Wonderfully offbeat film!

Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

I know that I have seen this years ago on VHS and I watched it again as I am writing this and my only conclusion is that it is a typical flick for the end of the eighties.We all know that the end of the eighties didn't brought us much in the horror genre except a few and this one is a so-called horror that isn't frightening at all. For todays standards it is even a bit lame. There are no effects to spot or any blood at all and that for a horror. Naturally if you don't add blood (like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)) you must add suspense or eerie situations but we don't have it here. The horror lays in the fact that a medium do contact dead people who are in fact still alive. Nobody believes her but once the living are dying like she said things go wrong. There are a lot of famous names here to see but for me it didn't deliver enough suspense like it did back then. For the Kleenex lovers, Rosanne Arquette do show a few things...Gore 0/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 0/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

Rosanna Arquette is Jason Robards daughter who possesses special powers to for tell future events. This leads to difficulties as she identifies the hit-man who carried out one of her predictions. There is a certain quality to this film that relates to the genuineness of Arquettes performance. Her followers come across as true believers, and what starts as a scam spirals into a very intriguing story. Tom Hulce's performance is no more than adequate, with zero sparks flying between him and the super sexy Arquette. Another negative would have to be Hulce's sometimes on, sometimes off Southern dialect, which detracts. Overall though this is a creative and entertaining film. - MERK

This had the potential to be a good movie -- the basic premise, about a phoney medium who starts to experience real premonitions, was interesting, the actors were excellent, and the gloomy atmosphere of an economically-depressed rural South came through loud and clear -- but it just didn't go anywhere.The movie came off like more of a soapbox for the writer's leftist, secular humanist views than anything. For example, there's a scene in which the psychic starts telling an auditorium of blue-collar workers that if only they were to stop believing in God and the afterlife, they could start to build a better world here on earth. The problem with such propositions is that they don't square with reality. The further we've moved from religion, the baser we've become. Unlike the churchgoing villain of this film, real-life Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was a fan of Richard Dawkins, not of the Bible. Becoming more honest with ourselves and each other by dispensing with our ideals (or, as the writer would probably see it, our hypocrisy) doesn't mean that the world will become a better place. Better a Henry Ford than a Gordon Gekko.Black Rainbow didn't spend enough time developing its characters to justify the frequently grandiose, overwrought, overly-intellectual dialogue. The story, which with a little more work would've resulted in a first-class supernatural thriller, was given a backseat to the incessant moralizing.Too bad Lee Ving wasn't cast as the hit man. That role would've fit him like a black glove! 6 out of 10 stars.

This is not a film everyone would enjoy. It takes a poke at an old and established con game -- for want of a more precise term, fake mediumship -- and then stands it on its head.Spoilers follow.Before an audience in a mining town, Arquette's character tells various audience members of their losses, while the victims are still alive! She's proved to be wrong, and then, later, the persons die in the manner she describes. This happens more than once. Had she been a local lady, she might have been a murder suspect, or possibly hanged as a witch.The story builds slowly, and each incident just throws another log on the fire, making the atmosphere murkier and more mysterious. The film opens ambiguously and ends the same way.As noted before, not for every taste. But for those with the appropriate taste buds, the taste of this is rich and flavorful.