Hellish Huggermugger

By Christopher Porterfield.

THE SENTINEL

Directed by MICHAEL WINNER Screenplay by MICHAEL WINNER and JEFFREY KONVITZ

Photographer's Model Cristina Raines likes her new apartment with its view of the Manhattan skyline, but the neighbors are a little strange. When she drops in for tea with the lesbians downstairs (Sylvia Miles and Beverly D'An-gelo), one of them masturbates in front of her. Fey old Burgess Meredith, who has a fixation on his cat and an unearthly gleam in his eye, drags her upstairs to a spooky party. At night somebody overhead stamps and clanks until Raines' chandeliers sway like a leftover set from The Exorcist. But then, what did she expect for $400 a month?

Strangest of all is that when Raines complains to Rental Agent Ava Gardner, she is told that those other apartments have been unoccupied for years. Is she going mad? Is she the victim of a bizarre plot by her lover (Chris Sarandon), a lawyer with shady connections? Poor girl, if only she had seen such essays in pop demonology as The Exorcist and The Omen, she would realize that she is simply, almost literally, going to hell.

As directed by Michael Winner (Death Wish), the film is a long, circuitous and not very edifying trip. Winner and Co-Writer Jeffrey Konvitz go through subplots as if they were exploring the New York subway system: as soon as one begins to get them somewhere, they change to another line. One of the more promising involves Eli Wallach as a cigar-chomping cop who sees Raines' lover as a latter-day Bluebeard.

The neatest puzzle in the movie is how Wallach, within a few hackneyed lines, manages to create a character. But after he spreads some suspicions and turns up a body, the film makers take him off the case. He and his very human rationality are left far behind as the film spirals downward through blood, perversity, communion with the damned and pseudoreligious mumbo jumbo.

Shocks and Slashes. All this huggermugger could be indulgently dismissed if it were not for the ugliness and brutality of so many of the scenes. The director lacks the true thriller director's gradual gut-tightening rhythm and the subtle sense of mood that causes men ace to materialize in the viewer's imagination instead of in the special-effects department. Winner goes in for violent shocks to the nerve endings. An eye is slashed and a nose cut off, flesh is seen to decompose, a corpse is eaten, hideous deformities are paraded, and through it all the camera does not flinch but presses luridly closer.

The film is fastidious about one thing though. The plot turns on a quotation from John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the script carefully identifies Milton as "the English religious writer."

That is a little like describing Tolstoy as the Russian exponent of land reform.

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