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worth of old arguments for the happy couple to rehash.

I often find really low-budget movies like this to be a lot of fun. In this particular production the fun is signalled immediatley merely from perusing the cast list filled with has-beens and never-weres as if plucked directly from the Love Boat guest star lists circa 1985.

Tristan Rogers, an actor from down under who played Robert Scorpio on General Hospital but never went on to better things like so many other stars of that show, headlines this one.

Dawn Wells who played Mary-Anne on Gilligan's Island gives us another one of her cameos for little more reason than so people watching the film can say "Hey didn't she used to be?" for a few minutes of screentime. Thus, the spirit of one of the dumbest shows in the history of television lives on, and not just in syndication.

Sons of Hollywood greats like Tyrone Power Jr. (spitting image of his legendary father) and Griffin O'Neal (Son of Ryan) also appear. I have never understood the rationale behind hiring family members of stars when production companies cannot get real stars. That is not to say that either is less than passable here.

The wonderful Paul Bartel who has given us so much brilliant b-movie weirdness over the years appears here as a boring college economics professor. He continually gives the familiar impression that he is capable of so much more than having to appear in low-budget drek like this but if it weren't for low-budget drek like this he would not have had a career.

Most of the rest of the cast is beyond terrible and do not look as though they have had even one acting lesson in their respective lives. They look like they were plucked from the reject lists of agencies in Hollywood which supply background performers. The best thing that the production team could likely say about them (in private) is that they could be hired for scale. You might recognise one or two of them from a soap opera or an even more slipshod production from around the same time or later.

Overall this is a huge missed opportunity to explore the realm of the unexplained in general, reincarnation and metaphysics. That which is dismissed as ancient superstition cannot wholly be discounted by science. But they sure look like they had fun making this as a lark and at times it does not look like that approach was necessarily a big mistake.

After advent of home video and the rise of large video rental store chains like Blockbuster and Jumbo there came a demand for titles greater than mainstream studios could supply year after year. This gap was filled with older indie titles, films from Europe, made-for-cable concoctions and then there still was not enough. Hollywood began producing direct-to-video titles of varying quality of which this a poor and tastless but nevertheless interesting exemplar.

The production value in these titles tended to be low and featured has-beens who often looked as though they had interupted the run of a dinner theatre show they were doing to appear onscreen again. Whilst not usually re-invigorating long dead careers, direct-to-video titles did provide paying work to actors like those seen here. They had the added value of quite often disappearing from the public consciousness shortly after being made if they had any impression on the public consciousness at all.

Notes:

The novelist and his wife have been married for 670 years. He is immortal and her spirit can come back to life. Yet they both speak with Australian accents. Australia was not established as a colony quite as far back as 670 years ago, thus the accents wouldn't be right would they?

Wendy Barry who portrays Raven was once a Motley Crue video girl.

Julie Strain who appears at the beginning was a Penthouse Pet.

Learn more about this author, Jason Daniel Baker.
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