The late Great British icon David Hemmings didn't just star in Blow Up and model a magnificent pair of eyebrows in later years. It's true, his forehead-thickets really were something to behold, but the bloke the film critic Pauline Kael once described as resembling "a pre-Raphaelite Paul McCartney" was also a noted watercolourist, a member of the Magic Circle, directed a number of episodes of 'The A-Team', 'Airwolf' and 'Magnum PI', and a clutch of feature films into the bargain. These include the David Bowie vehicle Just a Gigolo, the George Peppard adventure yarn The Race For The Yankee Zephyr - and this adaptation of James Herbert's horror novel.
It's a pity then, that this real renaissance man couldn't conjure some magic over his own movies. As he later said, "I've done some real stinkers, and I don't regret any of them because I went into them in the full knowledge that they weren't going to win an Academy Award." Which is just as well, as The Survivor remains defiantly unmolested by Oscar's advances. (Although it did pick up the Jury prize at an obscure Catalonian film festival.)
This finds commercial airline pilot David Keller (former Messiah Robert Powell) the sole survivor of a massive plane crash in Adelaide, South Australia. As he guiltily observes, "I've just killed 300 people in a field and walked away without a scratch; that makes me pretty special, doesn't it?"
While he tries to come to terms with his mixed fortunes and a terrible bout of amnesia concerning the incidents leading up to the disaster, the ghosts of the passengers roam the surrounding territory, grumpily avenging themselves on those ghoulish photographers and grave robbers who've treated their corpses with contempt in the charred, bloody aftermath - while roping in tortured psychic Hobbs (Jenny Agutter) as a go-between. With the screams of the damned reverberating in her eardrums she informs a disbelieving Captain Keller, "They're asking for your help - the men, women and children who died in your aircraft."
The Survivor has latterly been compared with the works of M Night Shyamalan, which ought to sound loud and insistent claxons with anybody bored to absolute blazes with promising plots that turn out to be little more than triple-length episodes of 'The Twilight Zone'. In all fairness, Herbert's (comparably restrained) source novel, is simply another variation on Ambrose Bierce's classic short story from 1891 'An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge' - see also: Carnival Of Souls, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Jacob's Ladder and The Escapist, all good films, in fact. Yet Hemmings' movie needlessly fudges a fairly straightforward issue by saddling itself with an even more complicated and ambiguous resolution.
The irony, given his later critical and commercial reputation is that the young Manoj Nelliyattu might just have managed to invest this adaptation with the stuff Hemmings conspicuously failed to provide here: suspense. Scares. Dread. Because up until the final, tight 10 minutes, this is a right dreary old bunch of cobblers; Herbert himself admitted in an interview that he'd nodded off during a screening of this weirdly tension-lite affair.
Sadly, cinema has rarely done the original Garth Marenghi proud. You long for some fearless Brit-horror director to make a genuinely faithful adaptation of an early period Herbert, such as 'The Spear' or 'The Fog.' Because the results would truly give the BBFC something to think about.
Meanwhile, Powell turns in another characteristically aloof performance; Agutter flails about ludicrously as the possessed medium; and in the minor role of a Catholic priest, the legendary Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, Duel In The Sun), mopes around to no great distinction, fervently praying this won't be his final film in a long and distinguished career. His prayers reached voicemail.
It's a pity then, that this real renaissance man couldn't conjure some magic over his own movies. As he later said, "I've done some real stinkers, and I don't regret any of them because I went into them in the full knowledge that they weren't going to win an Academy Award." Which is just as well, as The Survivor remains defiantly unmolested by Oscar's advances. (Although it did pick up the Jury prize at an obscure Catalonian film festival.)
This finds commercial airline pilot David Keller (former Messiah Robert Powell) the sole survivor of a massive plane crash in Adelaide, South Australia. As he guiltily observes, "I've just killed 300 people in a field and walked away without a scratch; that makes me pretty special, doesn't it?"
While he tries to come to terms with his mixed fortunes and a terrible bout of amnesia concerning the incidents leading up to the disaster, the ghosts of the passengers roam the surrounding territory, grumpily avenging themselves on those ghoulish photographers and grave robbers who've treated their corpses with contempt in the charred, bloody aftermath - while roping in tortured psychic Hobbs (Jenny Agutter) as a go-between. With the screams of the damned reverberating in her eardrums she informs a disbelieving Captain Keller, "They're asking for your help - the men, women and children who died in your aircraft."
The Survivor has latterly been compared with the works of M Night Shyamalan, which ought to sound loud and insistent claxons with anybody bored to absolute blazes with promising plots that turn out to be little more than triple-length episodes of 'The Twilight Zone'. In all fairness, Herbert's (comparably restrained) source novel, is simply another variation on Ambrose Bierce's classic short story from 1891 'An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge' - see also: Carnival Of Souls, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Jacob's Ladder and The Escapist, all good films, in fact. Yet Hemmings' movie needlessly fudges a fairly straightforward issue by saddling itself with an even more complicated and ambiguous resolution.
The irony, given his later critical and commercial reputation is that the young Manoj Nelliyattu might just have managed to invest this adaptation with the stuff Hemmings conspicuously failed to provide here: suspense. Scares. Dread. Because up until the final, tight 10 minutes, this is a right dreary old bunch of cobblers; Herbert himself admitted in an interview that he'd nodded off during a screening of this weirdly tension-lite affair.
Sadly, cinema has rarely done the original Garth Marenghi proud. You long for some fearless Brit-horror director to make a genuinely faithful adaptation of an early period Herbert, such as 'The Spear' or 'The Fog.' Because the results would truly give the BBFC something to think about.
Meanwhile, Powell turns in another characteristically aloof performance; Agutter flails about ludicrously as the possessed medium; and in the minor role of a Catholic priest, the legendary Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, Duel In The Sun), mopes around to no great distinction, fervently praying this won't be his final film in a long and distinguished career. His prayers reached voicemail.