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Steve-Calvert.co.uk
A Passion For Horror
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The Hearse (1980)Directed by George Bowers
Trish Van Devere stars as Jane Hardy, a recently divorced woman who is also struggling to comes to terms with death of her mother. Times have been hard for the school teacher, so there is little wonder that she has had a few mental problems. It is also probably not surprising that she feels like getting away from things for a while and decides to take a vacation at her aunt's house. Jane's aunt died
over thirty years ago and since then the house has stood empty. The
house is situated in the small back-water town of Blackford and,
even after driving all day, it is dark before she arrives. As she
is approaching the town though, Jane has an encounter with a creepy,
old hearse that nearly runs her off the road.
I enjoyed watching The Hearse and
jumped in my seat more
than once. There is no blood or gore, nor is there a lot in the way of
special effects, but it still manages to be quite a scary movie, if a
little predictable in places. My main problem with the movie is the way
it ends and I felt really let down (Oh! is that it?).
It almost looks as if the producers
ran out of ideas or just had no idea where they were
meant to be going with the story in the first place. Even though the
ending is so poor, The Hearse is still a movie I would happily
watch again because the good outweighs the bad and it is so creepy it
is hard not to love it. CASTJoseph Cotten ... Walter Pritchard David Gautreaux ... Tom Sullivan Donald Hotton ... Reverend Winston Med Flory ... Sheriff Denton Donald Petrie ... Luke Christopher McDonald ... Pete Perry Lang ... Paul Gordon Fred Franklyn ... Mr. Gordon Olive Dunbar ... Mrs. Gordon Al Hansen ... Bo Rehnquist Dominic Barto ... The Driver Nicholas Shields ... Dr. Greenwalt Chuck Mitchell ... Counterman Allison Balson ... Alice Jim Gatherum ... Boy #1 Victoria Eubank ... Lois Tanya Bowers ... Schoolgirl
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The local townsfolk are
less than friendly towards the new arrival and
the fact that she looks so much like her aunt probably doesn't help
matters. Jane does not know the full story about her aunt though, and
it
is only when she finds an old diary and starts to read it that she
begins to get a picture of her aunt's life and discovers that she was
involved in Satanism.
Jane has other things
to worry about though. She has had several encounters with the hearse,
it
even pays late-night visits to her home and the hearse's driver is one
creepy-looking dude. At one point the hearse succeeds in
running Jane off the road and her car gets stuck in the soft soil.
Fortunately for her, another car comes around the corner and the
driver,
a man named Tom, stops and gives her a lift home. He even drops by the
next day to return her car to her. Jane is very attracted to her knight
in shining armour and a romance develops between them, which seems to
mirror her aunt's romance (as described in the diary).