But Which Mountain?

Two extremely powerful psychic children are chased by Donald Pleasence and Ray Milland in Disney's 1975 film Escape to Witch Mountain. A badly written film filled with too many plot convenient coincidences and vaguely established character motives, it nonetheless has a few moments of magic.

Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards) are the supernatural siblings, recently re-orphaned after their foster parents passed away. We meet them as they're trying to adjust to life in the orphanage. On an outing one day, Tia spots Donald Pleasence about to get into a car and knows he'll die if he does. She warns him and he avoids getting into the car just before a truck slams into the passenger side. He realises these are exactly the kinds of kids his employer, a powerful and irritable rich man played by Ray Milland, is looking for. For what nefarious purpose does the sinister Aristotle Bolt (Milland) seek powerful psychic children? He lures them to his fabulous--and, by God, I mean really fabulous--mansion. He gives them ice cream and a combination playroom and bedroom cluster of chambers all to themselves. It all looks too good to be true.

And so Tia says her powers tell her. Yet we never actually learn what Bolt wanted them for. He makes a vague speculation about how they could easily find oil wells. So he wants to use them to make money and all he gives them in return is, apparently, anything they want. I'm not seeing the downside here.

It's weird from that angle but as a point of character development it's also pretty wobbly. Think it through a second. Powerful and absurdly rich Bolt gets it into his head one day he needs someone with psychic powers. He needs that someone so bad he tells his top man to scour the land. In one scene, he angrily promises to fire Pleasence if he fails to deliver once again. All of this would naturally lead one to believe he must have a very strong, specific reason to retain the services of a psychic. You don't launch the kind of manhunt evidently underway because you wake up one morning thinking, "Gee, I bet a psychic would come in handy in the world of business." The performances by Milland and Pleasence are of course the best in the film but, for that reason, I was left wanting knowledge of their motives all the more.

But the kids escape and go on the run. They're helped by Eddie Albert who drives a Winnebago that presumably runs on petroleum from a well that was found without aid of a psychic. It's not hard for them to stay a step ahead of their pursuers because the kids can push cars off cliffs with their minds or pluck pistols out of people's hands. But then a sheriff jumps out from behind a corner after waiting for them at the exact spot Eddie Albert randomly decides to drop them off. There's absolutely nothing about the chain of events that makes sense yet it's almost worth it when Tony thwarts the sheriff by animating his coat rack with his magic harmonica.

There are few nice ideas like this. The kids take on a bear companion briefly, which I liked. But these moments are always couched in bafflingly bad dialogue filled with senseless justifications or conflicts. When Tia wants to free the bear, Tony argues with her that they shouldn't because they can't take care of the bear once they're in the woods. As though the bear is unable to care for itself and would render the children no assistance in their flight from an angry mob that thinks they're witches (of course, the bear almost immediately turns out to be useful for exactly this).

The sequel has a different screenwriter so I might check it out.

Escape to Witch Mountain is available on Disney+.

Who Summons the Killer Baby?

It has a possessed baby, it has distinguished actors taking their roles seriously, but 1975's I Don't Want to be Born (a.k.a. The Devil Within Her and The Monster) never approaches The Exorcist in quality. Some nice dialogue thoughtfully delivered by Donald Pleasence and Eileen Atkins is undercut a bit by thoroughly unconvincing scenes of people getting pummelled to death by a newborn.

Baby's fingers dripping with his mother's blood following an attack when she tried to cuddle him soon after birth is the first real sign of trouble. For the baby's parents because this is not normal infant behaviour, for the audience because we're meant to accept what looks like drops of strawberry syrup on the fingers of a baby with an unmistakably oblivious facial expression as the sign of it cruelly perpetrating an act of physical violence. I wonder if anyone dared point out to director Peter Sasdy that one of the reasons The Exorcist worked is we were eventually able to see Linda Blair looking pretty convincingly demoniac.

Joan Collins is delicious as the baby's self-centred mother and I did like the scene where she narrates a flashback of the child's conception. Lucy (Collins) had worked as a stripper in a burlesque club where she performed with a dwarf named Hercules (George Claydon). In the flashback scene, she grudgingly admits to being turned on when he unexpectedly began fondling her in her dressing room but she angrily rejected him, pushing him away when he grabbed for her breasts. And so, like many evil dwarves before him, he takes revenge by putting a curse on Lucy. In case anyone thought this curse's relationship to the baby was too ambiguous, shots of Hercules in the crib in place of the baby are flashed for Lucy in moments when it's being particularly malevolent.

Lucy's husband, Gino (Ralph Bates), is blissfully unaware the baby might not be his, his guilelessness emphasised by an Italian accent so broad Chico Marx might call it stagey.

Gino's sister, a nun, has an accent not much more convincing but she's played with enough steel and intelligence by Eileen Atkins to make her seem the worthy counterpart to Max von Sydow in The Exorcist. She almost elevates every scene she's in, but maybe no performance can make up for a hairy little hand swatting up at adults from a crib. But I did really like a scene between Atkins and Pleasence, who plays the family's doctor. They have a fairly predictable debate about faith and science, with Pleasence concluding that, "a doctor can't write up a prescription against evil and violence. It's one of the severest limitations of our profession." But I love how Pleasence plays the scene. Except for the slightest of hints in his last few lines there's little sense of smugness in him and there's a sparkle in Atkins' eye that suggests her shrewd excitement in engaging in debate. I'd have loved to have seen these two as adversaries in a better movie with better dialogue.

This film is effectively funny, even if it didn't mean to be. Well, I'm pretty sure Lucy's hilariously useless stripper friend played by Caroline Munro was meant to be funny. I Don't Want to be Born is available on Amazon Prime under the title of The Monster.