Review #357: Communion (1989)

October Holiday Horror Review #30 - Communion (1989)

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The big list of holiday horror films on Wikipedia has this movie listed for Boxing Day (the day after Christmas); an important event in the story takes place on the day after Christmas, but it doesn't happen until about a third of the way into the film and it takes up very little runtime. (By comparison, a larger amount of time is spent on Halloween.) So I went about forty minutes of this thing wondering if this was another Arbor Demon situation, which it technically is not. After an entire month of mostly unfamiliar films I am thankful there was only one movie in my list that was completely devoid of holiday reference!

Anyway, Communion stars Christopher Walken as Whitley Streiber, a writer who goes out to a rural cabin on vacation with his family when he has a strange experience. He is woken up in the middle of the night by bright lights, strange sounds, and nightmares- after some unexpected traumatic flashbacks in the following months, he goes back out to the cabin for the Christmas holiday, and nearly shoots his wife by accident after another unexplained phenomenon. So Streiber sees a therapist, who hypnotizes him and gets him to relive the experience- an experience of alien abduction, where he was experiment on by numerous otherworldly individuals (that may have been watching him his entire life, and may be watching over his son as well). Streiber meets a few other people who had similar experiences, and goes back to the cabin for one last visit, where he comes to peace with the otherworldly visitors and decides to set aside writing his novel so he can instead tell the world all about what happened to him.

This movie is based on a book, which is allegedly a true account of what actually happened to the writer, Whitley Streiber; like many "based on true events" stories this really doesn't have a typical structure and certainly doesn't come to a satisfying conclusion. Almost nothing actually happens in this movie- we see the family go on vacation a few times and then we see a bunch of what are essentially dream sequences, and that's where the entirety of the horror comes from. And those sequences are definitely creepy, but they are all a bit hamstrung by the fact that the alien designs all look incredibly... silly, for lack of a better term. I understand these are probably exactly what the author claims he experienced, but seeing them on a screen really takes some of the tension away from the situation because of how silly and puppet-like they are.

Overall I just found this movie very uninteresting. I was excited at first when I saw Christopher Walken was in it, but this was 1989 and he wasn't quite the presence we know him as today; also his goofy little Walken-isms really didn't feel like they fit the character. The whole movie was also extremely inconsistent: I already mentioned the aliens looked silly but the climax of the film literally feels like it's meant to be funny rather than scary or tense, and the two main characters of Streiber and his wife spend a good deal of the middle of the film flip-flopping between whether they are taking these alien abduction memories seriously or not, and while it's entirely possible that this is how the real people acted during the events this movie is portraying, it makes for a frustrating cinema experience because I can't tell whether I am supposed to be concerned for the characters or if they think this is all a big joke. And the first half of the film is so padded out, that by the time they finally get to a point where it seems like the characters are about to start taking this seriously, the credits roll.

This had the makings of an interesting story but oftentimes reality is less interesting than fiction.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Scared Mantis Girls

A Harsh Mirror: I mentioned earlier that I felt Christopher Walken's typical behavior in this film didn't quite fit the character of Whitley Streiber. Apparently, Streiber himself (who was acting as Executive Producer on the movie) felt the same way, telling Walken that his behavior was portraying him as a little too crazy. Walken's response was "If the shoe fits..."