FANTASIA OBSCURA: Fancy a Nice New Apartment? This One Comes With a Free Gateway to Hell!
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, having to guard our world from evil while looking for a place to live can be the lease of your problems…
The Sentinel (1977)
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Directed by: Michael Winner
Believe it or not, once upon a time people were actively leaving New York in droves. The problems with urban living in the 1970s seemed even direr after President Ford let New York know how much he loved it. People threw around words to describe life in the city that included among more colorful phrases “hell hole.”
Which someone at Universal took a little too literally…
Note: Yeah, there are some minor spoilers that can be seen here, although a little drywall and some paint, then, maybe you won’t notice so bad…
During the opening credits we get look at our heroine at work. We see Alison Parker (Christina Raines) doing a set of gigs as a model and actress in commercials, seemingly enjoying her time in New York (where the film was mainly shot) as well as the company of her boyfriend, Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon).
Her living her dream gets side tracked when she gets a call that her father died, and she reluctantly goes to the funeral. There, she relives a painful memory, of coming home early to catch her father with two sex workers in his bed, which drove her at the time to try and take her own life.
Shaken by reliving this moment when she tried to kill herself, Alison decides to move out Michael’s apartment on Central Park South, to try and find herself (which a lot of folks in the ’70s were desperate to do…). Because she needs to get out now and can’t wait 30 years for Zillow to get invented, she turns to real estate agents, and finds through Miss Logan (Ava Gardner) someone so anxious to get her listing in Park Slope rented, she casually cuts 20% of the monthly rent, something that would NEVER happen in Brooklyn now…
Soon after taking the keys, she meets her neighbors. There’s Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith), who introduces himself while holding his cat Jezebel in his arms and showing considerable befuddlement. And there’s the couple downstairs, Gerde (Sylvia Miles) and Sandra (Beverly D’Angelo in her first theatrical role), a same sex couple where “sex” seems to be the operative word, as Sandra does in front of Alison what Louis CK did in front of plenty of other women.
And no, it’s not fun to watch…
Ultimately, Charles holds a party for Jezebel, where Alison meets the rest of the neighbors and hanger-ons, and things get a little weird very quickly…
Soon after, Alison finds out about the quirks of the place, the scraping and banging noises that wake her up and encourage her to investigate. Which, because this is a horror film, means that it’s not just a second-shift neighbor coming home late or a couple of rats in the walls…
All of this affects Alison’s work, with her fainting spells and reliance on prescription drugs to keep her going getting in the way. Alison is especially troubled when she reaches out to Miss Logan about the rest of the tenants in the building, and is informed by the agent that there are no other tenants there, save for a blind priest in the top apartment that she hadn’t met yet.
This so concerns Michael that he goes to the cops about it, although Michael’s involvement in his wife’s suicide makes the investigator, Detective Gatz (Eli Wallach) disinclined to help. Desperate, Michael turns to other means to determine what’s going on, when he uncovers the truth:
The building is a literal gate to hell, and there is a group within the Catholic Church that posts someone to keep watch over the building at all times. As the group chooses individuals for the position who attempted to kill themselves, for reasons that are hard to either fathom or buy, they have big plans for Alison as far as her helpfulness in keeping such evil at bay…
Thwarting malevolent machinations, mind you, is a lot harder than you’d think. What helped get this movie made, for example, was the fact that Jeffrey Konvitz was both the screenwriter (adapting his own novel from 1974) and the producer who had connections with Universal. That he could get Michael Winner almost immediately after he had directed the hot property Death Wish may have helped a lot in getting this off the ground. Getting for his leads Raines and Sarandon, who were also hot after doing Nashville and Dog Day Afternoon, respectively, allowed him plenty of leverage to see this one through.
The end result is a work that feels like less than the sum of its parts. There’s the extreme elements of the story where we are led to believe that the Catholic Church would be willing to abuse the suicidal and post them at such properties as the one depicted in the film. These cabalistic assertions would feel slanderous to the observant, and seem silly to anyone following the Katy Perry-Archdiocese of LA case for a convent in Los Feliz.
There’s also the heavy suggestion that in addition to suicide, that being a lesbian is a sure way to go to hell; it’s hard not to be appalled by the suggestion, especial at a time when the current Pontiff appears to being more open on the question.
On the other hand, there’s not a lot of center to this film being provided by Raines or Sarandon. Best guess is, they took to playing the characters in a low-key manner, whether with Winner’s direction or not, to make them seem like ordinary folks caught up in a fantastic threatening situation. Unfortunately, they turned it down so low, that with overly-vibrant hamming by the likes of Meredith, Gardner, and Wallach, aided and abetted by Martin Balsam as a classics professor who gives Michael a clue as to what’s up, they almost get lost in the flow of the film.
As a further indignity thanks to an accident of history, the leads had to contend with a number of smaller roles filled by actors who would go on to much bigger things. There’s Jeff Goldblum as Jack, a colleague of Alison who photographs her and is there at a few gatherings. There’s Jerry Orbach as a director on a commercial Alison does. There’s Christopher Walken as Detective Rizzo, Gatz’s partner. There’s even an uncredited Richard Dreyfus as a background character, showing up in this film the same year The Goodbye Girl comes out, for 
which he received an Oscar for Best Actor.
All of them suddenly appear, and the modern viewer gets jolted out of the film by their presence. It’s simply bad luck that the leads had no way of knowing they were going to be upstaged so thoroughly by folks getting day SAG rate for the shoot.
But that’s like real estate in New York, you know? How there’s always some hidden treasures you can find while going through the area, something that’ll appreciate and make a bad neighborhood hot some day.
Not that we had any of that here…
NEXT TIME: It may take me a while to come back here, but I will make it up to you with some great souvenirs from Pompeii…
…well, I think they’re from Pompeii…
