Review: The Manitou (1978)

Directed by: William Girdler
Starring: Tony Curtis, Michael Ansara, Susan Strasberg
Written by: William Girdler, Jon Cedar, Thomas Pope
Music by: Lalo Schifrin
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Scream Factory), DVD (Anchor Bay)
IMDb

It’s difficult to believe there was a time when a film studio handed out $3 million to make a movie like The Manitou, a bizarro supernatural body horror flick about a woman with a tumor rapidly growing on her neck that turns out to house the reincarnated fetus of an evil Native American shaman. But director William Girdler (Grizzly, Abby, Day of the Animals) got that budget to make that movie. The Manitou was actually his last, too, before he died in a helicopter crash while scouting his follow-up.

For a movie that’s got such a ludicrous premise, things start fairly innocuously with a woman named Karen attending a doctor’s appointment to get a bump on her neck examined. She then decides to catch up with an ex-boyfriend, Harry (played by Tony Curtis), who’s been cheating silly old women out of their cash as a phony psychic with a secret passion for disco. They talk, then talk some more. Eventually, a group of puzzled docs begin to think there might be a human fetus somehow growing on Karen’s neck and the story quickly shifts away from the tumor lady to Harry and his quest to talk even more to a whole lot of different people about the growth until he finally ascertains, courtesy of Burgess Meredith, that there’s a long-dead Native American mystic growing in there, ready to be reborn and destroy the white man. Along the way during this first hour, there are some spooky occurrences as the shaman starts to get his earthly boogie on, but things are very, very chit-chatty and pretty loose. The film almost lost me despite those moody ‘70s vibes courtesy of Lalo Schifrin’s music and an old woman hurling herself down the stairs in true septuagenarian fashion while Tony Curtis runs awkwardly in slow-mo.

But whoa boy, do things get ultra-wacky in the last act. Harry secures the services of a medicine man to fight a cosmic battle with the evil shaman, who ends up disgorging out of Karen’s tumor as a deformed dwarf because of damage from the endless X-rays of his neck-placenta. The two Native American spirit-wielders face off in a hospital ward to see who can conjure the worst special effects creation. Though the combat features a sudden tundra, a giant ghostly lizard, and a flayed zombie, nothing tops whatever the hell is happening in the climactic final showdown. Girdler definitely told his effects team, “Do anything you fucking want here, dudes, but shit needs to be blinking and shit needs to be flying, AND IT NEEDS TO HAPPEN IN SPACE!!!” I don’t even want to get into it because this wondrous work of art needs to be witnessed by as many people as possible so we can all confirm it actually happened and wasn’t some kind of rotted-brain psychotic break I had.

Even with foreknowledge that The Manitou was a weird little thing, the final 20 minutes or so still managed to thwack me in the skull and remind me that I was watching a singular sort of cinematic madness that couldn’t have ever been made by anyone else under the same circumstances. This movie is kind of sloppy, very strange, a little slow, but uniquely rewarding by the end via its pure lack of concern for, like, anything.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10