THE ANTICHRIST (1974)

As far as THE EXORCIST ripoffs go THE ANTICHRIST isn't too bad.  A young woman named Ippolita (Carla Gravina) was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident when she was 12.  The strange thing is the doctors cannot find anything wrong with her.  Her father (Mel Ferrer) is extremely wealthy and will do anything to cure her, so when her uncle (Arthur Kennedy) suggests a psychologist, who specializes in cases like hers, Mel immediately brings him in.  The doctor, using hypnosis, soon discovers that the paralysis is caused by both sexual frustration and a past life experience by a relative (who had the exact same name) who was burned alive for witchcraft!  Wow!!!  Somehow during all of this Ippolita is possessed by the same demon that possessed her ancestor.

Anyway, the whole story is just an excuse to get to the demon stuff and...it's entertaining.  THE ANTICHRIST had a lower budget than THE EXORCIST and the story is nowhere nearly as gripping, but the acting (by the impressive cast) is above average and the story does move along at a nice pace.  The demon-possession scenes themselves featured green projectile vomit, one head-spinning murder, demon-powered levitation, visions of a Satanic ritual (complete with off-screen goat butthole licking!), fire, rain, a fake-as-hell-looking snake, very mild nudity, blood licking, vomit licking, invisible demon sex, mouth foam, tons of blasphemous profanities and floating furniture.

Worth a viewing for fans of such things, but mainstream audiences would probably dislike it.

GRIZZLY MAN (2005)

GRIZZLY MAN is an interesting documentary (directed by Werner Herzog) about a man named Timothy Treadwell.  The thing that makes the film so interesting is that Timothy (along with girlfriend Amie Huguenard) died in a bear attack in 2003 and the film is mainly made up of footage that Timothy himself filmed while living in extremely close proximity with bears for months on end (mostly alone) for 13 years!  That's right, each summer for over a decade Timothy would go to the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska and camp out in the wild with nothing but his supplies and (in the last 5 years) some video equipment.  Anyway, according to Werner, Timothy compiled over 100 hours of film and GRIZZLY MAN is the end result of stuff taken from Timothy's movies and interviews that Werner conducted with people involved with Timothy's life and death.

I liked GRIZZLY MAN and found the whole thing very haunting.  Timothy's films (along with the Don Edwards song "Coyotes") are far and away the highlight of the movie and while they are simultaneously startling and shocking in how just how close the misguided Timothy lived with these animals, they are also endlessly fascinating in what they capture.

As far as a documentary goes, GRIZZLY MAN succeeds in entertaining the audience, but I wasn't totally satisfied with the movie.  Timothy's footage and the music were fantastic, but the interviews were not very good.  I liked the one with the pilot who found Timothy's body, but the other ones were pretty weak and I didn't care for the almost staged looking scenes about Tim's wristwatch and the one with Werner listening to the audio of Timothy and Amie's death.  And don't even get me started with the coroner scenes!  What was with that guy?!

Overall, Timothy comes off looking like an immature man-child who probably did more damage to the animals than he did good by making them become more accustomed to humans, but it's still sad that he and Amie died so young and in such a horrible way.

I'm curious if any of the animals that Timothy became "friendly" with ever missed him or thought of him after he was gone? I bet that one fox, Timmy, did. Timothy even said, while petting Timmy on the head, that he and Timmy had been friends for over a decade. Poor Timmy. He never got another head scratching ever again.