The Sender begins with a young man (Zeljko Ivanek) sleeping in the wilderness near the side of a road. A truck drives by, waking him up. He's startled and begins walking to a nearby public park with a lake. His face is intense, and he's walking like someone is guiding him. He picks up a huge rock and wraps his jacket around it, hugging it to himself. I anticipated him smashing someone over the head with the rock, but that didn't happen. Instead, he walks into the lake and tries to drown himself. He's rescued and placed in a state mental institution, but his amnesia and lack of identification forces the staff to name him John Doe 83. He's assigned a friendly psychologist, Dr. Farmer (Kathryn Harrold), but soon she's seeing strange things. Then, everybody's seeing them, and sometimes feeling them. John Doe 83 is a sender, someone who can project his own dreams and nightmares to other people, who feel them as if they're actually happening. But, who is he? And why did he try to kill himself?
The Sender is an understated, effective little horror/thriller with a couple of spectacular setpieces, quality special effects, believable performances, and confident directing. There is some silly bullshit you just have to ignore. For example, the Southern accents in the film are inconsistent, probably due to the majority of this Georgia-set film being shot in Shepperton, England, and two professional psychologists would never have a conversation like this: "I think John Doe 83 is projecting his dreams onto me, in some form of telepathy." "Why, yes, you could be right." Also, the state hospital is just too damn fancy to be a public institution. But if these kinds of things are enough to ruin your enjoyment of a film, you should probably take up croquet or competitive hot-dog eating instead. The film would be worse if the head of the institution didn't immediately accept the telepathy hypothesis because the audience would then be saddled with several cliched scenes about the guy slowly coming around to the truth, and we've seen that too many times before. It's dullsville.
What this film does right is create a palpable tone of dread and suspense as well as a slow building of tension that never feels cheap or easy. Also, the dream sequences are kick-ass. In most movies, dream sequences are stupid. They're filmed with gauzy, hazy lenses or cheap black and white or they end with a close-up of someone sitting bolt upright in bed, sweaty and hyperventilating. These dreams are projected into the waking lives of the characters, so they're filmed as big horror/action setpieces that just wind down when John Doe wakes up. After this happens several times, the hospital staff become used to the weird freakiness of it, and have to grin and bear it when things go cuckoo-bananas, for example, infestations of roaches and rats, crazy flickering lights, decapitations, fiery infernos, and probably the best electro-shock therapy scene ever filmed.
I'm not going to make any claims that this is some sort of lost classic, but The Sender is a well made, solid, stylish yet subtle horror movie. I love the convincing, handmade effects. (I consider the 1980s to be the decade in which special effects were at their best, when the handmade stuff looked as good as it was going to get before computer effects came in and fucked everything up. Now, every special effects scene in a Hollywood movie looks the same. The fun and invention of handmade, elbow-grease effects is gone forever. It makes me sad.) By the way, this film is not to be confused with a 1998 film of the same name about aliens, the military, and the Bermuda Triangle starring Michael Madsen, R. Lee Ermey, and Dyan Cannon. If you do confuse them, get back to me and let me know how that one is.
The Sender was director Roger Christian's feature debut. He started out as a set decorator, for which he won an Academy Award for his work on Star Wars. He moved on to art direction, his notable work here including Alien and Monty Python's Life of Brian. As a director, he's most (in)famous for the John Travolta Scientology disaster Battlefield Earth. I haven't seen that, or any of his other directorial work, which includes a sci-fi film, Starship, a bio-pic of Nostradamus, and several low-budget action movies and comedic crime thrillers. He actually worked again after the Battlefield Earth fiasco, making an indie romance and another low-budget action film. Judging by The Sender, I would mostly blame Travolta. Christian knows how to make a movie. Or, at least, he used to. Anyone seen Battlefield Earth out there?
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