On the Third Day (1983)

Wonderful character development!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Richard Morant plays Jeremy Bolt, a mysterious accountant who spends Easter weekend dredging skeletons out of the stuffy Hammond family's closet. After breaking into their house, his plummy accent and good manners convince prep school headmaster Douglas (Paul Williamson) and his wife Clarissa (Catherine Schell) that he knows one of their old friends, and has just popped by for a cup of tea and a chat. But ulterior motives seem to be the real reason for his visit, and after seducing daughter Sarah (Sally Toft), Mr. Bolt begins to reveal his hand. Shot on location in the gorgeous Cornwall countryside, On the 3rd Day is a slow-building psychological horror tale that doesn't deserve consignment to the VHS graveyard in which it currently resides. The long out of print Karl Lorimar videotape is mildly letterboxed at 1.66:1, which seems to accurately reflect the film's original aspect ratio. If you find a copy, buy it!

I like to watch rare horror movies partly to contribute missing information about them, but also in the hopes that some of the rare ones are actually unjustly overlooked. This is one that definitely deserves a wider audience, though it is a bit light on the horror and a little more of a drama. Movies with tensions in a house between a strange outsider like Funny Games, or with a mysterious stranger with mysterious motives like Death and the Maiden come to mind.A headmaster and his wife return home to find one of their doors to have part of a window pane neatly cut. Looking through the house for whatever might be missing, they find a young man sitting in one of their rooms, and the phone isn't working.The man's behavior is strange, but polite. He says he's arrived from Australia and was friends there with an old friend of the headmaster. He proves to have a lot of personal knowledge about the family, so his story seems to be true. However, he definitely has a dark side, doing over-the-top "practical jokes," producing a gun, engaging in a particularly bloody boxing match. (There are a number of nice touches in the movie, like the acting of the old man handling the timer and bell for the boxing.)The ending, well, perhaps a bit predictable (avoid reading too much of the box cover, or the synopsis on rotten tomatoes). Still, a pretty good movie overall and one of the rare horror movies to take place around Easter.