reincarnated body. The movie takes a
steep downturn here as Marcia finds out and decides to masturbate in the bathtub then confronting
Peter with the fact that she knows everything. The film's turgid pace eventually, painfully, reaches a
conclusion that actually surprised me. I didn't think it would end that way, but then again I could see no
other way out of this bizarre love triangle.
This film's great idea is wasted by terrible pacing. There are so many scenes that should have been
cut here, and their inclusion makes the film drag and drag and drag. Boredom killed any interest the film
was generating in the opening twenty minutes. Peter becomes a dull, uninteresting character, and when
he decides to fuck his daughter then we really start to dislike him. I mean, I know it isn't his daughter, but
if he knows he used to be Jeffery then yeah it is like he was fucking his kid, which is unpleasant to say
the least. However Ann (played by the gorgeous Jennifer O'Neill) was a very tempting little number. This
film was criticized for this exact same plot point and rightly so. Unfortunately, that's the least of its
worries. While it started out to be a supernatural mystery thriller, it ends up being a sluggish family
drama. Skip this version and wait for David Fincher's remake!
- Jose Prendes
N / A
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