When planning your cat's birthday party, be sure to call Burgess Meredith

For anybody that ever wanted to see Beverly D’Angelo’s breasts, there is Hair. For anybody that has ever wanted to see Beverly D’Angelo’s breasts PLUS her dressed like a trashier version of A Chorus Line’s Cassie’s masturbating furiously, there is The Sentinel. 

Quick Plot: Successful but emotionally cuckoo fashion model Alison moves into a furnished apartment in Brooklyn in order to assert some form of independence from her boyfriend, played with a terrible mustache by the nevertheless dashing Chris Sarandon. There she meets a gaggle of oddball neighbors, including Doll’s House favorites Sylvia Miles (as D’Angelo’s leotard-wearing lover) and Burgess “I Was In 85% of Every Movie Made Between 1975 and 1985” Meredith (as a quirky old coot with a loyal pet bird and indigestion-suffering cat). 

After an wacko birthday party for Meredith’s feline (it’s even better than it sounds), Alison visits her landlady to complain, only to learn that (cue the horns) she HAS no neighbors. Well, there is a blind batty priest who stares out the window all day long, but all the chatty weirdos seem to be figments of the increasingly unstable Alison’s mind.

*Note to self: Check with landlords to confirm that my fellow apartment dwellers who blast Gospel music at 6AM on the weekends are, in fact, real

What’s a pretty gal in the outer boroughs to do? Why, head to church of course! There’s the minor problem of Alison’s residual guilt from committing adultery (the smooth Sarandon was previously married to a now mysteriously dead woman) and attempting to slit her wrists after catching her elderly father nakedly partying with a pair of giggling ladies that were not her mother. Can these wacky Catholics and their stylish hats save America’s next top model before her next photo shoot with a peacock and an Afghan, or will the unhappy beauty be forced to guard the gateway to hell for eternity?

The Sentinel is an odd duck, a film with a strong reputation but generally mixed reception. There’s an insanely impressive cast and truly memorable finale, even if the plot, like so many other films of its era, feels so carefully constructed to grab new Exorcist fans. The story varies from campy to creepy to overstuffed, ultimately ending on a satisfying enough note that you almost forget the stretches of blandness it had before.

High Points

You can’t argue with the infamously controversial climax, a demonic fiesta that includes a bevy of real-life amputees and disfigured circus performers

If you’ve been keeping track, yes, this film includes performances from Christ Sarandon, Burgess Meredith, Christopher Walken, Jerry Orbach, Jeff Goldblum (in an unbuttoned shirt), Ava Gardner, William Hickey (and NOT ancient!), and Tom Berenger as, and I quote the credits, “Man at end” 

Low Points

Despite a reasonable running length, there seems to be an awful lot of downtime in The Sentinel that simply mutes some of the more interesting eerie oddness developed so early on. I’ll never complain about seeing Christopher Walken or Jerry Orbach onscreen, but the many, many scenes regarding police investigations do absolutely nothing but pull momentum from Alison’s far more interesting doom

Warning:

This movie features possible illicit acts with gerbils

Lessons Learned

In the 1970s, fondling your sister was one way to make a living

Ghosts are generally bad, but ghosts that turn you into blind men or women of the cloth are simply EVIL

New Yorkers only have sense for sex and money

Being caught having a threesome with a cake-eating obese woman and a cackler will do irrecoverable harm to your daughter’s mental health

Rent/Bury/Buy

I was a tad disappointed in the dragginess of The Sentinel, but it still stands as a sweet bite of genre candy that deserves to be tasted by most horror fans. There’s a little something for everyone--Sarandon suave for me, Beverly’s breasts for others, Burgess Meredith singing happy birthday to his cat for everybody--and best of all, the glory of Netflix Instant Watch for the lucky North Americans. Don’t rush out to fork down hard-earned wampum on the DVD, but definitely keep it on your radar for an eventual initiation into a slightly bizarre, incredibly ‘70s world of Catholic horror.