Don't Go Home!

For this week’s entry I watched Lurkers, the second-to-last film of prolific filmmaker Roberta Findlay.

Shortly before her wedding, Cathy (Christina Moore) starts seeing apparitions of tormented souls that may have a connection to her childhood tenement in the Bronx.

It did not take me long to realize that this was not Findlay’s best work. Yeah folks, Lurkers was not so hot, so buckle up.

I think the real problem with the film was the pacing, as Lurkers featured several drawn out montages that really just amounted to unnecessary filler. Even the sequences that should’ve been intense, like the little girl being choked with jump rope and the woman chased by a dude with a sledgehammer seemed to go on a tad too long. Several bits would have had a lot more impact if they had just been cut down by five or six shots.

Christina Moore as Cathy in Lurkers.

I had the same thing happen while watching Lurkers that I did with Findlay's Blood Sisters (released a year earlier) where I found it difficult not to doze off during the middle chunk of the movie. But hey, at least Blood Sisters had a smashing coverbox.

Something I found a bit distracting was that nobody, save for the protagonist, seemed to properly react to the situation. Granted, this was explained during the climax, but it did little to elevate the proceedings. Even though the “reveal” when it finally came was intriguing in concept, it was not particularly well executed. Lurkers felt like a Dean Koontz novel that he probably would’ve given up on halfway through writing it.

See how they lurk.

Points for featuring one of the laziest parking jobs in cinematic history though. And Gil Newsom as the least priestly priest ever. I also had a chuckle during the scene where two undressing models talk at length about high finance.

A travesty!

Roberta Findlay’s storied career ranged from everything to exploitation flicks to hardcore porn, but it was the tail end of her filmography that seemed to decidedly descend into mediocrity. And I say tail end because her 1985 effort Tenement is actually every bit as effective as John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and though I haven’t seen The Oracle yet, it looks pretty fucking bonkers – I probably should’ve watched that instead.

As far as bodies of work go, Findlay had one of the most colourful out there, male or female. I guess there comes a time when you just have to hang it up. No shame in that.