THE BELIEVERS (1987)

Nothing essential, but skilled middle-of-the-road entertainment. Martin Sheen, 47 at the time, is our likeable everyman, a psychiatrist, and now a single parent to a young son (Harley Cross) following his wife’s (Janet-Laine Green) accidental death. A change of scenery: Minnesota becomes New York. Unfortunately, his employment with the New York police department (and gruff detective Robert Loggia) brings him close to a series of ritualistic child murders, potentially endangering his own spawn. The opening shock-scare works quite well - Sheen's wife electrocuted near the breakfast nook courtesy of spilled milk and a buzzing coffee machine - but the film settles into a simplistic xenophobic stance that concerns Santeria, a Cuban voodoo. (What is it with this period that inspired such fascination with voodoo? Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow - much better, but hardly a masterpiece - would follow in 1988.) Twelve years after adapting dream project Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1975) for Paramount, and eleven after his biggest financial success (Marathon Man, 1977), John Schlesinger slums it with location shooting in Toronto standing in for New York City. (Early tip-offs: Canadian performers like Helen Shaver as a street-smart love interest and Gary Farmer - Nobody from Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man - as a hot-tempered furniture mover.) Schlesinger name-checks Polanski/Rosemary's Baby and Friedkin/The Exorcist in a period interview, tipping his cards as to the kind of picture he was aspiring to make - a prestigious supernatural drama to elevate the genre. Lofty notions with middling results. Twilight Time, now shuttered, issued a blu-ray in 2014. Since then, there's been a German release from OFDb Filmworks. This release ups the bonus content with newly recorded interviews: Helen Shaver, author Robert Stuart Nathan (of the 1982 novel The Religion, on which the film is based), and producer Michael Childers. Twilight Time's blu-ray has, as usual, an isolated score (by J. Peter Robinson), liner notes by Julie Kirgo, and the original Theatrical Trailer. The transfer is crisp, adequately representing Robby Müller's work that was wedged between Barbet Schroeder's Barfly and Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train.