Paul (Gary Wallace) gets into a car accident and brings the old man (Les Miller) he hit back home to his apartment. Not only is the dude weird as shit, he’s also carrying a strange jar and won’t let it out of his sight. When he disappears suddenly, he leaves the jar behind, which contains a little demon baby. Paul naturally tries to get rid of the jar several times, but it ominously keeps coming back. Pretty soon, he starts having bizarre visions, loses track of time, and has trouble distinguishing reality from illusion.
The Jar is a weird fucking movie. It’s very amateurish in some spots, but downright effective in other stretches. It almost feels like David Lynch directed a Frank Henenlotter film. There are also some moments that might have influenced Jacob’s Ladder too, which came out six years later. (There’s a Vietnam flashback.)
He might not have any other credits on IMDb, but director Bruce Toscano gets a lot of mileage from just a handful of locations and is able to create some unsettling atmosphere with just a shoestring budget. We also get a good performance by Wallace (who, like Toscano, has no other credits) in the lead. In some of his scenes, he reminded me of Bruce Campbell in the first Evil Dead, as his character goes through Hell mentally and physically, but gamely keeps plugging along.
There are many positive things I can say about The Jar that can’t be said for many low budget horror movies. The problem is that after our hero is left alone with the jar, things become increasingly predictable and repetitive. (The ending is a foregone conclusion.) The thing in the jar is pretty cheap looking too. (It resembles a pickled Ghoulie.) However, the horror comes from the mental chaos it creates, and not the monster itself. Ultimately, Toscano is unable to string that feeling along throughout a feature length running time.
In fact, there are some scenes in the film that are in black and white for no good reason whatsoever. This leads me to suspect it might’ve started life as a short and was later expanded. If that was the case, it’s better than many similar movies of its kind. That’s still not quite enough of a recommendation to make it a must-see, but it works most of the time.
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