User Reviews

While hardly for all tastes, THE COMING is an interesting and thoughtful possession/reincarnation horror film which gets complicated when a time-travel element is introduced. There aren't nearly enough films made these days about the witch-hunts of centuries past anyway, so any that do get made must have something going for them. Directed, somewhat surprisingly, by '50s monster-maker Bert I. Gordon, this breathes a breath of fresh air into a genre which, at the time, was being besieged by masked killers and inane teenagers dicing with death. I'm pleased to say that there isn't a single teen to be found anywhere in this movie! The film is not brilliant, with the low-budget often showing in the poor quality of the production, and many scenes take place in the dark which often makes it difficult to see what's going on (or maybe it's just the quality of the tape I saw...).

One of the things I liked most about this film was the acting, which was surprisingly good for a no-budget genre. Nobody is brilliant, but the film is packed with affectionate, obscure characters and nobody puts a foot wrong either. Susan Swift, a child actress who resembles and recalls ALICE SWEET ALICE's Paula Sheppard, mixing the same childhood innocence with an adult evil to scary effect. Although Swift is often hysterically over the top and her incessant whiny crying is enough to make the viewer join in, she's a lot better than many other child actresses I could mention. Albert Salmi is underused as the town Sheriff but nonetheless creates a warm and gently amusing character, the likes of which have almost died out these days in films.

Also deserving of praise are David Rounds, playing a confused time traveller who puts in an appreciated understated performance and John Peters, playing the inherently evil Reverend, a great "boo! hiss!" type villain. Tisha Sterling shows promise but is wasted in a nothing role as Swift's perplexed mother. The film focuses on plot and atmosphere rather than action and in-your-face horror, although there are a couple of tacked-on gore sequences which look like they belong in a different film. I guess Gordon couldn't resist inserting a couple of his patented cheap but cheerful special effects into the film, including a briefly-seen spider demon which enters a cadaver, but these are used sparingly and to good effect.

The film is full of flashbacks and most of it is set at night, which was enough to confuse this viewer. However, the cast of quirky characters and odd situations, the smattering of gore and the fairly original plot was enough to make me enjoy this movie, even if it is a little slow-going in spots. And hell, in a week in which I've watched the triple distilled evil of NINJA HUNT, THE MUTANT KID, and, to top it off (and nearly me in the process), the godawful TROLL 2, anything with an ounce of sense or intelligence would look good to me.

Bert I. Gordon's BURNED AT THE STAKE, inexplicably titled THE COMING on the British made video I managed to see, is essentially a chick-flick horror movie tapping into both THE EXORCIST and the legendary Salem Witch Fiasco with an interesting angle on time travel. Others have described the plot in enough detail, my interest in how the film essentially boiled down into a clever little manipulation aimed at 17 to 25 year old females who still remember the angst of their adolescent years. It's quite watchable, has some decent shock sequences, but ultimately raises more questions than it answers when viewed in a contemporary light that sees through the film's contrivances.

For instance, you have to wonder about any horror movie that casts a 17 year old girl as a 12 - 14 year old who's age is never really established. At one point lead actress Susan Swift -- who is superb, given the material -- is playing hopscotch when I realized she was perhaps a bit too old for that sort of thing. Or at least a bit too well developed as the film takes great pains time & again to provide her with costuming that seems to be more interested in showing us how she was maturing into an attractive young lady. They tap into the Linda Blair thing by having her spend the bulk of the film either dressed up as a Puritan serving girl, a schoolgirl, or running around present day Salem in her nightgown so much that you wonder why nobody seems to notice & ask if she needs a ride home.

She also spends an awful lot of the film writhing around on the floor in a demonic frenzy, which is where I suspect a lot of the interest in the film lies. Then the movie goes out of it's way to be respectable, showing it's true colors of having it's cake and eating it too by lacking the traditional nudity and explicit gore that early 1980s horror movies are so well known for. Yet make no mistake, the film is an exploitation exercise, albeit one in surprisingly good enough taste to appeal to a female audience who will very quickly come to identify with the poor young thing as she realizes that she is a modern day reincarnation of one of the young hysterical liars at the focus of the Salem Witch Fiasco. Then there is the scene where she sits on the steps of her school bus unsupervised while the rest of her class is being given a tour of a colonial era haunted cemetery, the improbability of which is only underscored by having her teacher literally struck dead from above by a coincidence of the most extreme kind.

Then again all of the adults in the film are ineffectual, stupid, or at best well-meaning but ultimately wrong. All that is except for one of the resident present day witches who walks around dressed like Elvira and is the only one with any hope of getting to the bottom of the mystery at hand. Which is, how can a 17th century Puritan farmer suddenly find himself transported to 1981 era Salem? The farmer is the only truly sympathetic character in the film (even the local investigative journalist carries a flask of whiskey with him for a quick nip to get him through some research work) and yet the filmmakers have the clod invade the young woman's bedroom where he is understandably shot at point blank range by her mother, who doesn't seem to understand that good Massachusetts liberals don't keep loaded handguns in their bed stands. The scene is creepy but for the wrong reasons, since after all this is supposed to be a 12 to 14 year old girl. Couldn't he have just invaded the kitchen while she was fixing a snack?

Perhaps this is the key to understanding the film, which is more or less a young woman's fantasy vision of a horror film world, replete with cobblestone streets, Gothic churches, cloistered old cemeteries, fetching costumes, and authority figures who are too caught up in their adult function roles to understand her inner turmoil. Good old Albert Salmi has a thankless role as a police officer who is nice enough to re-unite our heroic witch with her "familiar" Rottweiler hound but intellectually ill-equipped to understand what is going on around him. He's like an ineffective father figure, concerned and empowered but ultimately unable to comprehend what he's found himself in the middle of. The finale also has enough fire & brimstone yet ultimately fails to answer the basic question at the heart of the film: Was there actually a supernatural force at work in Salem in 1692? Damned if I know.

5/10

Also known as The Coming, this movie starts in the late 1600s in Salem, as Ann Putnam (Susan Swift) is caught experimenting with black magic. To protect herself, she turns over the names of those who were also involved, sending Reverend Samuel Parris (John Peters) on an orgy of stake burnings to not only destroy all of the witches but to bring back the fear of the Lord in his worshippers. Meanwhile, in 1982, Loreen Graham (also Susan Swift) is possessed by Ann's spirit.

By 1982, Bert I. Gordon had given up on giant animals after Empire of the Ants and would go on to make movies like Let's Do It, The Big Bet, Secrets of a Psychopath and Satan's Princess. That said, along the way, he'd made Picture Mommy Dead and Necromancy, so he was about more than Costco sized vermin.

Ann Putnam is a real person who, at the end of her life, tried to atone for all the people who died at her hands - well, as the result of her identifying them - and said that they were innocent. As for Gordon, making this near the end of a long career, he's put together a movie that can't decide if it wants to be supernatural or a dream. He's still making an occult movie that could play as a made for TV film minus all the profanity and gore the genre had embraced by 1982.

In this film. Putnam can only save a young girl by changing history and bringing someone back in time to fix it. It honestly makes no sense but had enough eerie visuals to keep me watching. There's a skeleton-handed killer who the movie never really explains and we wonder who the protagonist is, who the villain is and how we'll get the story all figured out. I wonder if Gordon ever divined it himself.