Magic (1978)

'We're gonna be star-arrrs.'
— "Fats"

It had been two weeks after seeing Phantasm that my family's weekly "Movie Date Night" continued on with the next film treat on our list: Magic, the Richard Attenborough directed psychological horror, in which the now legendary Anthony Hopkins stars as Charles "Corky" Withers, an aspiring magician and Ventriloquist, whom, "in partnership" with a profanity-spewing ventriloquist dummy named "Fats", perform their comedy shticks before live audiences and together become a huge success. But the newfound fame - even coming with an offer to star in his own television show - just isn't good enough for the "severely troubled" Corky: For he is a man who has never let go of his past. And that past includes a woman on whom Corky had an intense crush, even fr...

**_Anthony Hopkins as a schizophrenic magician and Ann-Margret the woman he loves_**

A shy man finds success as a ventriloquist with his dummy “Fats,” but vacations in his hometown in the Catskills where he seeks to reunite with a high school friend. As his agent tries to find him, the woman's hubby might show up. Burgess Meredith and Ed Lauter play the latter two.

“Magic” (1978) is a slow burn Hitchcock-ian psychological drama/thriller that mixes bits of "Psycho" with the creepy mannequins of several 70's movies/shows, like Kolchak: The Night Stalker's "The Trevi Collection." The well-done "Pin" from a decade later was influenced by it. It’s basically a lowkey cabin-in-the-woods flick with the unique dummy angle.

While not great like “Psycho” or even “Carrie,” i...

After a distinctly rocky solo start, “Corky” (Anthony Hopkins) has become quite a celebrated ventriloquist but that fame with “Fats” has come at a price. Indeed, it’s not always clear who has their hand up whom? In order to take a breather from all this lucrative adulation, and despite the insistence of his more venal agent “Greene” (Burgess Meredith), he seeks somewhere more remote to recharge his batteries. That somewhere just happens to be where his boyhood crush “Peggy” (Ann-Margret) lives with her husband “Duke” (Ed Lauter). Things are tense at the best of times, but made even more so when his agent tracks him down and things take an altogether more violent turn. It’s now that the already anxious “Corky” becomes more unstable as his plastic nemesis starts t...