There have been, to date, three film adaptations of Fritz Leiber’s 1943 horror novel Conjure Wife – Reginald Le Borg’s Weird Woman (1944), Sidney Hayers’ Night of the Eagle (1962) and this witless comedy that has disappeared into semi-obscurity. And long may it stay there. Started by director Richard Shorr, a former sound editor (Die Hard (1988), Poltergeist III (1988) and Predator (1987) are among his “day job” credits), he got replaced part way through the shoot by B-movie veteran Herbert L. Strock (I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1957), The Crawling Hand (1963) et al). And you can certainly tell – it suffers the most alarming inconsistency of tone throughout.
College professor Joshua Lightman (Richard Benjamin) is up for promotion but doesn’t approve of his wife Margaret’s (Terri Garr) help, using her interest in magic and witchcraft and forces her to give it up. Things soon start to go wrong for Lightman, being accused of sexual harassment, being shot at by a disgruntled student and pursued by a glowing eyed demon that hatches from a huge egg in the college grounds. It turns out that Vivian Cross (Lana Turner in her last film role) has been manipulating Margaret and several other witchy college wives and now, close to death, is planning to swap bodies with Margaret.
The first half of the film is a light-hearted take on the story, full of dim-witted attempts to lampoon the novel and its characters. As it goes along, it starts taking a darker path, one more consistent with the novel, though still with plenty of silly diversions here and there, and the effect is unsettling. We’re never quite sure just how seriously anyone, including Shorr and special effects specialist Syd Dutton are expecting us to take it – it feels like they lose nerve part way through, or simply run out of jokes, and try to make a U-turn into darker territory. It doesn’t work as the notionally more darker stuff is as poorly written and badly acted as the comedy business.
Initially the game cast give it all they’ve got but it son becomes evident that even they knew that it was the most dreadful rubbish. Indeed when Richard Benjamin – whose character is a complete jerk (you can feel his enthusiasm for the project slipping away as the film progresses) – stood in for Johnny Carson on one of the hosts’ frequent leaves of absence from The Tonight Show, in May 1980, they discussed the film as being something that they’d made a few years previously and both seemed happy enough that it had apparently been shelved. It’s often listed as being a 1980 release but it’s copyrighted 1979 and appears to have been shot around 1978 (shortly before Benjamin appeared in Love at First Bite (1979)) but was presumably deemed so terrible that no-one was particularly interested in releasing it.
Fans of late 70s disco might get a kick from the occasionally funky score (including a song performed by Joyce Vincent-Wilson from Tony Orlando’s Dawn). Anyone else will struggle with its bastardisation of Leiber’s novel (at least the writers had the good grace to keep his name off the credits), it’s feeble attempts at comedy and the sudden tonal gear changes. There wasn’t enough money to do David Allen’s demonic gargoyle that hatches from the egg any kind of justice, the flat photography gives it the feel of an under-achieving television film and the talented cast (which also includes Kathryn Leigh Scott of Dark Shadows fame, and Angus Scrimm, here credited as Lawrence Guy), none of them firing on all cylinders, deserved a lot better.
Night of the Eagle remains the best adaptation of the novel so far and this entirely redundant third run through fails in all areas – it’s not funny enough to work as a spoof, not serious enough to be a faithful adaptation and it certainly isn’t scary. Quite who it was aimed at isn’t clear – only the most undemanding of very young horror fans finding their feet with the genre might get something from it. And as soon as they get a sight of Night of the Eagle this feeble effort will soon fade from the memory.
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