Burly Movies: THE MANITOU

I saw THE MANITOU (1978) last night and it felt wrong.

That's not to say that's a bad thing. THE MANITOU is based on a book I've never read by Graham Masterson, who has made a habit of making money off of the gory horror craze of the 1980s. Again, I've never been drawn to his work.

But I'm a Tony Curtis man, who stars here as a huckster Tarot reader who has an ex-girlfriend who woke up with a huge lump on the back of her neck. This woman goes to some doctors who discover the rapidly-growing lump is, in fact, a f*cking fetus!

So, worse than that, every time the doctors try to operate and remove the growth, some malevolent invisible force possesses anyone in reach to hurt and even kill themselves.

This doesn't sit well with Curtis, who proceeds to use his contacts in the more legit supernatural circles to discover that the fetus is a 400-year old Tribal medicine man (and, it turns out, the baddest-ass of them all). The medicine man died in the past, but sent his "manitou", or spirit force, into the Beyond between time and space, to attach itself to a person or animal and become corporeal once more. Of course, the problem is that the innocent victim providing the medicine man's re-entry will die.

Curtis and another Tribal medicine man played by the great Michael Ansara embark on a remake of THE EXORCIST, to rid the world of the evil medicine man. And if you think you know what that means, visually, I'm here to tell you you don't.

The end of THE MANITOU is a feast of crazed late-1970s special effects, complete with 1970s tape reels, naked boobs, outer space, fireballs, killer meteors, midgets, Star Wars laser effects, boobs, midgets, psychedelic-effect Cthulhu Dark God, and explosions.

If that sounds like the greatest ending of all time, it isn't. But you cannot blame THE MANITOU for trying. And if nothing else, you will have a blast trying to imagine how freaked out people were when they first saw it. Or how embarrassed. I mean, the composer god Lalo Schifrin (MAGNUM FORCE and the greatest television theme of all time, "Mission: Impossible") does the soundtrack for this thing. Burgess Meredith appears in one of his many latter-years cameos, absolutely taking over the screen. And Tony Curtis looks like he's there to have fun and lay some dames. Which you know he did.

A crazy flick, and well worth seeking out for that Friday night when you can't imagine anything better than watching a woman give birth to a midget out of her back.