The Survivor (1981)

This spooky little film is full of the supernatural imagery familiar to us from other good ghostly films (such as DON'T LOOK NOW). Filmed in Australia, the story of the man surviving the plane crash and being plagued by ghosts is both intriguing and dramatic. Director David Hemmings is adept at serving up disturbing images, from the burned young girl to the photographs of the dead. I have read the James Herbert novel on which this film is based before and from what I can remember it sticks pretty well to the source material.Robert Powell is on top form as the haunted (and in the end, haunting) pilot and he is given solid support from Jenny Agutter as the psychic he teams up with. Expect lots of shivers and chills instead of in your face horror and you'll find yourself enjoying this little mystery, which copes well with a low budget and is well worth your time. Not one for watching alone late at night!

"The Survivor" is a bizarre, incomprehensible attempt at a horror story that barely registers as that or anything at all.The bits that one assumes are meant to be scary are merely confusing and come out of nowhere. The soundtrack pummels you with frantic music but this is merely irritating since you can't understand what, if anything, you are supposed to be scared by.The plot is fairly simple, so why is it so confusing? It's about a pilot who survives a plane crash that kills everyone else on board. He is visited by some kind of clairvoyant or something, played by Jenny Agutter, who is about as mystical in this role as the CEO of Wendy's. Her role in the plot is obvious on paper (how else is the movie going to get the supernatural bent going?), but when handled this badly, becomes confusing and you may wonder what she is there for.The ending, I admit, was clever. It's just everything that led up to it was so bad that it was completely wasted, like the rest of the movie.

A woman experiences a premonition about a devastating plane crash in the suburbs. This turns out to be accurate, when a plane crashes next to the home of a photographer- who is one of the first responders on the scene. A pilot is the sole remaining survivor of the wreck. He manages to walk away from the disaster virtually unscathed- suffering only from retrograde amnesia and survivor's guilt. He becomes obsessed with piecing together exactly what happened.A few days after the crash, the photographer becomes haunted by premonitions of a young girl with burns all over her face. Meanwhile, the pilot does his best to follow the investigation...but it's getting him nowhere. His most solid lead is a mysterious woman who claims to have advanced knowledge about the incident.When he tries to get information from her, however, she suffers from a hysterical fit and attacks him. Despite the fact that it was her that approached him to help...while looking for some help herself.Eventually she comes around, and claims that she was present at the crash...but not in a typical way. She seems to be a psychic medium through which victims of the crash (or something) are (is) trying to contact the pilot.Subsequently, when the photographer leaves his photographs to develop, his wife looks at them...only to discover they are filled with ghastly images of some sort of demonic entity. Obviously she dies.The psychic woman then approaches the pilot for a second time, now suggesting he trigger regression by returning to the site, with hopes that it will evoke his lost memories. He agrees to participate.Together, they seek help from a local priest and return to the cockpit, where his memories begin to return...to her.By now, the photographer has stumbled upon the crime scene that used to be his darkroom...and gotten himself killed- slasher style- in the process, just like his wife.It's at this point that the pilot gets a chance to meet the demon responsible for all of this death and destruction face-to-face...and he's coming for his soul! This film is short and sweet. Packed into 1 hour and 15 minutes, it's an Aussie flick that seems like it was made-for-TV. At first I thought it was going to suck hard, because it has what is probably one of the most hilariously bad plane crash sequences in cinematic history (it literally looks like a camera tracking in unison with a plane wing that is moving through a movie studio). But that aside, the ending really redeems this awesome little film.It's quite evident that ---SPOILER--- The Sixth Sense stole it's twist from this screenplay. With this one being a bit more supernatural, overall. I particularly love the way the filmmaker denotes our entrance into and exit from the "Other World". Great little flick that is definitely worth a watch.6 out of 10

Robert Powell and Jenny Agutter star in this Australian production of a pilot and a medium who have need of each other after an air crash.Powell was the pilot of an airliner which crashed on coming in for a landing at an airport. Mysteriously he was the only survivor and he survived with barely a scratch, but with retrograde amnesia, he cannot remember any of the details of the crash.Agutter is a psychic who is having a bad time seeing visions of what happened and apparently communicating with those who died. What they discover about the crash the story for the rest of the film.This film marks the farewell appearance of Joseph Cotten who has a small role as a priest. Soon afterwards this most classy of leading men from the golden days of Hollywood suffered a stroke and was forcibly retired from the cinema.It's not a bad film, Survivor, but it plays like a blown up version of an episode of the TV series One Step Beyond. It might be worth a look if that's how your tastes run.