The Unseen (1981)

Very Cool!!!

Great Film overall

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

"The Unseen" does manage to stand out from many other independent horror movies of this period. The production values are pretty good, for one thing. More importantly, much of the movie is creepy enough to make you genuinely uneasy. Much of this is due to the performances of the two lead male actors. Cult star Sydney Lassick makes his Ernest character a very uneasy figure - you can tell he's hiding something, as well as hinting that his character is a very disturbed individual long before secrets are revealed. And Stephen Furst is very convincing as "Junior", the out of control secret who is extremely unpredictable.Both actors bring in some genuinely creepiness and chills, and the direction adds some genuine atmosphere at times. Still, the movie remains somewhat tasteless to a degree. When we learn how disturbed Ernest is, and how he treats his "wife" and Junior, there is an uneasy feeling of genuine cruelty. Also, the character of Junior often comes across as an unfortunate, and a victim to a degree. The treatment of this unfortunate leads to some uncomfortable moments.Is the movie worth seeing despite the lapses in taste? Maybe. I would recommend it to viewers who are (1) fans of independent horror movies from this period, and (2) are not easily offended. Though even these people might find some moments of the movie tough to sit through.

It's true that Danny Steinmann's "The Unseen" is a simplistic horror thriller with a very predictable plot, no particular attempts for twists or surprises whatsoever and featuring literally every single cliché the genre has brought forward over the decades, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad film. On the contrary, my friends and I were pleasantly surprised by this obscure but nevertheless intense little 80's shock- feature that mainly benefices from a handful of brutal images and a downright brilliant casting. The beautiful and ambitious reporter Jennifer Fast and two of her equally attractive friends travel to a little Californian town to shoot a documentary on the anniversary festival, but their hotel forgot to register their booking. In their search for a place to stay, the trio runs into the exaggeratedly friendly but suspicious museum curator Ernest Keller who invites the girls to stay at his remote countryside mansion. One by one the girls experience that Keller and his extremely introvert and submissive sister Victoria hide a dark and murderous secret inside their house. "The Unseen" can easily be described as a cheap and ultimately perverse amalgamation of the horror classics "Psycho" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The plot is a series of familiar themes that became notorious and endlessly imitated due to these two films, like twisted family secrets in the cellar, voyeurism, crazed inbred killers and a very unappetizing treatment of chickens. Still, I don't consider these to be negative remarks, as "The Unseen" is a completely unpretentious and modestly unsettling thriller that clearly never intended to be the greatest horror classic of the decade. Although the denouement of the plot is pretty clear quite fast, director Steinmann attempts to maintain the mystery by keeping the evil present in the house "unseen" like the title promised. The casting choices and acting performances are truly what lift this sleeper above the level of mediocre. Sydney Lassick, immortalized since his role as the overly anxious psychiatric patient Charley Cheswick in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is truly the ideal choice for the role of Ernest Keller. His persistent friendliness and almost naturally perverted appearance are exactly what the character needed. Also Stephen Furst, who eventually turns from the unseen into the seen, gives away a tremendous performance as "Junior". He looks and acts like an authentic handicapped man and his attempts to get close to Jennifer in the basement are genuinely unnerving. "The Unseen" is a slow and predictable but nevertheless potent early 80's film that will certainly appeal to fans of 70's exploitation and generally weird stuff.

Dreck about three beautiful women in California who go to cover some festival (or something). All the hotels are booked so they have to spend the night in a creepy old house. What they don't know is that there is a creepy inhabitant there who likes to kill...Yawn. Boring, pointless, utterly stupid "horror" film. Bach and her two buddies are certainly beautiful but the movie itself is dull dull DULL! Bach and her friends are no actresses--their faces are blank all the way through. The final "revelation" is laughably predictable and there's no blood or gore to keep you interested along the way. There is some expected gratuitous female nudity but that's not enough to save this. Boring, pointless and unknown (for good reason). A 1 all the way.

Los Angeles TV news reporter Jennifer (the beautiful Barbara Bach of "The Spy Who Loved Me" fame) and her two assistants Karen (the appealingly spunky Karen Lamm) and Vicki (the pretty Lois Young, who not only gets killed first, but also bares her yummy bod in a tasty gratuitous nude bath scene) go to Solvang, California to cover an annual Danish festival. Since all the local hotels are booked solid, the three lovely ladies are forced to seek room and board at a swanky, but foreboding remote mansion owned by freaky Ernest Keller (deliciously played to geeky perfection by the late, great Sydney Lassick) and his meek sister Virginia (a solid Lelia Goldoni). Unfortunately, Keller has one very nasty and lethal dark family secret residing in his dank basement: a portly, pathetic, diapered, incest-spawned man-child Mongoloid named Junior (an alternately touching and terrifying portrayal by Stephen Furst; Flounder in "Animal House"), who naturally gets loose and wreaks some murderous havoc. Capably directed by Danny Steinmann, with uniformly fine acting from a sturdy cast, a compellingly perverse plot, excellent make-up by Craig Reardon, a nicely creepy atmosphere, a wonderfully wild climax, a slow, but steady pace, likable well-drawn characters, and a surprisingly heart-breaking final freeze frame (the incest subplot packs an unexpectedly strong and poignant punch), this unjustly overlooked early 80's psycho sleeper is well worth checking out.