Horror story about the violation of Yuppie Paradise: a canyon home once featured in Architectural Digest, an advertising husband and a designing wife, and a little bundle of joy called Jake. The violator, making the nameless governess in Turn of the Screw look like Mary Poppins, is an English nanny who has a habit of feeding month-old babies to a tree in the West Los Angeles hills, according to the ancient practices of the Druids (about whom we haven't heard much on screen outside of those bonehead occultists, the band members of Spinal Tap). A printed prologue, to clear the filmmakers of any charges of bigotry or libel, assures us that most Druids were decent people, but we do not hear any more about them in the dialogue proper, and it remains an open question how this Druidic disciple (to say nothing of this carnivorous plant) came to be operating in present-day So. Cal., in a deep dark woods illuminated by the intermittent strategic spotlight. We long for the plotline to take a sudden swerve into, say, the Anthropology Department at UCLA where someone like Peter Cushing held domain over Celtic lore. No such luck. Tenaciously advertised as coming to you "from the director of The Exorcist" -- and never mind what William Friedkin has directed in the meantime -- this movie certainly equals that one, if it doesn't surpass it, in pointlessness and in mindlessness. And Friedkin, shot by shot, is rarely anywhere on or around a discernible target: the fish-eye lens looking straight up from the baby's crib, for example, might better make sense had the baby been Rosemary's. With Jenny Seagrove, Dwier Brown, and Carey Lowell. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd