Seizure

Oliver Stone’s debut, Seizure follows horror novelist Edmund Blackstone (Jonathan Frid) as he and his weekend guests are terrorized by figures directly out of his book. Stone, working from a script written with Edward Mann, delivers a fairly compelling and promising opening stretch that details the arrival of the aforementioned guests to Edmund’s expansive country estate, as the filmmaker does a solid job of establishing the various protagonists and transforming them into relatively compelling figures. (It remains clear that Joseph Sirola, cast as an obnoxious businessman, turns in a larger-than-life performance that remains an ongoing highlight.) The picture’s downward spiral, then, is triggered by an increasingly abstract midsection that boasts few compelling attributes, and it’s clear, too, that the less-than-engrossing vibe is compounded by a continuing emphasis on excessively tedious interludes (eg a long, hopelessly dry sequence in which a character explains the origins of certain mythical figures). By the time the endless and nonsensical third act rolls around – it’s difficult, certainly, to see the value of the gladiator-like battle between surviving characters – Seizure has confirmed its place as a trainwreck that couldn’t possibly be less indicative of Stone’s subsequent career (and its impressive that he even had a career after the one-two punch of this and the equally disastrous The Hand).

* out of ****

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