I picked this up in a cheap DVD bin. I immediately recognized as 1 of 2 movies that I saw when I was a starving (pretty much literally) student living away from home for the first time, in 1973, and couldn't resist picking it up and giving it a look, that many years later.
As other reviewers have noted, the promotion for the movie is pretty, ahem, imaginative. There's not a lot of sex (hardly any, actually), very little nudity, any reference to homosexuality is passing and irrelevant, there is no horror other than the horror of murder and violent death by knife and gun (we need more???), and it is not oriented towards the supernatural beyond the fact that the villains dabble in black masses -- there are no otherworldly events, no actual contact with the devil a la Rosemary's Baby or Devil's Advocate.
So it's really a detective story. The device of tracking parallel time-lines does add some suspense and tension (exactly what did happen to this girl, and will the detective crack the case); however, I found that the tension peaked somewhere around mid-movie, and the trip to the end more or less plodded to anti-climatic conclusions to both time-lines.
Unrealistic (as I imagine them) scenes certainly contributed to that plodding effect. At one point, amidst wild gunfire, a uniformed policeman tells the arriving detective, "he's up there and he's got one of our men as hostage", and then resumes shooting in the general direction. Uh, yea.
Now, there are unexpected pleasures to be wrought from watching obscure movies now and then, and while I generally am pretty resistant to the 'oh wow, I've been there' effect, I did find the 1972 vintage shots of 'Place Jacques Cartier' and 'Rue St. Paul Est', well before the resurrection of the area as "Old Montreal' to be such a surprise.
As other reviewers have noted, the promotion for the movie is pretty, ahem, imaginative. There's not a lot of sex (hardly any, actually), very little nudity, any reference to homosexuality is passing and irrelevant, there is no horror other than the horror of murder and violent death by knife and gun (we need more???), and it is not oriented towards the supernatural beyond the fact that the villains dabble in black masses -- there are no otherworldly events, no actual contact with the devil a la Rosemary's Baby or Devil's Advocate.
So it's really a detective story. The device of tracking parallel time-lines does add some suspense and tension (exactly what did happen to this girl, and will the detective crack the case); however, I found that the tension peaked somewhere around mid-movie, and the trip to the end more or less plodded to anti-climatic conclusions to both time-lines.
Unrealistic (as I imagine them) scenes certainly contributed to that plodding effect. At one point, amidst wild gunfire, a uniformed policeman tells the arriving detective, "he's up there and he's got one of our men as hostage", and then resumes shooting in the general direction. Uh, yea.
Now, there are unexpected pleasures to be wrought from watching obscure movies now and then, and while I generally am pretty resistant to the 'oh wow, I've been there' effect, I did find the 1972 vintage shots of 'Place Jacques Cartier' and 'Rue St. Paul Est', well before the resurrection of the area as "Old Montreal' to be such a surprise.