There are some high profile names and faces in this movie, or at least some very recognizable ones. How did they come to be involved in this? The concept certainly comes across as the sort that has filled many anthologies, and been beloved by many writers over the years in a variety of media. The mystical MacGuffin of chaos is classic, and this specific creation looks really great. There are tinges of both humor and abject creepiness as the course of events progresses: a little horror, a little comedy, a little mystery. I think Mark Thomas McGee's screenplay is surprisingly well balanced between its component parts. Only - where is the plot? The character of Howard Hansen, a struggling writer, seems to have been somewhat autobiographical for McGee, as we're greeted with a surfeit of characters and a deficit of story. We're introduced to him, her, and the other person, but instead of narrative threads weaving together, it seems more like they're mostly just pointlessly laid out scattershot on a table, and going nowhere. To ask my third question in one paragraph, what happened here?
Fred Olen Ray's name is a little infamous when it comes to film-making, love him or hate him. I'm not inclined to have any especial opinion, yet here his direction shares the same qualities as the editing of Steven Nielson and Fima Noveck, and perhaps also Gary Graver's cinematography: overzealous, incohesive, and unconvincing. Perhaps that slant is intentional in light of the marginally tongue-in-cheek tone of the production, so often shared by other tales similarly centering such a singular, story-driving thingamajig, but even at that the result is unimpressive. And it should be said that the what's-it in a jar is so loosely tied into the plot in the first place, only occasionally having relevance to specific scenes until more than halfway through the runtime, that one is truly left to wonder just what McGee was actually doing at the time he wrote this. Scenes, characters, dialogue, and the narrative and its development are all over the place, making sense only in the most vague of terms. And truly, Ray's direction here is no better. As if to emphasize the point, there's a moment when a character is killed, and their blood slowly pools on a glass surface. However, in the shot where we watch that crimson spread, I feel like we're looking at an M. C. Escher painting, because there's no easy discernment of how the body is actually positioned relative to the glass surface and the objects around it.
Sloppy as the writing and film-making are on a fundamental level, the cast are pretty much wasted. The version of 'Possessed by the night' I watched was sadly chopped up to remove a few minutes, tiny segments at a time (specifically, any of the eroticism in this so-called "erotic thriller"), but I really don't feel like I missed anything: as terribly as this is made, I'm glad to have been spared a few minutes of my time, and a little bit of nudity isn't nearly enough to begin to compensate for all the astounding, flailing weakness. Even the effects are plainly overdone to an extent that wrecks suspension of disbelief. I'm sure there's probably someone out there that thinks this feature is a whole lot of fun, but I'm absolutely not one of them. Points awarded for a few good ideas, but a finished film can't be sold merely only on What Could Have Been. Whatever it is you think you're going to get out of 'Possessed by the night,' you'll get much more of it, and better examples thereof, in many, many other movies. There's no reason to waste your time on this one.
