Mausoleum (1983)

Playboy Bunny Bobbie Bresee is possessed by a demon.  Satanic shenanigans ensue.  Let's have a look...

Susan Walker Farrell wanders into a foreboding mausoleum and, as luck would have it, gets possessed by a demon.

Many years later, Susan returns to that same dark and mysterious place...

But it's okay, Susan is married to a top-notched fella named Oliver (played by my main man, Marjoe Gortner).

Two seventies icons.

Marjoe got his start famously in his real life story Marjoe (1972) and then a long series of VZ1 level classics such as: Earthquake (1974), Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976), The Food of the Gods (1976),
Mayday at 40,000 Feet! (1976), and my favorite Viva Knievel! (1977).

Bobbie Bresee was a Playboy Bunny and appeared in a shit ton of great seventies television including: Fall Guy, BJ and the Bear, The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels, Simon and Simon and Wonder Woman.

Susan is harassed by a Grizzly Adams looking dude at the local discotheque, so she lights him and his car on fire.

Supposedly, Bobbie Bresee suffered eye damage from the contacts she had to wear during the possession scenes. Some scenes were filmed where the poor gal couldn't see at all due to lingering pain from these damnable contact lenses.

Holy shit.  Susan's maid is LaWanda Page - Aunt Esther from Sanford & Son. "Watch it, sucka!"

Susan starts to act out-of-character; clearly possessed.  She eyes herself naked in the mirror and starts flirting with the gardener.

Susan lures the gardener into a shed where they screw... and she turns into a monster and kills him.

Sadly, the picture quality is so shitty, you really can't tell what's going on.  According to IMDb:

When BCI Eclipse obtained the rights to release Mausoleum on DVD, they could not find any original elements to transfer. This means the original elements either no longer exist or are temporarily lost. BCI was forced to use a damaged print instead for the DVD release. Because of the damage, BCI decided to release it as a double feature instead of a single release as they first planned.

In other words, the best quality they could find was still shit.  I'll also mention that the sound quality is even worse than the picture quality.

Perhaps the scariest moment: Susan turns into a demon-like creature; a combination of darkness adn poor film quality makes this scene particularly unnerving.

Susan as the demon levitates a woman and has her chest explode.

Susan goes to see a shrink, Dr. Simon Andrews (Norman Burton) who puts her under hypnosis (then randomly gropes her leg for a brief second).

Under hypnosis, Susan turns into this creature.  Bobbie Bresee has said that she received some possessed voice coaching from Mercedes McCambridge (the demonic voice in The Exorcist (1973)) while co-starring with her in Charlie's Angels (1976) Angels in Springtime.

Just as she did with the gardener, Susan tempts a delivery man into her house... then causes his head to explode.

Oliver starts to suspect something's not right with his wife.  But she lays on the sexual charm, and he forgets all about it.

In the end, Susan kills Oliver, and is ultimately saved by the doctor who has her return the demon back to the mausoleum, where she evidently unleashed it as a child.  THE END.

The Bad:

None of this makes a damn bit of sense.  With the Exorcist we had an element of the unknown, but the critical parts of the story at least fit together.  This is just random satanic bullshit thrown together.

They may have found a better version of this; but as far as I know, the best copy out there is total shit.  A nice picture and sound quality would have gone a long way.

 As the Chicago Tribune described it:"one of the weakest horror films one is likely to see."  True that.  The film just flits from one lame scene to another without much purpose.  Susan kills the gardener, then the delivery boy, then a guy at the mall, then... (yawn). 

Any review of this film will invariably comment on Bresee's gratuitous nude scenes.  Yet I found them pretty disappointing.  She's really hardly naked in this at all.

Marjoe is barely around.  He probably spent a couple hours total on the set.  And what about Aunt Esther?  She would have been nice comic relief had they used her properly.

The Good

Bobbie Bresee's boob.
Bobbie Bresee's other boob.

★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆