Reincarnation: The Audrey Seed

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

AUDREY ROSE

Directed by ROBERT WISE

Screenplay by FRANK DE FELITTA

DEMON SEED

Directed by DONALD CAMMELL Screenplay by ROBERT JAFFE and ROGER O. HIRSON

Reincarnation on Central Park West? It sounds like material left over from an old Nichols and May routine. An implacably amorous computer? It sounds as if the Disney organization decided to adapt an idea Stanley Kubrick had discarded as unworthy of him. Yet allegedly responsible adults, accountable to the stockholders of major motion picture concerns, are asking us to consider the former a realistic possibility, the latter a cautionary tale.

In the first instance we are asked to believe that when the soul of a little girl named Audrey Rose departed her body as the result of an auto accident, it hopped over to the delivery room of a New York hospital, there to take up residence in a child named Ivy Templeton (Susan Swift). She grows into an ordinary child--except that she has awful nightmares. And then, of course, there is this odd man who keeps following her around. If only he were a run-of-the-sidewalk pervert; for Humbert Humbert, after all, there are practical remedies.

But no, he is Audrey Rose's daddy, played so well by Anthony Hopkins that he rivets you with purely expository passages. He recounts his grieving conversion to belief in reincarnation, and an inspirational trip to India. If Ivy's parents will allow him to help, he is convinced he can conduct Audrey Rose safely over to the other side and free the living child of these fits. Mom (Marsha Mason) is tempted; Dad (John Beck) will have none of it.

The law, psychiatry, the church are all called in, with colorful but ineffective results. The picture ends in tragedy. If only they had listened, it softly moans, there are more things in heaven and on earth ...

Doubtless. And perhaps if the film were made with real flak, one would feel like toying with its mystical precepts. But Director Wise cannot think of any way to stress the spooky except to drench scenes in rain, while Writer De Felitta cranks out undigested research. They are very tedious fellows.

Still, Audrey Rose seems sophisticated compared with Demon Seed. The trouble here starts with a computer scientist (Fritz Weaver) who is just too good at his job. Down at work he has created a superbrain named Proteus. At home, he has wired up a system that takes care of most of the household chores. This leaves Julie Christie, as his wife, bored and offended to the point of asking for a divorce, especially now that their child has died of leukemia. Weaver departs, but Proteus, unknown to him, has developed a capacity to think without the aid of programmers. Inevitably, some of these thoughts are of a randy nature, and pretty soon it has plugged itself into Weaver's all-electric home in order to imprison and then impregnate Christie.

It is posited that all of human knowledge has been fed into Proteus, but it seems to be fixated on two authors. One is Sade. How else explain the frequency with which it contrives to place its loved one in variously humiliating bondage scenes? The other is surely Kahlil Gibran, from whom it has obviously borrowed its sententious prose style. In the end, Proteus manages to get itself destroyed--too big for its breeches as it were. But not before it effects a kind of reincarnation: the child Christie conceives looks exactly like the one she lost to cancer. There are enough holes in the logic of Demon Seed's plot to drive twelve Proteuses through. Indeed, like Audrey Rose, it presents the best possible argument against reincarnation. Who wants a second lifetime full of movies like these? Richard Schickel

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