Cinema: Old Debil Moon

ABBY

Directed by WILLIAM GIRDLER

Screenplay by G. CORNELL LAYNE

See if this sounds familiar: a cleric (William Marshall) doing some archaeological research in a distant land unleashes the spirit of an ancient demon. Back home across the sea, his sweet, pretty daughter-in-law (Carol Speed) starts acting up. Her sexual passion is unquenchable. Her vocabulary becomes raunchy, and her voice turns coarse to match. She knocks her husband around, makes the windows shake and the furniture jump and is even responsible for a death or two. Medical science cannot fathom her symptoms. Is she crazy? Or is her trouble—as someone ominously and predictably puts it—”something else”? Only her cleric knows for sure.

Abby is a scurvy little number, but it is worth a quick sociological footnote. When The Exorcist was pulling down so much money last year, black audiences seemed to account for an inordinate share of the grosses. Whether or not the statistics were accurate, what matters is that at least one producer believed them. So Abby was born—black.

The budget of this movie would appear to be approximately half the price of a ticket. No matter, because audiences whoop it up at all the synthetic terror and threadbare mumbo jumbo. There are many moments of low comedy, all inadvertent, as when Abby beats up on her husband, croaking “You are gonna love and obey!” as she pummels him. The rampant foolishness, indeed, may be part of the point. Audiences know that Abby’s appeal is way low-down and prefer to chide themselves for enjoying it. As much as they may laugh, though, audiences could never put themselves down as hard as these film makers have.

∎ Jay Cocks