DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

DRIVE-IN

SflTURDAV

Return To Sender

by Edouard Dauphin

'He has the power to make you live his nightmares. And he's dreaming about you. '

No, 'he' isn't Ozzy Osbourne, so you'll have to explain those bat carcasses on your pillow some other way. 'He' is the title character in The Sender, a nifty atmospheric horror flick and the scariest thing to come out of England since Haircut One Hundred.

As played by newcomer Zeljko Ivanek (take that, CREEM typesetters), The Sender is a tightlipped young psycho who has no recollection of who he was before he tried to walk on water at a beach in Georgia. No one has attempted that stunt in the area since Gregg Allman back in 1972, so The Sender is hustled off to the booby hatch.

There he has his cerebrum pored over by a team of shrinks including sexy Kathryn Harrold, with whom he soon establishes a powerful telepathic link. The Dauph would have gone for something more physical but then I'm not used to seeing doctors like Harrold in the asylums I frequent.

Plugged .into the bizarre impulses of The Sender's mind, Kathryn is soon seeing rats squeezing their repulsive bodies out of people's mouths and a plague of roaches overrunning the clinic's medicine freezer with a vengeance enough to cause Muhammad Ali to throw away his D-Con and flee for cover. The Dauph hasn't hallucinated like that since he ignored the warnings about the brown acid at Woodstock.

Speaking of the past, some of the other patients at the clinic are mired in it. There's the messiah, a hollowfaced loony who thinks he's—yeah, you guessed it—and stares at the walls a lot. Which, come to think of it, might be what J.C. would do if he returned to earth and found himself in Georgia.

Less menacing but no less brainfried is the burly black army veterain who thinks the Vietnam war is still going on. He keeps saying things like 'We'll win this thing' and 'Once we get out of 'Nam.' Many in the audience at the Loew's Orpheum on 86th Street agreed with these sentiments and seemed puzzled that the rest of us were chortling into our hot buttered. Nice to know that current events are only current for some. (Now if we could just get this Iranian hostage thing over with.)

Harrold's boss at the hospital, Paul Freeman, is Rick Johnson's kind of psychiatrist. He wants to forget about finding the deep-seated reasons for Zeljko's (another try, typesetters) amnesia and just strap him down on a hard tabl,e and give him shock treatment. Maybe play him a few Kansas tunes just to make him squirm.

Naturally, the chief doc is challenged by Harrold who considers him a barbaric, insensitive lout. A greater problem is what happens in the clinic when they try to apply the electrodes to Aeljko's paranormal head. Doctors and nurses are catapulted into the ceiling, rockets of flame shoot out from the floor and broken shards of glass come flying from every direction. Easily the best hospital chaos scene since a mammoth infant exploded through the roof of an operating room in It's Alive.

Further complications arrive in the person of Shirley Knight who may or may not be The Sender's mother and who may or may not have died about a week earlier. Shirley has put on a few pounds since we last encountered her— guess she's been sticking pretty close to that David Crosby Diet. Either that, or it was makeup, in which case, sorry, Shirl, and we loved ya in Beyond The Poseidon Adventure.

See The Sender and be scared by the dreams of Zeljko Ivanek. Or is it Zekljo Ianvek? Or rather Zejlko Ikanev? Or maybe...

☆ ☆ ☆ •

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