In short: Cameron’s Closet (1988)

Cameron (Scott Curtis) is a little kid with X-Men level psychokinetic powers, and has been the favourite test subject of his psychologist(?) father Owen (Tab Hunter) for quite some time. Alas, Owen did make the mistake of letting Cameron use a statuette of a Mayan “demon” which somehow allowed the thing to use Cameron as some sort of conductor into our world, where it moved into the kid’s closet. All this information, the film will explain in excruciating detail throughout its first hour or so, but everyone who isn’t a zombie (sorry, zombies!) will have figured out most of this after the film’s prologue, in which Owen’s attempt to somehow get rid of the demon – or kill Cameron? – ends in a pretty ridiculous decapitation with his own trusty machete for him.

Cameron ends up in the care of his borderline alcoholic mother (Kim Lankford) and her idiot budding child abuser boyfriend Bob (Gary Hudson). The demon soon enough burns Bob’s eyes out and throws him out of a window, which seems to be the proper way to treat the guy. Alas, this is also the point where the film slows to a crawl and spends a lot of time with intensely boring cop Sam Taliaferro (Cotter Smith), whose main claim to any interest at all is his tendency for weird dreams that do influence his on the job performance. He has to team up with police psychologist Dr Haley (Mel Harris) in this, who is of course not just the police’s child psychologist on call but also the woman he can’t open up to in his mandated sittings. You can imagine the character trajectory, and alas, so could I.

After a long, long time of Cameron being involved in little business of interest and the police bores finding out way too many details about everything the audience already knows, something may happen eventually.

Well, indeed it does, but if my subtle (cough) hints haven’t made it clear already, the main problem of Armand Mastroianni’s Cameron’s Closet is its apparent belief that it is a movie not about supernatural business involving a little kid but one about a very slow and boring police investigation conducted by a guy lacking in whit, charm and screen personality. Most of the first hour after Bob’s well deserved death is excruciating and generally pretty pointless, packing fifteen minutes of plot into forty-five, and lacking anything meant to keep an audience awake. As a director, Mastroianni doesn’t seem acquainted with the concept of mood building, and his style is the sort of bad TV movie bland many TV movies do not suffer from.

So it’s rather a huge surprise that the final act turns relatively entertaining, like a whacked out low budget version of Poltergeist, with a bit more gore and one of Carlo Rambaldi’s least convincing creations. A head or two are melted, excellently bad child acting happens right into a demon’s face, and things turn from soul-destroying boredom to stupid semi-fun.

Why, there’s even a scene of a character travelling into a cheap version of the spirit realm, Taliaferro trying to punch a demon in the face there. Given how much the rest of the film drags, that’s more than anyone could have expected of it.