meddlecore A woman experiences a premonition about a devastating plane crash in the suburbs. This turns out to be accurate, when a plane crashes next to the home of a photographer- who is one of the first responders on the scene. A pilot is the sole remaining survivor of the wreck. He manages to walk away from the disaster virtually unscathed- suffering only from retrograde amnesia and survivor's guilt. He becomes obsessed with piecing together exactly what happened.A few days after the crash, the photographer becomes haunted by premonitions of a young girl with burns all over her face. Meanwhile, the pilot does his best to follow the investigation...but it's getting him nowhere. His most solid lead is a mysterious woman who claims to have advanced knowledge about the incident.When he tries to get information from her, however, she suffers from a hysterical fit and attacks him. Despite the fact that it was her that approached him to help...while looking for some help herself.Eventually she comes around, and claims that she was present at the crash...but not in a typical way. She seems to be a psychic medium through which victims of the crash (or something) are (is) trying to contact the pilot.Subsequently, when the photographer leaves his photographs to develop, his wife looks at them...only to discover they are filled with ghastly images of some sort of demonic entity. Obviously she dies.The psychic woman then approaches the pilot for a second time, now suggesting he trigger regression by returning to the site, with hopes that it will evoke his lost memories. He agrees to participate.Together, they seek help from a local priest and return to the cockpit, where his memories begin to return...to her.By now, the photographer has stumbled upon the crime scene that used to be his darkroom...and gotten himself killed- slasher style- in the process, just like his wife.It's at this point that the pilot gets a chance to meet the demon responsible for all of this death and destruction face-to-face...and he's coming for his soul! This film is short and sweet. Packed into 1 hour and 15 minutes, it's an Aussie flick that seems like it was made-for-TV. At first I thought it was going to suck hard, because it has what is probably one of the most hilariously bad plane crash sequences in cinematic history (it literally looks like a camera tracking in unison with a plane wing that is moving through a movie studio). But that aside, the ending really redeems this awesome little film.It's quite evident that ---SPOILER--- The Sixth Sense stole it's twist from this screenplay. With this one being a bit more supernatural, overall. I particularly love the way the filmmaker denotes our entrance into and exit from the "Other World". Great little flick that is definitely worth a watch.6 out of 10

Ali Catterall The late Great British icon David Hemmings didn't just star in Blow Up and model a magnificent pair of eyebrows in later years. It's true, his forehead-thickets really were something to behold, but the bloke the film critic Pauline Kael once described as resembling "a pre-Raphaelite Paul McCartney" was also a noted watercolourist, a member of the Magic Circle, directed a number of episodes of 'The A-Team', 'Airwolf' and 'Magnum PI', and a clutch of feature films into the bargain. These include the David Bowie vehicle Just a Gigolo, the George Peppard adventure yarn The Race For The Yankee Zephyr - and this adaptation of James Herbert's horror novel.It's a pity then, that this real renaissance man couldn't conjure some magic over his own movies. As he later said, "I've done some real stinkers, and I don't regret any of them because I went into them in the full knowledge that they weren't going to win an Academy Award." Which is just as well, as The Survivor remains defiantly unmolested by Oscar's advances. (Although it did pick up the Jury prize at an obscure Catalonian film festival.) This finds commercial airline pilot David Keller (former Messiah Robert Powell) the sole survivor of a massive plane crash in Adelaide, South Australia. As he guiltily observes, "I've just killed 300 people in a field and walked away without a scratch; that makes me pretty special, doesn't it?" While he tries to come to terms with his mixed fortunes and a terrible bout of amnesia concerning the incidents leading up to the disaster, the ghosts of the passengers roam the surrounding territory, grumpily avenging themselves on those ghoulish photographers and grave robbers who've treated their corpses with contempt in the charred, bloody aftermath - while roping in tortured psychic Hobbs (Jenny Agutter) as a go-between. With the screams of the damned reverberating in her eardrums she informs a disbelieving Captain Keller, "They're asking for your help - the men, women and children who died in your aircraft." The Survivor has latterly been compared with the works of M Night Shyamalan, which ought to sound loud and insistent claxons with anybody bored to absolute blazes with promising plots that turn out to be little more than triple-length episodes of 'The Twilight Zone'. In all fairness, Herbert's (comparably restrained) source novel, is simply another variation on Ambrose Bierce's classic short story from 1891 'An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge' - see also: Carnival Of Souls, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Jacob's Ladder and The Escapist, all good films, in fact. Yet Hemmings' movie needlessly fudges a fairly straightforward issue by saddling itself with an even more complicated and ambiguous resolution.The irony, given his later critical and commercial reputation is that the young Manoj Nelliyattu might just have managed to invest this adaptation with the stuff Hemmings conspicuously failed to provide here: suspense. Scares. Dread. Because up until the final, tight 10 minutes, this is a right dreary old bunch of cobblers; Herbert himself admitted in an interview that he'd nodded off during a screening of this weirdly tension-lite affair.Sadly, cinema has rarely done the original Garth Marenghi proud. You long for some fearless Brit-horror director to make a genuinely faithful adaptation of an early period Herbert, such as 'The Spear' or 'The Fog.' Because the results would truly give the BBFC something to think about.Meanwhile, Powell turns in another characteristically aloof performance; Agutter flails about ludicrously as the possessed medium; and in the minor role of a Catholic priest, the legendary Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, Duel In The Sun), mopes around to no great distinction, fervently praying this won't be his final film in a long and distinguished career. His prayers reached voicemail.

ThrownMuse This interesting supernatural horror from The Lucky Country begins with an airplane explosion that kills all passengers aboard. The pilot of the plane (Robert Powell, dull and deadpan) is the lone survivor, and he suspiciously escapes without injury. As he wrestles with his guilty conscience and the mysterious tragedy, he finds himself haunted by a creepy little girl and the screams and cries of those who died in his plane. He meets the kooky psychic Hobbs (Jenny Agutter of "An American Werewolf in London" fame), and together they try to figure out what the hell happened. Directed by horror icon David Hemmings, "The Survivor" feels like an episode of "The Twilight Zone." Today's audiences would find it easy to guess where the story is headed (and if not, ginormous spoilers on the back of the DVD case will certainly point the way), but I can see how this movie may have been a doozy in the early 80s. It's based on a James Herbert novel, but it sort of feels like a loose remake of a low-budget 60s horror gem that shall go unnamed here. The good news is that the film is very atmospheric and eerie, and the sound editing adds an especially chilling touch. I think it's an effective horror film overall, but it is not without its flaws. The problem with the movie is that it touches upon several genre elements (ghost story, slasher) without actually exploring any to a satisfactory degree. There are also a couple death sequences that don't make sense within the context of the film. Most unfortunate is that the opening sequence is more amusing than horrifying, and I assume this is due to budget constraints. The pilot avoids crashing the plane into town after it explodes, but the focus of this terrible incident is a woman on the street nearby, clinging desperately to a blowing tree, screaming and flailing about. It doesn't help that whenever the pilot has a flashback to the plane crash, we're taken back to this funny scene. All in all, "The Survivor" is a decent movie, though a bit of a mess. Still, it's one of the better 80s Aussie horrors that I've seen.

dbdumonteil The screenplay was certainly absorbing,but David Hemmings did not do a good job with it.It arguably has the seeds which spawn such later works as "fearless" (1994) and "unbreakable" ,but directing cannot pull it off properly,despite of its cast including Robert Powell whose strange looks were tailor-made for the part,Jenny Agutter who seems to be waiting for something to happen concerning her character,and Joseph Cotten whose end of career cannot compare favorably with Hitchcock and Welles works :here he is totally wasted .Interesting because of its connection with the later developments of the fantastic.