Miriam (Karen Black) is a frumpy 26 year old housewife who's been suffering from nightmares involving her own funeral. She feels stifled in her marriage where she's being forced to procreate as soon as possible and gets inspired at the mall one day when she sees a fancy red blouse and a blonde wig.
Take a bored housewife of a lawyer and a blonde wig and suddenly she's taking on the personality of a dead woman that lived in the house 5 years earlier. She started out as a very reserved, conservative woman with a tight bun and glasses but with the blonde wig she turns into a fairly wild flirt and party animal.
Mrs. Oliver, a modern-day lawyer's wife in her late 20s, suffering under the oppressive thumb of her husband--who seems to like her spinsterish, her hair in a tight bun, etc.
The seventies was definitely the decade with the best made for TV movies and there were plenty of goods ones; the best of which as far as I'm concerned being Gordon Hessler's Scream Pretty Peggy which he made in 1973. Fast forward four years and he's back to making TV movies, this time with prolific cult queen Karen Black, although the result is nowhere near as good as the earlier film.
This movie starts off quite slow and stays that way for the first half of the movie. But then, it finally kicks into some suspense and mystery, where the female lead tries to find out why she suddenly starts to dress up and takes up the personality of a deceased woman.
***SPOILERS*** Not what you would expect from a possession type movie with the music of the teeny popper hit song from the 1950's "Venus" being played all throughout film has the terribly confused Mariam Oliver, Karen Black, having nightmares about her past that's slowly driving her insane. It's when she goes shopping for clothes and decides to buy a tight red sweater and blond wig that her real personality comes to the surface: That as blond party girl Sandy Logan.
Karen Black portrays a staid, schoolmarmish matron who inexplicably lives a double life as a wild party girl. Is it a case of possession or schizophrenic split personality?
Since she died a few years ago, I feel that I can speak freely. Karen Black was NOT a particularly good actress in "The Strange Possession of Mrs.
*Extremely Light Spoilers*The writer of this film, Richard Matheson, remains one of the most influential horror writers of the past fifty years. Many of his novels have been produced as feature films.
