Movie Version of Audrey Rose
...Well, I'd never seen it, and it starred some pretty good people, so when the 1977 film Audrey Rose showed up on TV last night, I tuned in to see what it was about:
It was about two hours long, but it seemed like a month.
It told the story of two families: one with a pre-teen daughter named Ivy, who was suffering increasingly frequent, painfully vivid nightmares about being trapped in a burning car, and who woke up from the dreams with actual burns on her hands and face. The sole survivor of the other family was a man whose wife had in fact been burned to death in a car crash years before, along with their young daughter Audrey Rose.
Poor Audrey Rose died a mere two seconds before the birth of the girl Ivy. (A couple of psychics, on two separate occasions, had hunted down the bereaved man and helpfully insisted on telling him this ghastly, unwelcome information, prompting him to visit India to study Hinduism and reincarnation. It made him calm... not to mention creepy.) He was now stalking the intact family because he believed that Ivy was the reincarnation of his daughter Audrey Rose, and that he alone could help her live with the traumatic memory of her own death. In this he was unsuccessful. So were the psychiatrists who tried to cure her with hypnosis. Ivy, after two solid hours of unintelligible lectures on the nature of reincarnation - alternating with hysterics and psychosomatic burn wounds - died of stress-induced heart failure. It seemed a merciful ending.
But now I want my two hours back.
It was about two hours long, but it seemed like a month.
It told the story of two families: one with a pre-teen daughter named Ivy, who was suffering increasingly frequent, painfully vivid nightmares about being trapped in a burning car, and who woke up from the dreams with actual burns on her hands and face. The sole survivor of the other family was a man whose wife had in fact been burned to death in a car crash years before, along with their young daughter Audrey Rose.
Poor Audrey Rose died a mere two seconds before the birth of the girl Ivy. (A couple of psychics, on two separate occasions, had hunted down the bereaved man and helpfully insisted on telling him this ghastly, unwelcome information, prompting him to visit India to study Hinduism and reincarnation. It made him calm... not to mention creepy.) He was now stalking the intact family because he believed that Ivy was the reincarnation of his daughter Audrey Rose, and that he alone could help her live with the traumatic memory of her own death. In this he was unsuccessful. So were the psychiatrists who tried to cure her with hypnosis. Ivy, after two solid hours of unintelligible lectures on the nature of reincarnation - alternating with hysterics and psychosomatic burn wounds - died of stress-induced heart failure. It seemed a merciful ending.
But now I want my two hours back.