Magic Year: 1978 Director: Richard Attenborough Written by: William Goldman Threat: Psychopath Weapon of Choice: Dummy Based upon: novel - Magic - William Goldman Color/B&W/3D: Color Language: English Country of Origin: USA IMDb page:

Other movies in this series:
None

The tyranist's thoughts
After Netflix kept insisting I needed to see this movie, it was finally Rish bringing it over that got it screened. I shouldn't have resisted. While I had never heard of this one, it turned out to be an unusual and pretty enjoyable flick.
Anthony Hopkins stars as a slightly agoraphobic magician who, after bombing quite badly, adds a dummy to his act and becomes a massive hit. Too massive. He can't deal with the success and runs off to his hometown where he ends up hiding out in a cabin his high school crush has for rent. Their lives become entangled and when her husband and his agent turn up, the horror starts.
Anthony Hopkins is his usual brilliant self, although doing it much earlier than I had previously known he had. Ann Margaret is delightful. The chemistry between the two of them makes the film work far better than it deserved to.
I've never read the Goldman novel, but I'm tempted to now that I've seen the movie. The script is interesting, but so much more could have been done with it that I have to believe the novel would expand on it impressively. Still, I don't imagine the novel can pull off the Fats stuff quite as effectively.
As horror flicks go, this one has that slow '70s pace that so often puts people off, but if you hang in there you get a pretty good movie with some really funny and really creepy stuff. The ending is at once tragic and baffling. It is perhaps the only flaw in the movie that it ends that way. Of course, some of what I was puzzled about was explained in the making of documentary on the DVD, but not everything.
I'd definitely recommend this one to not only Hopkins fans, but anyone who enjoys '70s horror at all.
Posted: September 5, 2006

Rish Outfield's reviews
I don't have a great deal to say about the film. Not that it was bad or anything, it just didn't make much of an impression on me either way. The film certainly looked interesting: a young Anthony Hopkins (though I wonder if he was ever truly young), the director of Ghandi and the most celebrated screenwriter of the 20th Century, together in a movie that looked like it might be scary (the trailer certainly was).
I really pitied Hopkins's character, and thought the scene where Burgess Merideth challenged him to keep the doll silent for five minutes was pretty great. People tend to praise the movies (Horror or otherwise) of the Seventies for their daring, their artistic integrity, and their pacing. Well, Magic was a slow, well-acted, psychologically complex movie, but came centimeter close to being deemed "Not Horror" by tyranist and me.
My biggest problem with the film is that we're occasionally led to believe that the ventriloquist dummy is alive and not controlled by Hopkins. When the film ends and that turns out to not be the case, it is irritating. At least to me.
Posted: November 14, 2006

Total Skulls: 8

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears		Anthony Hopkins
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc.
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?