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53 reviews in total

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17 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
Not quite up to the standards of Exorcist or Omen, but still good, 24 May 1999

Author: Barnaby Marriott (barnabymarriott@yahoo.com) from Brighton, East Sussex, England

Audrey Rose is a very intelligent horror movie, but it is not as creepy as its original source - the novel by Frank De Felitta. On the acting front, Marsha Mason is both believable and sympathetic as the frantic mother, Janice Templeton. It's a shame that both Sir Anthony Hopkins and John Beck seem to have their minds on other matters, as if they were not enjoying being a part of this movie. Making a fantastic debut, Susan Swift is quite remarkable in the dual roles of Ivy Templeton and Audrey Rose Hoover. The climax, however, is more depressing than moving.

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16 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
Very avant garde for the time, 31 August 2004

Author: cyberxime from Chile

I've recently seen this movie again after at least 15 years. The first time it scared me a lot, probably for the weird look in Ivy's eyes and the screaming scenes...

Keep in mind that reincarnation was not a very common subject at the time, and I took it just as many other people, as a poor Exorcist copy. Now, knowing a lot more on the subject, I think it was not too bad given the time it was filmed. The hipnotic regression scene is well done, even though the ending probably can't happen in real life after a regression to a past life.

It was great also watching a young Anthony Hopkins in such role. As always, he convinces you of what he is feeling, and the movie, not being excellent, keeps you interested.

I gave it a 6, considering the good original screenplay (for 1977), and the performances of Anthony Hopkins and Marsha Mason. I must say she seems a little "too dramatic", but that was her style.

If you like Anthony Hopkins and you want to watch a good old thriller, you must see "Magic" too.

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Intelligent But A Bit Plodding., 3 June 2007

Author: youshotandywarhol from Oregon

"Audrey Rose" is a strange little tale of reincarnation. The story centers around a Janice (Marsha Mason) and Bill (John Beck) Templeton, a New York city couple who have a wonderful daughter named Ivy. Their lives are fairly normal, that is until a stranger (Anthony Hopkins) begins to stalk Ivy, claiming that within her body is the reincarnated spirit of his daughter, Audrey Rose, who burned to death in a horrible car accident. Of course, the Templetons think this stranger, named Elliot, is a madman. But when Ivy begins having horrible nightmares, running through her room, and banging on her bedroom window with her fists, they begin to wonder if Elliot's claims may just be true...

From the director of the horror classic, "The Haunting", Robert Wise, comes this bizarre but spooky little tale of reincarnation. The story is based on Frank DeFelitta's novel of the same name, and the plot is interesting. Reincarnation was a topic that hadn't really been addressed at the time, but while this film is constructed all around the basic idea of reincarnation, many people have mistaken it for some sort of "Exorcist" rip-off, mainly because of the fact that it displays horrible events plaguing a young girl. It's an intelligent premise and a well-written plot, but the problem with the film is that it is quite plodding and almost too slow for it's own good.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with slow-going stories, but I think most people can agree that the pacing here is a little tedious at times. On the plus side, there are some genuinely frightening hysteria sequences involving the young Ivy, along with the awful car crash death in the beginning that is the basis of the film. As far as the acting goes, it was all good - some of the hysteria scenes were obviously overacted, but aside from that it wasn't bad. Marsha Mason conveys a very emotional, frantic mother, while John Beck isn't given much to work with. The brilliant Anthony Hopkins plays Elliot (in one of his earlier roles, before "The Silence Of The Lambs" fame that he earned later in his career) quite well, which isn't surprising because he's always good. And Susan Swift (who much later appeared in a "Halloween" sequel), plays the tormented Ivy. I'm surprised we didn't see more of her as an actress, she seems to have had the potential.

To sum things up, "Audrey Rose" is a decent horror movie. The storyline is excellent, but unfortunately the pacing here breaks a lot of tension. On the plus side, there are some frightening scenes and a few memorable sequences, plus the story is intelligent and original. While it's a decent horror movie, it's not the kind of movie you can sit down and watch if you're in a tired mood, because it will likely bore you. Go into it with an open mind, but don't expect anything in terms of "The Haunting" or Wise's other films. 6/10.

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9 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Please Stop the Screaming, 25 May 2005

Author: Carrigon from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I first saw this movie years ago when I was much younger. At the time, I thought it was great and very haunting. But now that I've seen it again as an adult, I can't believe I ever thought it was a good movie. The story itself is excellent, but the way it is presented is just plain awful.

The worst thing about this movie is the constant hysterical screaming Ivy does. It goes on and on in so many scenes, it just gets to the point where you hope and pray she either dies or someone kills her just to stop the screaming. It just destroys the entire later half of the movie.

The rest of the script is just horrible. It's just not done well. And the ending leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.

The basic story of a girl who was killed in a fire at a young age and then reincarnated into Ivy is a very good story. But as I said, it's not played out right here. The script and the acting just ruins it. Really the only reason to see this film is to watch a pre-Hannibal Lecter Anthony Hopkins in one of his early roles. Other than that, I can't really see a reason to recommend this movie.

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12 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
The haunting and the haunted., 26 May 2004
Author: dbdumonteil

"Audrey Rose" was bound to fail:coming three years after the exorcist farce and all its imitators ,it stood no chance at all.

You should not forget that Robert Wise tackled the paranormal ten years before William Friedkin' s masquerade ,and with highly superior results :"the haunting" (1963).Roughly ,the stories display strong analogies "Her soul is in peace now" says Hopkins at the end of "Audrey Rose" whereas Richard Johnson told his companions that now Eleanor (Julie Harris) had found peace at last.No matter if "the haunting" is primarily a non-religious film and "Audrey Rose" deals with a religion 700 million human beings put their faith in:both the shrink in "Audrey" and doctor Markway in "haunting" try a scientific approach;both movies include a skeptical character:Russ Tamblyn's Luke and John Beck's bewildered father ,and in the end ,these two men begin to realize that something eludes them ,something which is beyond Cartesianism.

The main difference between "Audrey Rose" and "the haunting" lies in directing:whereas the latter's was prodigious ,innovating almost at every scene ,carrying its audience in another world ,allowing them to experiment themselves,the former relies upon clichés -and it's when you see these scenes of Audrey screaming that you realize the bad influence "the exorcist " had on the fantasy and horror genre - and nothing in the shooting of the NYC ancient building -if at least he had borrowed from Polanski's "Rosemary's baby'- recalls the eerie pictures of the Gothic castle where Eleanor and her mates wandered.

Emotion was intense in "the haunting";here only Anthony Hopkins is able to generate desperate hope,tenderness and faith.Hopkins was interested in the fantastic genre at the time,for he made "magic" two years after and "elephant man" -which was realistic but was given a fantasy treatment- which boosted his career as none of his other movies did before.

"Audrey Rose" came at the wrong moment .In spite of its flaws,it deserves a watch .It's Wise's legacy (Unless "star trek " counts).

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Dull, Dumb and Discardable, 8 February 2009

Author: rhinocerosfive-1 from Los Angeles

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

"Interesting" seems a necessary component of entertainment, and after the first 15 minutes AUDREY ROSE fails to meet even this basic criterion. Robert Wise is capable of good stuff: there's not much wrong with BLOOD ON THE MOON, or DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, or SOUND OF MUSIC, but he is sometimes the most boring filmmaker who ever lived. STAR TREK THE MOVIE is some kind of historic low-water mark, and there are many others. This is one. This movie would be depressing if it were good enough to inspire any emotion - a girl dies tragically, then her soul is reincarnated in another girl, who, uh, dies tragically. Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, instead it simply sucks.

The premise is compelling, and there is good acting here, but Frank De Felitta's script fails to explore any of his story's potential value, and ignores its many inherent contradictions. If "the soul is free", as his hodge-podge of Eastern mysticism purports, why does Ivy suffer death due to Audrey's trauma? Her soul didn't look any too free when it was thrashing around on fire, trapped in nightmares of its previous incarnation's demise, drawing Ivy to the same doom. What good, then, does Hoover do when he calms his daughter's soul-descendant in her panic? Does she recognize him as Daddy? Do I care? Not much, but apparently more than De Felitta and Wise did. Rather than consider any of these questions, Wise and his scribe prefer to linger for leaden minutes on the minutiae of police, medical and legal procedure. This stuff is supposed to be creepy, a banality of horror-type thing, but it's merely frustrating. Sure, those elements worked in EXORCIST: but there was a movie behind them.

Anthony Hopkins is a dependable manic, and Marsha Mason, even when married to John "a jaw is a fine substitute for a talent" Beck, is a credible and sympathetic performer. Susan Swift alternates between outrageously good and howlingly awful in her turn as the fatal juvenile. None of these fine people is able to salvage whatever usefulness there may have been in the bestseller, and concurrent decade-long national obsession with the paranormal, that gave AUDREY ROSE life.

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6 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Reborn too Soon, 22 September 2006

Author: sol from Brooklyn NY USA

***SPOILERS*** Losing control of her car on the rain-slick Pennsylvania Turnpike just outside of Pittsburgh Mary Lou Sikes, Ivy Jones, helplessly slides across the grass divider and into the oncoming traffic crashing into a car driven by Silvia Flora Hoover with her five year-old daughter, sitting in the back seat, Audrey Rose. In an instance the car driven by Slivia is knocked over on it's back and bursts into a ball of fire killing both mother and daughter. The time of the accident is 8:20 AM October 3, 1965. Some 375 miles way in New York City two minutes later on 8:22 AM Janice Templeton, Marsha Mason, gives birth to her first child a girl and she and her husband Bill, John Beck, name her Ivy, Susan Swift.

It's now some 12 years later and Ivy has been having nightmares of being burned alive waking up with mysterious blister on her hands. There's also this strange and creepy-looking man who's been following Ivy at school and even to her apartment building doing nothing but just watching her as he knew Ivy all of her life. We and the Templeton's later learn that the man is the president of Unified Steel Corp, among other titles that he has, Elliot Hoover, Anthony Hopkins. Mr Hoover turns out to be the father of Audrey Rose Hoover the girl killed in the October 3, 1965 car crash!

Hoover had been left a broken man after his wife's Silvia and young daughter Audrey Rose's tragic deaths. Over the last seven years Hoover has gotten involved with the occult and the mystic Eastern and Oriental World cultures that believe in Reincarnation and the indestructibility of the soul and that it's as real and alive as both being born and after dying. With the help of a number of oculists and mediums Hoover had tracked down his late daughter's soul, or being, in the body of Ivy Templeton due to the time of her birth and her nightmares about, like Audrey did, being burned alive. Now that Hoover found her he feels that he has to look after Ivy, or Audrey, like some guardian angel.

It's Hoover's annoying behavior and almost fanatical determination to be near Ivy that leads Bill to both verbally and physically have it out with him! This leads Hoover to be brought up on charges of both harassing the Tempeltons and even at one point kidnapping little Ivy. It's Ivy's mom Janice who strangely becomes convinced that Hoover is on to something. Since he has the uncanny ability to get Ivy to stop crying, and in some cases injuring herself, with his father-like attraction to her whenever Ivy goes into one of her uncontrollable fits or spasms.

The very depressing ending of the movie has both Bill and Hoover have, to Janice's objections, Ivy regressed by Dr. Lipscomb, Norman Llyod, back in time. It's then where she returns to her previous life as Audrey Rose Hoover and relives the horror of that accident at the beginning of the movie with first devastating and later deadly results.

I at first had difficulty understanding what exactly Elliot Hoover wanted with Ivy since even if she possessed the soul of his dead daughter Audrey Rose she was still the flesh and blood, and legal, child of Bill and Janice Templeton. As the movie started to slowly explain itself, through Hoover and a number of experts on Reincarnation, it became evident to me that the very fact that Ivy was born so soon, just two minutes after Audrey Rose's death, had left her a both physically and emotionally crippled little girl! It also became evident that Ivy's soul didn't have the much needed rest and time to heal itself from the unbearable trauma that it just went through as Audry Rose.

The tragic ending in the film didn't at all seemed to effect Hoover it was as if he expected it while both Bill and Janice were left numb with shock. It's at the very end of the movie "Audrey Rose" that you begin to realize, like Hoover did all along, that Ivy wasn't meant to be born. In being born so soon, just two minutes after Audry's death, her life would be hell resulting from the terrible memory of her previous incarnations, as Audrey Rose, terrifying death. This would have Ivy either like a moth be attracted to a flame, like she tried to do at a Catholic School snowman bonfire, and end up immolating herself or end up so traumatized that she would never have a happy or normal life.

Janice as well as Hoover, with Bill still not being able to accept what happened, in the end learned that Ivy's death was not a tragedy but in fact an escape from a life of suffering that awaited her. In the near future she'll be reborn again to a loving and caring couple with her troubled and tortured soul healed from what she suffered in the tragic lives that she lead as both Ivy Templeton and Audrey Rose.

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6 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Marsha Mason terrific as emotional center in off-beat reincarnation thriller., 16 May 2000

Author: Arne Andersen (aandersen@landmarkcollege.org) from Putney, VT

As in most of Marsha Mason's films, she is the entire emotional center. Her writers and directors rarely developed the male characters around her beyond sticks of wood and the actors playing them (with a few notable exceptions) did not attempt to leaf out. Here she gives a terrific performance as a mother whose child may or may not be the reincarnation of a soul lost in a tragic accident. John Beck as her husband has one emotion, barely concealed rage, and even the young Anthony Hopkins registers only one - benevolent concern. Miss Mason's face registers every nuance of intelligence and feeling within the character. She excels in a very long sequence in the middle of the film where her daughter runs amok, is finally calmed by Hopkins' character, is followed by an emotional interaction between Hopkins and herself and ends with her violent railing at her husband's disbelief and ineffectiveness. This is built so carefully that despite the numerous takes it must have occasioned she is never out of sync with the slow registering of terror/confusion/slow belief in the truth of the reincarnation theory. It should be removed and presented to acting classes. Here she undergoes trauma - physical, emotional and spiritual - and all the while she is thinking, processing, feeling - and we think and feel with her.

The plot and the film itself are not outstanding and the resolution is a let down, but it's Miss Mason who holds the film together and makes it a memorable experience.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
A real snooze, 1 September 2007

Author: Wayne Malin (wwaayynnee51@hotmail.com) from United States

A husband and wife (John Beck, Marsha Mason) have a loving 12 year old girl (Susan Swift). However she keeps having strange nightmares that won't stop. They are visited by a strange man (Anthony Hopkins) who tells them the spirit of of his dead daughter Audrey lives in their little girl.

The book of this came out in the mid 1970s. It was a huge hit and sparked off an interest in reincarnation. It was a long (over 400 or 500 pages) but engrossing read. For some reason Hollywood took its sweet time making this. By the time this was released there was no interest and this film failed almost immediately. Many people said it was made and released too late. To be honest though, this film isn't very good at all.

The film is well-directed by Robert Wise and it looks fantastic (the Templeton's apartment alone is jaw-dropping) but there are numerous things wrong here. The script is simply dull. It's all talk talk talk--just saying the same things over and over again. This movie moves very slowly. The acting doesn't help. Beck is dull and lifeless. Swift isn't good either but her role WAS difficult and she was only 13. Even Hopkins (a GREAT actor) is terrible. His reaction to seeing Ivy running around screaming as Audrey was just so bad! Only Mason (a very underrated actress) gives a very good credible performance. Basically the film is too long, unfocused and dull. Mason's good performance can't save this. This still remains an unknown film for good reason! Read the book instead.

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Audrey Doze, 2 May 2006
Author: Poseidon-3 from Cincinnati, OH

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

An undoubtedly talented film-maker, Wise somehow began to create films in the late 70's and early 80's that, despite potentially-arresting subject matter, had a rather leaden pace and suffered from over-length without the interest to warrant it. Here, he helms the story of a young girl who may be the reincarnation of another young girl who perished in an accident. The story begins involvingly and intriguingly, but eventually peters out with a lot of court room claptrap and questionable medical maneuvers. Mason plays a wife and mother who enjoys a rather carefree existence as a photographer until the day when a bearded stranger (Hopkins) begins stalking her daughter (Swift.) Simultaneously, Swift experiences violent and torturesome nightmares, profoundly worrying Mason and her husband Beck. Hopkins approaches the couple and explains to them that Swift was born about two minutes after his own daughter died tragically and he has reason to believe that Swift is the victim of this tormented soul, the title character. The couple refuses to believe this until the nightmares become even more tumultuous, though when Hopkins intervenes to help, Beck resists to the point of litigation and physical violence. Finally, it is up to psychiatrist Lloyd to tackle Swift's problem through hypnosis. Mason (who many people today forget was once, albeit briefly, a major actress with four Oscar noms to her credit) acts creditably throughout, though she does tend to tear up a bit frequently. She has a nice, tenuous chemistry with Hopkins. Hopkins has a semi-creepy, haunted role and he does it well. Beck is handsome and as effective as one can be in such a thinly drawn role. Even though he and Mason are virtually the same age, they do not ever seem believable as a couple. They just don't go together for whatever reason. He always seems like a younger man she met who would more likely be Swift's step-father! Swift is, at times, refreshingly natural and has a few good scenes involving physicality as well. Unfortunately, she also has some really goofy expressions and some googly eyes making it hard to realize when and when not she's possessed! The deliberate pace and heavy-handedness in the direction sometimes create unintentional humor when there ought to be unadulterated tension. The most notable example of this is when Swift is thrashing around the apartment in a nightmare trance and Mason splays around after her, falling over nothing and bloodying her knees. She can't get up to help her daughter who is in danger of bursting a window, but when the phone rings, she gets up and goes to it! The court room scenes are really ugly, perhaps intentionally. Rust and green and icky lighting pervade the scenes. A badly-conceived scene involving a giant snowman (obviously shot indoors) and a petulant nun played by Jackson (better known as one of the spinster sisters on "The Waltons") does nothing to allay the feeling of disjointedness the film has dropped into by that time. The whole thing, despite a few interesting segments, has to count as a misfire. It needed a clearer point of view and a more tightly-wound script. It meanders for far too long to a let-down conclusion (this is even after obvious cuts that were made prior to release!) One key role of a wheelchair-bound woman was played by the sister of the novel's author.

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