The Pyx

Rating:
Summary: Post-hippy Satanic Creeper
Review: The underbelly of a drugged-out, early 70s Montreal is laid out in the cold light of dawn in this eerie occult mystery. What happened to Ms. Black? That's what Christopher Plummer is trying to find out. Fans of Argento would enjoy this gritty, tough, and street-level film. If you're into 70s Black Sabbath one could see Ozzy, Tony, Geezer & Bill smoked out of their minds watching this in a dark, grimy Montreal grindhouse circa 1973. Cut the chatter and find this.

Rating:
Summary: Post-hippy Satanic Creeper
Review: The underbelly of a drugged-out, early 70s Montreal is laid out in the cold light of dawn in this eerie occult mystery. What happened to Ms. Black? That's what Christopher Plummer is trying to find out. Fans of Argento would enjoy this gritty, tough, and street-level film. If you're into 70s Black Sabbath one could see Ozzy, Tony, Geezer & Bill smoked out of their minds watching this in a dark, grimy Montreal grindhouse circa 1973. Cut the chatter and find this.

Rating:
Summary: HORRIBLE DVD release of obscure Canadian occult mystery
Review: This DVD is of a little-known film made in Montreal in the early 1970s, starring a very young and beautiful Karen Black, Christopher Plummer and Quebec actor Donald Pilon. This film was often shown on TV in Canada throughout the 70s, and although I cannot call it a great movie, it does have a certain atmospheric quality to it which has stuck in my mind all these years.

This movie is one of a host of films that came out at around this time (see also: "The Devil's Rain", "Race With the Devil", "The Omen", "The Sentinel", etc.) which, influenced by the success of such films as Rosemary's Baby and especially The Exorcist, dealt with the theme of Satanism.

Police detective Plummer and his partner Pilon are called to the murder case of prostitute Black. We flash back to Black's final days, as clues gradually lead the detectives to a Satanic cult.

Plummer is good as the detective but the real star here is Black, who has never been more radiant, and who also sings the movie's hauntingly etherial theme song.

It's a pity that the DVD transfer of this film is so bad, because I really do like this film and would otherwise have given it 3 stars.

But unfortunately the money-grubbing DVD-making people at Beverly Wilshire were so cheap they did not even bother to do what most el-cheapo DVD release companies do when releasing a movie with a picture screen ratio wider than a conventional TV screen, which is to pan and scan. Instead, they merely went and squeezed the entire wider image into the smaller screen, thus giving us a movie of long, thin "stick people". Such lazyness is absolutely INEXCUSABLE, and I wish there were some way to punish these people who are obviously out to cheat the unsuspecting public.

I guess the only real method to punish them we have at our disposal is to withhold our hard-earned money, so I would strongly advise you NOT to buy this DVD.

--Which is a real pity, because this film does deserve to be seen, and if you've viewed and enjoyed the other films I've mentioned above, chances are you will probably like this one too. I can only hope that someone will someday rerelease this again in a proper DVD version, giving the film the respect it deserves. In the meantime, this film was also previously released on video, so if you scrounge around you may be able to find yourself a copy. This is what I will now have to do.