TrueJoshNight
Truly Dreadful Film
Inclubabu
Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
Lidia Draper
Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.
mike65-2
What can one say? Other than this is a film that should be seen just so you can say to yourself "I saw that - what was I thinking!?!" So much of Winner's oeuvre is pure hackery with all the directorial style of TV of the same era just with a much bigger budget and more nudity, sex, gore and violence. And that's the case here as a young women snags a suspiciously, cheap apartment in a town house full of strange neighbours. I'll say no more about the story but will mention the music score by Gil Melle which is a tremendous, full blown bombastic affair worthy of Bernard Hermann or Pino Donaggio. I didn't recognise the name but he also worked on varied genre fare such as The Andromeda Strain, Blood Beach, the Ultimate Warrior and loads of TV work including Killdozer, Questor Tapes, Frankenstein:The True Story, The Six Million Dollar Man pilot and many more all coming after a fine jazz career on the renowned Blue Note label. The other thing I'll mention is Winners amazing ability to assemble a cast which is clearly far too good for the lowbrow material that he has signed them up for. The Sentinel is typical of this - packed with spot the veteran actor and spot the future star names from the first few minutes to the very moment. Even in the smallest roles you'll go "goodness I never knew he/she was in this". So if nothing else Winner did give plenty of young actors a high profile break - he's not all bad!
hellholehorror
This took the brooding suspense of Rosemary's Baby (1968) and the mythology of The Exorcist (1973) and mashed together a slow psychological horror. My biggest gripe was that it wasn't scary enough. There was one really scary scene around the middle that was so effective in building tension and then reaching a horrific climax with genuine fear long the way. Other than that and the ending, that was a bit creepy, this was a little disappointing. The pace is slow as most films were back in the seventies. This is well acted and suitably directed. It suffers from blandness when compared to much better films in the same genre from the same era. I didn't like the complete lack of supernatural special effects. I had to think. It would have been a lot scarier if I was a Christian.
NateWatchesCoolMovies
The Sentinel is one of the weirdest thing you'll ever see. It's less of a horror and more just a parade of bizarro world situations strung together loosely by a vague haunted apartment story. A young model (Christina Baines) has found a sweet deal on an uptown flat, inhabited by only herself and a blond priest (John Carradine). It's just too bad that when a deal seems to good to be true in these kinds of movies, there's almost always some kind of sinister agenda behind it. It's not too long before spooky stuff comes along, starting with strange physical problems, creepy encounters with her odd lesbian neighbors, flashbacks to her attempted suicide and psychic disturbances that can't be explained. She soon realizes that she has been brought to this building for a very specific and decidedly sinister reason. The way I described all that sounds kind of routine and pedestrian, but trust me when I say that there's nothing generic or run of the mill about this absurdity of a film. Everything has a very disconcerting and surreal feel to it, particularly in a whopper of a climax where a portal to hell is opened and all sorts of babbling loonies pour out, deformed, whacked out and adorned in some of the most creatively gross practical effects that will give your gag reflex a solid workout. The film also speckled with a diverse group of actors, some of them quite young looking when you remember that this was 1977. A chatty Eli Wallach shows up as a detective, with a youthful Christopher Walken in tow as his partner, Ava Gardner of all people has a cameo, and watch for Burgess Meredith, Jerry Orbach, Beverly D'Angelo, William Hickey, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Dreyfuss, Chris Sarandon, and Tom Berenger in what must have been one of his very first gigs, a literal walk on part. Very distinct and memorable film, one that pushed the boundaries considering the time period, and never let's the weirdness mellow down for a single minute.
chaos-rampant
There were three masters of horror at the time driven by vision, Hooper, Argento, Carpenter, perhaps two films each.Then the bulk of horror, either studio or gonzo. This is studio, pretty awful in its basic gears. Story and acting are wooden, editing is artless. I can feel a workmanlike hand in the story, a hack in control, always some narrative noise going on and cut to someone talking with hardly a moment of quiet. But for whatever reason it's also shrill, crazy, nonsensical. Unusual. I'll take this over polished horror like The Omen. If we make nonsense after all, it hurts no one and may open a few doors of the imagination. This lack of finesse is funneled here into a kind of demented energy, I would describe it overall as a hellish mix between Fulci and Raimi. A young TV model moves into a New York apartment with a creepy blind old man staring out the window in the floor above, soon hell is unleashed. I will keep with me all the scenes that show a snooping around in dark corridors and up the stairs to the old man, they are perhaps no more than 2-3 of them but hacked raw from the walls of nightmare. So a strange thing, silly and yet disturbing as another reviewer said.
