The Entity

Perhaps any movie with such a wretched central idea (woman sexually assaulted by an invisible demon), supposedly based on fact or not, deserved the feminist picket-line which attended its West End screening. But for reasons that may be fortuitous, The Entity doesn't emerge quite as one-dimensionally nasty as its synopsis suggests. The film's men are so uniformly creepy, and its heroine so strong and sympathetic, that apart from a couple of unpleasant moments the story often seems less like horror than feminist parable, especially when Hershey (giving a fine performance) is reduced to a laboratory object with her home recreated in the psychology department. None of this may be intended, of course, but it goes to show that commercial movies sometimes hit spots that more intentionally didactic efforts can't reach.