"Burnt Offerings" with Karen, Oliver, and Miss Bette

It's back, after disappearing into the black hole/camp maw of cable. And as shockingly dreadful, shockingly watchable as ever. Who decided Karen Black, a highly erratic character actress, is a leading lady? (She went directly from this to AIRPORT 1970-WHATEVER, when she famously flew a plane with a hole in its nose toward safety and the waiting cold, dead hands of Charlton Heston). This role should've gone to ... I dunno, Katherine Ross, from hunger? But there's la Black, with her high-pitched hillbilly dialect, whining crazily about the creaking homestead she tends to with a lysol soaked rag with increasingly OCD zeal, fending off the moonlit, animalistic advances of a sweaty Oliver Reed (in his post WOMEN IN LOVE prime -- despite a few porkier shots -- fellow Reed fans.) And then there's Miss Bette Davis, acting her brains out in scenes opposite the robotic, cross-eyed gaze of Black.

If you've never seen it, you'll wonder why it was made. If you saw it in the 70's, you'll happily revisit its soapy banality, its by the numbers horror literalness -- noting, too its lack of suspense, and its agonizing portrait of the once smoldering Oliver Reed going beserk as a horny husband who, to serve the gothic plot machinery, cannot stop himself from damn near killing his obnoxious kid in the roiling waters of a miraculously restored swimming pool. Not to be missed, not to be overly invested in, either.

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Updated On: 6/22/08 at 10:06 PM