B-Notes - Sole Survivor (1982)

Written and Directed by Thom Eberhardt
Details at the IMDB, US.IMDB
See if Reel.com has rescued any copies.

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (1772-1834)

Every weekend in San Diego, there's a huge swap meet. They turn a large section of the Sports Arena into an amazing colossal flea market/yard sale. You can get some darn good stuff at a darn good price at these events, but your humble author usually goes for the movies.

I've spent hours looking for the right movies on these sunlit tables. Among the jillion or so copies of last year's blockbusters, you can be sure to find something obscure. And that's where this article's feature attraction comes in.

It stood out like a leisure suit at a black-tie party. The cover art was tacky, unpromising. The write-up on the back was uninspired. This had to be a bad B movie.

But like they say about books, their covers, and judgment, the same applies to VCR boxes. I was caught off guard by this one. In fact, my surprise was so complete that this movie had to go into a rare B-Note - one that said nice things about a dubious movie.

And after reading this B-Note, you'll understand why we usually don't do this sort of thing around here.

The Plot

Death Takes a Holiday (by Air)

We open with a deserted street at night with moody, ambient music. (Hereafter, we'll be referring to this as the Menacing Mood Music™.) Run opening credits. During the credits, we are also treated to shots of department store dummies with a few Christmas decorations. A bus comes down the street. Inside, there is only one passenger, a frightened woman (Anita Skinner) in a white turtleneck. She either has blood on the front of her sweater, or she's been auditioning for a Carl's Junior commercial. After covering her messy red hands with the sleeves of her sweater, she tries to hide a revolver.

Cut to a woman (Caren L. Larkey, also this film's co-producer) screaming in bed. (No, sorry guys; that'd be a scream of terror.) She jumps out of her bed and stands next to a table. It begins to shake. She begins to have a vision of an airliner taking off. Then she grabs an artist's pad and begins to scrawl frantically. (Those last minute script revisions can be a pain.)

While she continues her manic scribbling, we get cross cuts of an airliner crash site. The camera pans over some personal belongings (some are not intact) and bodies (ditto), which are strewn about behind a wall of flames. Finally, the camera settles on the woman we saw earlier on the bus. She's wearing different clothes and sitting up straight and motionless on a row of intact seats. She looks at one of the bodies. It's a man cut in half. He opens his eyes.


The story of a widowed small mouthed flatfish. (Alright, let's see you come up with a better one.)	Although Denise was happy with the sudden additional legroom.....

Cut to ringing phone at night at the home of Blake (Andrew Boyer), a talent agent. He's not happy. At the other end of the line is Carla Davis, the woman with the berserk drawing style. He tells her that Denise Watson is the woman at the ad agency. On Carla's pad, she's scrawled the word "Denise." Carla says she's had a premonition. Blake tells her not to behave this way and not to start this thing again. After the call, Blake explains to wife (Laurie Wendorf) that Carla has not worked in years. This is probably just her way of getting attention.

And then we see an airliner taking off (again). An air traffic controller (Rudy Challenger) talks to the pilot while the plane gains altitude. Abruptly, the pilot asks the controller to stand by. An alarm goes off. The text for the symbol of the plane indicates something very unpleasant is happening. And the track drops off the screen. While the controller reacts in horror at what he knows to be a crash, two red demonic eyes are reflected in the radar screen. (Yeah, all that caffeine those guys drink will do that.)

A medivac helicopter lands on a roof. The mystery woman from before is now on a gurney. A doctor (Kurt Johnson) asks her some basic awareness question. Her name? Denise Watson. She asks him how many made it. The doctor tells her she was the only one. As they wheel her away, she says she saw them moving.

Jump to eight days later. Denise is dressed, packed, and ready to leave the hospital. She and the doctor from before make some small talk. He's doing basic checks. Tells her she's now officially released, but warns her there're reporters out there. But then he asks her how she feels. She says she feels odd. He explains that he asked because he's checking her for a sense of guilt or unworthiness because she may have survivor syndrome.

She asserts that she feels no guilt. For her, it's like the time she bought a dress but didn't get the bill. She kept her mouth shut and had the same feeling as now. But she also insists that she's a cause and effect type; she knows she didn't get the dress because a computer screwed up, but she doesn't know why she's alive.

Cut to a waiting area in the hospital. It's wall-to-wall reporters in there. Kristie (Robin Davidson) explains to a nurse that she's Denise's neighbor and she's supposed to pick up Denise at the back exit. Then she asks how to get there. The less than helpful nurse tells her she can find it out back.

And back to Denise (who is on her way out) and the doctor (who is more helpful than the nurse for directions to out back). As parting advice, the doctor tells her to remember that what happened to her was only luck, like not getting billed for that dress. Denise says she did finally get billed for it. Sooner or later, she admits, these things catch up with you.

Denise goes down a hall. Sees a sign that says "NECROPSY" and pauses. A shadow passes her. She turns, but no one is there.

"Out back" is a loading dock. Denise sees small girl (Jennifer Sullivan) at a distance standing at the far end of the dock. Denise starts talking to her, but the child doesn't answer. She approaches the girl, walking behind a large delivery truck. The girl is sopping wet. While Denise is focused on talking to the listless lass, the brake lever on the truck slips, and the dutifully demonic delivery vehicle rolls toward our heroine. Denise notices it just in time. She leaps out of its way just before it slams into the concrete loading dock.

The girl is gone, but Kristie has arrived. She doesn't seem very concerned about Denise's most recent brush with the reaper. (Hey, living through a plane crash is a hard act to follow.) And they're on the road. They make small talk, mostly about the doctor. Denise really liked him and counts him as yet another missed opportunity. Kristie invites Denise over for a party, but Denise declines because she doesn't care for the kind of guys her helpful neighbor hangs with.

But that night, Dr. Brain Richardson (the doctor in question) calls Denise. He asks her again how she's feeling. She says she's fine and gets real comfy on her bed while talking to him. Brian says it's important for her to focus her life, and that work may not be enough. She explains about the commercial she's working on, and they make small talk about this and a few other things.

While they talk, we are shown the rest of Denise's place, and the farther we get from the bedroom, the less we hear from the conversation. Our heroine lives in a big house by herself. There's a Christmas tree in the living room, so either Denise is way behind on picking things up or it's Christmas time. Back at the conversation, she invites him over sometime. (Perhaps she needs help taking down some Fourth of July decorations elsewhere.) He accepts, and they make a date. After the call, she gets comfier, but hears a noise.

She looks around the house to find out what caused the noise. After some investigating, she walks into the kitchen. On the wall, there's one of those Felix the Cat style pendulum clocks with the flicking tail and eyes. The faucet is dripping. While she tightens the tap on the sink, she has flashbacks of the drippy dock girl. The phone rings, startling her. It's Carla. The paranormal player asks her how she's doing. But then she tells Denise to lock her doors and hangs up.

Denise looks at her cat clock. It's stopped. A shadow passes on the curtain over the sink, startling Denise. But it's only Kristie. She comes in through the door and introduces her friend Roxie (Wendy Dake), who is spiritually inclined (in a comic relief sort of way). Roxie wanted to see the miracle girl and asks Denise if she's spiritually inclined, too. And then she asks, "Why you? Out of all those people…."

Here Comes Mrs. Jordan

Go to a square cropped frame of a coffee commercial with Carla and another actress (Toni Lawrence). Carla blows her line. A director yells, "Cut!" That was take number sixty-eight. In the control booth, Denise, Blake, and some of the crew talk about how Carla has been messing up - especially around Denise. (Yeah, well, if I had sixty-eight takes of coffee, I'd probably be blowing my lines, too. Cf. multiple takes for Vitameatavegamin™.)

Enter Brian. He and Denise leave for their date. While walking in a park, they make small talk about Carla. Brian saw her in one of her old movies. He thought she was dead. Denise asks for something to help her sleep. Brian recommends relaxation not medication. She suddenly plants a big kiss on him. He doesn't back away. She tells him, "Last year, I took three classes in assertion training. This is the first time it's really paid off." He kisses her back. "Gee," she says, "it's even better when you help." He quickly identifies the one-liner from Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not.


Kristie (left) and Roxie ask important questions. "Is there a God controlling destiny?" "If there is a God, why would he let a clock like this exist?"	During another nightmarish twist, Brian momentarily transforms into Carl Sagan.

They continue kissing in the park for a while, and it isn't long before they make immediate plans for privacy. They decide on her place, and split for their cars. While she's walking through the park, the sound track cues up the Menacing Mood Music™. An elderly man (Lloyd Stevens) sporting a bathrobe and a lost look is staring at her. She pauses to look back at him.

Back at her place, Denise and Brian are in bed, engaged in post event snuggles. But she's still thinking about the old man in the park that spooked her. She asks him some more personal questions, like is he involved with anyone? (Notice how this kind of personal question follows a very personal experience. Ah, the nostalgia of those bygone days before AIDS.) He says he's involved with work. Suddenly he jumps and runs because he's late for work.

While they make plans for later, he explains he's working extra hours because several of the staff at the hospital were suspended. Someone took a body out of the morgue for half an hour. It was a girl who'd died in a boating accident. No one knows how she was taken and how she got back.

Later, Denise starts popping the pills. She turns out the light and whispers, "Coincidence." (So much for Brian helping her with relaxation.)

The next morning, Denise goes through her normal routine of getting ready in the morning. We are shown a quick jump cut sequence of her showering, dressing, doing her makeup, and leaving her house. Elsewhere, a man (Eldon Randall) staggers onto the road and stands waiting. Back to Denise, listening to the weather report. It's going to rain later. She looks up just in time to see the man standing in her path, slam on the brakes, and crank the wheel to the right.

Denise cusses out the obtuse obstacle. He just stands there staring at her. After realizing he's not much of a conversationalist, she drives away (leaving some very visible skid marks from where she narrowly missed him).

Cut to an exterior shot of a skyscraper during a rainy day. Inside, they're still trying to do the commercial, but Carla keeps messing up on the opening line, "As an actress…." (Funny how she didn't see this bad day coming.) Denise suggests that since Carla seems to be focused on her, she should be the one to talk to her. But before she can act on her suggestion, Carla freaks and leaves the set. Denise goes to talk to her.

At the top level of the building, Carla opens a rain-splattered window and looks down. Denise finds her and tells her that she shouldn't be taking the elevator because it hasn't been working right. Then she reminds her that these commercials could be good for her, but to straighten up or she's out. Carla already knows she's got a bad reputation as a drunk but explains her psychic history. It all started when she had a premonition that the wife of someone she knew was going to have a baby, but that it would be stillborn. Then she explains that she was lost until she started working for Kenny Kingston's Hotline. Nah, just kidding. But she does say that no one takes her premonitions seriously.

And so Cassandra, er, I mean, Carla tells Denise about the crash forewarning. Denise counters with the (apparent) fact that she survived the crash. Carla explains that the purpose of her vision wasn't that she'd die in the crash; it was that she didn't die. And then the paranormal performer tells Denise that what will follow is inevitable, and that it will be bad for those who get in the way.

Carla walks away. (Maybe it was to get out of the way of whatever that inevitable thingie is.) After a pause, Denise tries to find her. She takes the elevator. While she's thinking about how she can salvage this situation, the elevator skips her floor, taking her all the way down to a (remarkably empty) parking garage. She tries to punch in her floor again, but no go. So she follows a sign for an escalator.

Unfortunately, the Menacing Mood Music™ starts playing while she's walking through this ghost town garage. When she gets to the foot of the escalator, there's a ruffled Hispanic man with conjunctivitis (John Zigler) at the top. She assumes he's a mugger and walks away. Then runs. To the elevator, which still has its doors open. She hits the alarm bell, then all the buttons. The man is walking toward the elevator. The doors close before he can get to her.

When she arrives on another floor, the rest of the production crew meets her. They tell her that Carla has walked.

Later, Brian and Denise are at a restaurant. It's storming outside. Denise explains that she has the feeling that she's going to get caught by something. Brian tells her something new about sole survivor syndrome. There's a tendency to die by misadventure within twenty-four months. Many sole survivors take new risks and put themselves into dangerous situations. Denise asserts that the elevator went to garage on its own, and that the man she nearly ran over on the road wasn't her planning.

Outside, Brian sees someone across the street. He comments that some people don't even have the sense to get out of the rain. Denise looks at the motionless man in the rain. Her eyes lock on him. The Menacing Mood Music™ plays again.

Next door, Kristie and a few of her friends are playing strip poker. Roxie is fully clothed, but the rest of the players haven't been doing so well. The silly spiritualist attributes her winning to cosmic awareness. Someone suggests that Roxie sees God. Roxie says she saw Him last week, but He didn't look so good, maybe not eating right. The other players pay up on their last bets, including Jennifer (Brinke Stevens), who takes her bra off. This is deeply appreciated by Randy (Clay Wilcox), who is the only male player. ("Dear Penthouse Forum: This sort of thing usually happens to other guys, but when it happened to me…."


Carla on take one-hundred-fifty-seven for the coffee commercial. (About ten more takes, and she should be able to audition for Scanners.)	Jennifer suggests the next hand should be No Peekie Baseball.

Outside, Denise runs through the rain to Kristie's. Kristie answers the door and starts to tell her that this is an awkward moment, but Denise explains that she needs some company. The other partiers grab their clothes and beat feet (mostly bare) out the back door. However, Randy is still looking for some of his clothes when Denise comes in. After an awkward moment, Kristie hustles him out. Denise remembers when Randy was a paperboy. She asks to swipe a drink from Kristie's parent's liquor cabinet; she's suddenly feeling old.

After Denise gets her drink, she and Kristie make small talk about Carla. Denise falls asleep. Kristie writes a quick "out with friends" note and leaves. She runs over to Denise's house (huh?) and hears a noise, so she goes in to investigate. In the kitchen, the cat clock is running again. She notices that the sliding glass door to the backyard is open. The underwater lights for the backyard swimming pool are on. She closes the door. In her reflection in the glass, she sees a man looking over her shoulder.

Cross cut shots of Denise waking up with shots of someone brutally drowning Kristie in the brightly lit pool. Denise finds the note, but looks out the front door and sees Kristie's car. But then she sees the man she nearly ran over that morning. He's standing on the doorstep over at her house. And he's staring at her.

Denise shuts the door and calls the police. Then she starts locking the door. When she reaches to lock the doorknob, it turns. She runs to kitchen and grabs a knife. But instead of staying in kitchen, she starts checking out the other rooms in Kristie's house, knife at the ready. (OK, so maybe Denise does have survivor syndrome.) Unfortunately, the Menacing Mood Music™ starts playing. She freaks, runs downstairs, and opens the front door, ready to carve anything in her way. However, the police are at the door with pistols drawn at the ready. Fortunately, the cops are a showing some restraint (and, if you see things this way, Denise is white), so the policeman with a drawn revolver tells her to drop the knife.

It's a Dead Man's Party

At the police station, they're not concerned about Kristie. A policeman called Lieutenant Patterson (Daniel Cartmell) explains to Brian that the neighbor girl has a habit of disappearing for a day or so. Also, the man Denise described was a state highway inspector. But it couldn't be him. While they were searching the woods, they found him in his car. He'd been dead for two days from a heart attack. And then the detective says that Denise was taking sedatives plus drinking. Therefore, a woman under the influence is claiming that a dead man attacked her. Of course they're not concerned.

Later at Brian's place, Denise and Brian have a tense conversation. Denise suggests that the reason why so many sole survivors die is because "they" get them. Brian asks clinically who "they" are. Denise gets defensive. Brian asks about the sedatives and then reads her the riot act on taking an old prescription and drinking. She gets argumentative with him. Brian compromises and says he's going to check with a coroner friend about the dead guy. (Perhaps this purportedly passed-on person is in the morgue singing, "I feel happy! I feel happy!")

At the county morgue, an assistant coroner called Artie (William Snare) is pulling back the sheet on a body. It's the Hispanic guy from earlier. The Artie explains to Brian that this one committed suicide because he failed an exam. Brian asks him to check on the state highway inspector. The assistant coroner says it's likely someone made a mistake, but then, he's always catching mistakes the police make. (Yeah, like that OJ thing….)

Back at Brian's place, Denise answers the phone. It's Carla. She explains that she understands that walking out on the commercial shoot was a mistake and ties to sell Denise on her ability to do this job. Denise tells her that she's gone too far and it's out of her hands now. The Menacing Mood Music™ starts to play. Carla asks if there was a break in, and hangs up.

Back at the morgue, Artie tells Brian that the highway inspector's clothes were all wet and muddy. Brian reminds him that the man had been dead in his car for two days, but it didn't start raining until last night. Artie casually suggests someone must've dropped him, but also says that the insensible civil servant supposedly died face down. However, all the blood had pooled into his legs; he must've died standing up. Same as an old guy who was recently found in a prone position wearing a bathrobe….

Brian calls home, but his message service tells him Denise has taken a cab home.

In a taxi, the driver (Steve Isbell) is listening to a risqué talk show. He's getting into it, but his passenger, Denise, is not. He tries to pull her into the conversation. She ignores him. When they arrive at Denise's house, he quotes to her the huge fare. Then he crudely offers to let her work it out if she doesn't have the money. She declines, and not very respectfully. The driver takes it in stride as he drives away. ("Dear Penthouse Forum….")

Denise walks over to Kristie's house. She checks out the kitchen. Cutlery is scattered on the floor.

Back to the cab driver. He mumbles, hello sweetheart, and pulls over to the side of the road, shouting that he's driving all the way back to the city and could use some company. He gets out of the cab and walks to the silent woman on the roadside. It's Kristie. (Bet you were asking how the police missed her body in the swimming pool.) The driver doesn't see the big chef's knife in her far sided hand….


After helping himself to some gumdrops, Brian is asked by Artie to find some missing pancreas samples.	Water retention. Some women get it for the rest of eternity.

The Good Stuff

Not Your Usual Zombies

Throughout the eighties, we'd see a lot of zombies in movies. Most of them would fall into the George Romero Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead school of dietary habits. Sometimes, we'd see a more traditional Haitian walking dead type or, in the style of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies, agents of a sinister entity. Rarely would we see something relatively original with the walking dead as we do here, where the zombies are directly controlled agents of a mysterious elemental force (as opposed to a powerful individual or singular entity).

Furthermore, we've all seen movies with the dead haunting one living person, and only this one person can see them. Such stories usually have a scene with the protagonist becoming embarrassed or frustrated when other living people can't see the ghost. (Cf. Topper (1937) for the granddaddy of this cinematic gimmick.) However, this movie is original enough to allow everyone to see the "ghosts," even if not everyone can recognize them as walking dead.

Tight Script and Self-Closing

This story has a lot of foreshadowing, and some of it is remarkable subtle. Even some of the lightest lines will come back later in the story as a payoff.

On the other hand, when the foreshadowing is not so subtle, the payoff in the script can be subtle. For example, the plot description above includes how Denise encounters the "wet girl." Although Denise has a flashback about her while closing the tap on a sink, we are not subjected to a similar flashback when Brian tells her about the temporarily missing body. It's enough to let the actress (and the audience) make the tenuous connection. It's rare we get to see a movie like this that doesn't insult the intelligence of the audience by hand feeding them.

If you've read the plot description above, you may be asking how is it that no one else in this movie's universe ever noticed that dead people could walk. This question is covered in the story's conclusion.

Very moody

This movie effectively uses scenes that juxtapose normal with subtly creepy. For example, in the scene where Denise is talking on the phone to Brian, the shots jump cut back through her house. Although her house is tastefully decorated and cheery, the silence in this sequence (plus the fact we know we're watching a monster movie) gives these shots a sense of tension. Audience members start looking for something out of place, but of course, everything is normal. (Heh heh heh…)

As another example, after Denise openly denies the connection between the girl on the dock and the missing body, we share her continued denial in a jump cut sequence of her doing normal things the next morning. Only when this sequence nears an end, something odd (the man on the road) is gradually added to the cuts in the sequence.

Shock Timing

The writer and director knew how to play the false-scare, real-scare game. It's not just a matter of setting up the false threat, waiting for the audience to relax, and then throwing in the real threat. The right timing for these events is important. This movie has some good examples of the way this manipulation technique should work. (And by the way, Mrs. Apostic is relatively immune to this tactic because she's seen it so many times. But this movie got at least two good jumps out of her.)

Live Characters Among the Dead

Often, we are given main characters in movies that are not very distinguishable from the background characters. The fault may be in the script, the direction, or the talents of the actor in question. In Sole Survivor, Denise is quirky enough to be interesting, and realistic enough to be in denial about the weirdness around her. Since most of the push-pull in the plot is about her acceptance of what may or may not be happening around her, this becomes as much a character study about her increased paranoia as it is a weird tale. Fortunately, this is well presented through good showmanship, and Anita Skinner plays a credible Denise.

Also, Denise and some of the other characters get the occasional good, Woody Allen style one-liners. As many regular B-Note readers know, I usually don't quote dialogue unless it's astoundingly bad, and I usually never touch the cutesy small talk. However, some of the dialogue between Denise and Brian is, for a change from regular B-Note fare, good enough to quote.

The Bad Stuff

Slow Ride

This is a very slow, moody, deliberate movie. The most common complaint about this movie is the unhurried tempo. People who watch this movie expecting a fast paced story about flesh eating zombies are going to be disappointed twice.

Do You Win When Jennifer Loses?

Somehow, the strip poker scene feels out of place. Yeah, it looks like something normal, and yeah, it establishes Kristie's character. However, it feels so inapt with the rest of the movie that it looks like an excuse to show Brinke Stevens topless for the sake of production formula. (Yeah, we got gore, but no one gets naked. Let's get an up-and-coming model turned actress to wear a G-string and take her top off. Yeah. That's it. That's the ticket….)

Why Christmas?

Given how thoughtful most of the script is, one wonders why this is set at Christmas time. And they do a lot of work on the continuity to preserve the yuletide motifs. You can think of many generalities, but nothing specific is obvious.

The Who Cares Stuff

Notes on the Cast and Crew

Thom Eberhardt (writer, director) has done some imaginative movies throughout the '80's. This includes the val gal post-apocalypse Night of the Comet (1984). In 1989, he won the special jury prize at the Cognac Festival du Film Policier for the backwards Sherlock Holmes feature Without a Clue (1988). Later, his work became a bit more conventional and popularly coarse, as with Captain Ron (1992). Ah, well. Gotta go where the money is. But at least Sole Survivor shows a side of Eberhardt you'd never expect.

Anita Skinner (Denise) has very few screen credits, which is a shame because she does a good job here. She was trained at Julliard, picked up a Golden Globe nomination for "Best Motion Picture Acting Debut - Female" for her work in Girlfriends (1978), but dropped out of known acting shortly after Sole Survivor. However, she recently returned to regular acting, appearing on stage as The Belle of Amherst.

Jennifer Sullivan (the girl on the loading dock) did bit parts in things like Charles in Charge (1984) and Invasion USA (1985). After she grew up she started getting better parts, but this was not necessarily an improvement. For example she was in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) as Melissa. (Why do they bother with new character names in those movies name?)

Toni Lawrence (the other actress in Carla's commercial) played the tightly wrapped Lynn in Pigs (1972, a.k.a. Daddy's Deadly Darling).

Scream queen Brinke Stevens (Jennifer) used to be a scientist. She double-majored in marine biology and psychology at San Diego State University (this author's alma mater) and followed it up with a master's in marine biology. Then she hit it big with modeling and acting. Sole Survivor was early in her career, but when she also appeared in the notorious Slumber Party Massacre (1982), all bets on her either returning to science or playing more conventional parts were off. Since then, she's become one of most familiar faces (and other body parts) in B horror movies and documentaries. Her official fan site is at http://www.brinke.com/.

Roots, Shoots, and Other Compares

They See Dead People

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) - A boxer's life ends, but it turns out to be a supernatural mistake; that is, he wasn't supposed to die. The forces at work send him back into someone else's body. (In other words, it's an inverse of the situation in Sole Survivor.) Remade as Heaven Can Wait (1978) and various other incarnations.

Dead of Night (1945) - One of the stories in this early anthology movie was about a man who dreamed of a hearse driver, but later encounters him while boarding a bus. See also the Twilight Zone episode called "Twenty-Two" and various urban legends about avoiding death through premonition.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946, a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven) - Bomber pilot mysteriously survives jumping out of his mortally wounded plane without a parachute. However, the mystic forces of the afterlife subpoena him to stand trial to determine if he should continue living. Think of it as like its contemporary, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), except that the main character is pretty sure he's supposed to be around.

Twilight Zone (1959 - 65) - First season episode "Going My Way" was about a woman haunted by a hitchhiker. Retold with minor variation in Creepshow 2 (1987).

Carnival of Souls (1962) - The cult classic about a woman who is haunted by the dead after what should've been a fatal accident. Sole Survivor is deeply rooted in this one.

The Survivor (1980) - Actor/director David Hemmings film version of the book by James Herbert. After surviving an airliner accident, the co-pilot is haunted by the dead passengers. There have been claims that Sole Survivor is very much like this one, but after the beginning the similarities are superficial.

Prince of Darkness (1987) - Malevolent force traps people in a church and uses the weak minded and recently dead as its agents. (The man standing in the rain in Sole Survivor may remind some of the mob of homeless in this later film.)

Flatliners (1990) - Medical students intentionally give themselves near-death experiences, and then are haunted by ghosts from their pasts.

Jacob's Ladder (1990) - After a near death experience in Viet Nam, a veteran has surreal visions and discovers what may be a conspiracy. Is it a Government cover-up, a supernatural conspiracy, or…?

Sixth Sense (1999) - We all know the story by now, and the big surprise in this story; that is, Bruce Willis was in movie near the end of the '90's that was actually good.

Final Destination (2000) - A group of passengers back out of a flight at the last moment and then watch the plane explode. But there's no avoiding Death, especially when he has a thing for Rube Goldberg style accidents and humor that's too dark for most audiences.

The Bottom Line

Woman miraculously survives an airliner accident, but the dead visit her with the intention of correcting this oversight. Deliberately slow, moody ghost story with a few novelties. Effective scenes with a well-written script. Some subtle foreshadowing plus some subtle payoffs. Good production values in an early eighties independent film. Easily overlooked. Despite a few messy scenes and brief nudity, not recommended for gore-hounds and pop-shotters (who traditionally have short attention spans). Recommended for people with long attention spans and Brinke Stevens compleatists. Serves as a reminder that you can't always judge a videotape by its box art.

Sole Survivor (1982)

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