SHE WAITS (1972)
TV-Movie
Article 4662 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-23-2014
Directed by Delbert Mann
Featuring Patty Duke, David McCallum, Dorothy McGuire
Country: USA
What it is: Possession thriller

A man brings his new wife to his mother’s home, where his previous wife died. It appears that the original wife had been murdered, and now she seeks a way to take possession of the new wife to avenge her murder.

She waits…. and if you’re on the watch for something exciting or original to happen in this TV-Movie, you’ll be waiting, too. The premise isn’t particularly original to begin with, and the bland, witless script doesn’t do a particularly good job of developing it into a full length movie. As a result, we have stretches of time where simply nothing is happening, constant recycling of the same plot points over and over again (it might be fun to count how many times the characters tell us that Elaine is dead), and long, tiresome conversations where people avoid telling each other what the need to know or taking forever to sort out revelations that we viewers have picked up on immediately. The acting is adequate but far from inspired, and the direction isn’t particularly strong. Only the music editor seems to be really committed to making the movie as scary as possible, although he uses the most obvious means at his disposal to do so. The end result is one of the more tedious TV-Movies I’ve seen for this series.