Black Rainbow (1989)

Unfortunately the plot is full of interesting ideas thrown together with no internal logic, so that the story is just dumb.Just one example - (may contain spoilers if you have not read any of the other reviews.) Towards the end Arquette's character suggests to the audience that they are wrong to try and believe in some other life and that what if there is only this and shouldn't we live for it.A fine and noble thought - but hardly likely to be voiced by a character that is in herself providing proof that there is something more. Since she has discovered that she is getting true messages from beyond, she would be far more likely to say at this stage that maybe once it was all an act but now she is compelled to believe in a next life ...And then at the end she sits in a chair and disappears .., so if she was a ghost why the hell was she doing the act for her father and getting upset by it and worried about their money... not to mention screwing around ... Or was she just a regular human vulnerable girl for most of the movie (and this acted brilliantly) and then transformed suddenly into a ghost in that chair, or did she suddenly learn teleportation ...Fuzzy, insultingly sloppy thinking ruins what could have been a really good movie.

This had the potential to be a good movie -- the basic premise, about a phoney medium who starts to experience real premonitions, was interesting, the actors were excellent, and the gloomy atmosphere of an economically-depressed rural South came through loud and clear -- but it just didn't go anywhere.The movie came off like more of a soapbox for the writer's leftist, secular humanist views than anything. For example, there's a scene in which the psychic starts telling an auditorium of blue-collar workers that if only they were to stop believing in God and the afterlife, they could start to build a better world here on earth. The problem with such propositions is that they don't square with reality. The further we've moved from religion, the baser we've become. Unlike the churchgoing villain of this film, real-life Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was a fan of Richard Dawkins, not of the Bible. Becoming more honest with ourselves and each other by dispensing with our ideals (or, as the writer would probably see it, our hypocrisy) doesn't mean that the world will become a better place. Better a Henry Ford than a Gordon Gekko.Black Rainbow didn't spend enough time developing its characters to justify the frequently grandiose, overwrought, overly-intellectual dialogue. The story, which with a little more work would've resulted in a first-class supernatural thriller, was given a backseat to the incessant moralizing.Too bad Lee Ving wasn't cast as the hit man. That role would've fit him like a black glove! 6 out of 10 stars.

A man named Gary Wallace (Tom Hulce) looked for a medium named Martha Travis (Rosanna Arquette) who disappeared after her father's death. Gary found her living in the woods and he had been tracking this girl down for 10 years.This was confusing in the beginning because, you see her father alive! Weird. This movie began where it ended. Anyways, here's the rest of the review:Martha worked at a church as a medium and she lived with her father named Walter Travis (Jason Robards) at a hotel. And that day, she saw a vision of a woman's husband, her name was Mary Kuron (Linda Pierce). And her husband's name was Tom (Olek Krupa) and Martha believed that he was dead! And when Mary returned home, he was okay until she went out of the lounge. Tom got shot while he was watching t.v. BIZARRE! After the incident, Martha and Walter went to go speak to a guy named Jack Callow (Jon Thompson) to discuss the incident. Fortunately, Jack's wife Eva (Helen Boldwin) refused to say who Mary was with. That guy was the person who shot Mary's Husband! He certainly was looking for TROUBLE!Again, at the church. Martha said to a woman named Jacky Adams (Marty Terry) that her deceased friend had seen her husband, Bill. And then, she said to a woman that her brother named Louis is with his twin brother Jimmy, when in fact one of them was dead! And soon, Jacky believed that her husband Bill was dead.And not so soon, Martha was told to go because, everyone thought she was a witch. And when Wallis popped in to the church to see Martha, she had left. And he finally found her and he warned her about Tom Kuron's murderer was going to kill her that evening. And that night, the murderer came after her while she was communicating to another person's deceased love one. Martha shrieked, she told everyone in the church to run , gun shots went off, and everyone ran out like crazy people.And when Martha came home, her father took off with her the moment she came in! And the killer shot out of Martha's room and he tried to shot Martha down the passage. But strangely, the bullets went through her and they killed her father! And followed by an investigator named Irving Weinberg (Ron Rosenthal) when he was coming out of the elevator. And when the killer came downstairs, he got shot and he went through a wood and glass door.And before Gary left the church, Martha told him that her father didn't know that all this was not a dream. And she disappeared. And Wallace went back into the wood's , to Martha's house to find her. NOW! This was the strangest moment that I was talking about: A car that was seen stuck in a leaf pile was seen again and Martha's house was totally shambled. And as you all knew....it was in the woods. Weird END!

"Black Rainbow" is an uncategorizable film: an unusual and ambitious mix of such different genres as metaphysical horror, corruption/conspiracy thriller, family drama, even a backstage look at the way evangelist/medium "shows" are set up. The mix doesn't always work (the ending, for example, is not consistent with some of the previous events), but the movie is still definitely worth seeing. There are at least two or three brilliant scenes (the most notable of which is, arguably, the way Hodges "films" an explosion without actually showing it), and Rosanna Arquette gives an impressive performance. (***)