In Possession (1984)
** (out of 4)
A few chills are pretty much wasted in this episode from the Fox Mystery Theater. Frank and Sylvia Daly (Carol Lynley, Christopher Cazenove) are on a business meeting when they walk into their hotel room and notice an elderly woman and her daughter. It turns out these were spirits and two years later the couple are in a new home when they start to experience mysterious things. IN POSSESSION actually gets off to a pretty strong start as the pre-title sequence manages to be quite creepy. Director Val Guest manages to build up some nice suspense during the routine but effective opening but sadly the rest of the film just slowly falls apart. There are many problems with the movie but the majority of them can be blamed on the screenplay, which just runs out of ideas as it goes along. After a while you just get bored with the two people constantly "seeing" new items. These items include spirits, dead bodies, weird lights and other visual objects but they are never scary and after a while they just become boring. Obviously in a film like this there's going to be a big mystery that gets revealed but when it finally happens I really can't say that I was shocked or didn't see it coming. The film benefits from the two leads who offer up fine performances and the supporting cast isn't too bad either. Guest does what he can do inject some life into the story but after a while it's just one cliché after another.