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Flix.com
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Somehow art dealer John (James Bolam) has gotten his hands on a bronze
sculpture, not knowing that the artist of the sculpture, Victor (Mike
Raven), has actually covered his model Chi San (Me Me Lai) for the
sculpture in bronze to immortalize her beauty (but kill her in the
process).
It's not long before an art collector (Kenneth Keeling) wants to steal
the sculpture, but is mysteriously killed when trying to do so ...
John meanwhile wants to get more stuff from Victor, fortunately his
best friend Mike's (Ronald Lacey) father, but unfortunately a very
stubborn old man who doesn't want to sell his art. To that end, John
persuades Mike to take him and his girlfriend Millie (Mary Maude) to visit
Victor in the country. There, he finds a truly disfunctional family:
Victor detests his mad wife Dorothy (Betty Alberge) but lusts after
both his current model Marcia (Judy Matheson) and his som Mike's
girlfriend Jane (Beth Morris).
Mike meanwhile is a hopeless drunk, who gets into fights with his
girlfriend over pretty much everything, which is somehow playing into his
father's hands.
And then there's Bill (John Arnatt), a friend of the family who lives
at Victor's place for some reason and who is madly in love with Victor's
mad wife Dorothy.
... but when Victor lays his eyes on John's girlfriend Millie, he
becomes obsessed by her beauty and desperately tries to persuade her to
model for him, but she refuses, not for a few sketches, and absolutely not
for a bronze sculpture (even if she does not know the whole truth about
the other bronze sculpture).
Eventually, Victor wills in to sell John a few paintings, but he wants
the payment in cash up front, today even ... whcih might be a bit
difficult because it's weekend and the banks are closed (and remember,
this was before ATMs). So John has to go back to London, to find someone
to give him the money he needs ...
With John gone, Victor seizes the opportunity to terrorize Millie into
modelling for him, while at the same time, murders start to happen. First,
Jane is stabbed, then Mike is squashed by a stone pillar, next Marcia gets
acid thrown into her face, then Dorothy commits suicide (which might not
have been suicide at all) ... but nobody seems to worry a whole lot that
all these people start disappearing, instead Bill all of a sudden decides
to pick up John, whose car has broken down, in the middle of the night,
and leaves Millie alone with Victor, who has already started to heat up
his furnace to melt the bronze. And soon enough too, he has caught himself
Millie as a model, knocked her out and covered her in plaster ... when
suddenly life returns to Millie, but it's not her own life, she becomes
possessed by dead model Chi San to avenge her death. Only when she has
killed Victor does Millie break down and presumably die too ...
... which is when John and Bill arrive, and Bill suddenly has an
explanation for everything: It was Millie's kimono that was possessed, and
everytime she wore it she killed someone - so yes, she has murdered all
the others too. Thing is, I have not the slightest idea why Bill knows
that all of a sudden and hasn#t tried to do anything beforehands. And I
don't know why the spirit of Chi San saw it fit to kill all those people,
since most of them had nothing to do with her death ...
As a whole, this film seems to have no idea of where to go. Part of it
plays like a film about a disfuncional family, then there is a murder
mystery thrown in (that makes not all that much sense since nobody seems
to care awfully much that the corpses keep piling up) and in the end,
everthing turns out to be a ghost story about a possessed kimono ...
please !!!
Still, you might find the film amusing at times - if for all the wrong
reasons.
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