Classic Horrors Club

If I were to wake up from a cryogenic deep sleep after 34 years, I can’t imagine that I’d be bored and lie around the house all day. Instead, I’d be out and about experiencing all the marvels of a new world. Then again, I wouldn’t have a psychopathic daughter like Caroline Carmichael (Donna Mills) does in Live Again, Die Again (1974.)

Yeah, Marcia Carmichael (Vera Miles) has a real bee in her bonnet about her mother “dying” on her when she was a little girl. For some reason she believed all these years that Caroline was going to come back from the dead to punish her for something. Fear turned to hatred and when she was revived, Marcia goes a little crazy and everyone fears for Caroline’s life.

Mrs. O’Neill aka “Sissy” (Geraldine Page) is very protective of Marcia. She’s been running the show while Caroline was napping and may as well be her mother, as well as her brother’s, James (Mike Farrell.) In the event of a fistfight between mother and daughter, she’d side with Marcia. She’d rather see Caroline really dead than Marcia in an institution.

The idea at the core of the movie is intriguing. Everyone but Caroline has aged while she was asleep and now she doesn’t recognize a soul. It’s a bit unsettling to watch Mills, who was 34 at the time, interacting with her older children. (Miles was 45 at the time and Farrell was 35.) And it’s really unsettling to see her fooling around with her husband, Thomas, because Walter Pidgeon was 77.

I missed why Caroline was put to sleep in the first place. There’s brief mention of an incurable disease. However, when she wakes, nobody says there’s now a cure. Why did they wake her then? One of the doctors does say there’s the possibility of brain damage, but Live Again, Die Again is not about Caroline’s mental state; it’s about Marcia’s.

At the peak of Marcia’s frenzy, and the climax of the film, there’s a bizarre dream-like sequence utilizing all the tricks of the trade: freeze frame, slow motion, off-kilter angles, etc. I don’t know what was actually happening, but after all the confusion (SPOILER ALERT), the story ends quietly with a plea from Caroline: “Come to Mommy. I’m not going to punish you.”

II’s such a strange approach to the material, but it is entertaining. Some may say it’s surprising and unexpected. Others (like me, for example) may say, “Huh? Why?” What would have pushed me the other way would have been some kind of twist. Maybe Caroline really did suffer brain damage and she did come back to punish her daughter.

That isn’t what we have, though, and we can judge only what we do have. To a certain extent it’s a disappointment… a squandered idea. I hoped for more from the writer of Psycho. It’s based on a book and if you want to see something even stranger than its adaptation, search the internet for an image of “Come to Mother by David Sale,” but don’t say I didn’t warn you.