Bad Spirits

By JAY COCKS

THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY

Directed by WARIS HUSSEIN Screenplay by MATT ROBINSON and GRIMES GRICE

Norah (Shirley MacLaine) is rich, divorced, anxious, a woman fighting a losing battle against becoming a matron. A familiar enough character, but one with an odd quirk: Norah has an uncommon affection for her younger brother Joel (Perry King), who lives in a shabby flat in the middle of a forbidding Manhattan slum. "Why do you live down there with those people?" Norah nags, but Joel only grins.

He grins even after he has been released from Bellevue, where he was committed after trying to strangle the superintendent of his apartment building. He was not, it seems, lodging a complaint about vermin and bad plumbing. His rage remains unexplained, and Norah, who has taken him in, is too busy fussing over him and wrestling with him on the bed to pay it much mind. She does become concerned, however, when she hears loud Latin music blasting from behind his locked door and two distinctly different voices speaking Spanish when Joel claims he is alone. Norah sends Joel to a woman psychiatrist (Lovelady Powell), but she isn't much help, being apparently as puzzled about him as the rest of us. "I never understood why you went to live in the East Village when you came back from Tangier," she says, a remark which slightly advances the plot, but not the analysis.

Joel grows ever more savage and even takes to intimidating Norah's two kids. Meanwhile, a beautiful model, a girl friend of Joel's, is found beheaded in her apartment. The killing, the po lice insist, bears an uncanny resemblance to mutilations performed the previous summer in Central Park by a Puerto Rican named Tonio Perez. Tonio was a close friend of Joel's, but Tonio, as it happens, is now dead.

It hardly seems possible . . . But yet . . . could it be?

Of course it could, and, given the title of the movie, it is. "Tonic's restless spirit needed a home," someone thoughtfully explains, whence The Possession of Joel Delaney. Why is another matter entirely.

The movie is as shrill and dense as its heroine and, incidentally, is casually vicious toward Puerto Ricans, who are mostly portrayed as primitives who are prey to ghastly superstition and threatening to high-toned women. Director Waris Hussein is, from the evidence of this movie, unclear about the difference between suspense and brutality. For some heavy atmospherics, he has Norah's apartment festooned with African masks. For shock he lingers lovingly over close-ups of newly decapitated heads. Whenever he needs some tension, he brings on Actor Perry King to snarl, suggest acts of elaborate sadism and terrify the children. Shirley MacLaine's performance is very good but, under these sorry circumstances, pretty much wasted.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.