The unquestionably absurd premise of The Manitou is that lump on the back of a woman’s neck turns out to
be the growing fetus of a four-hundred-year-old shaman going through the
process of reincarnation. But the folks who made The
Manitou picked it up and ran with it. While this film may not be one of
Tony Curtis’s finest or rate a “Classic” status, it does show a lot more creativity
and inventiveness than the current derivative spewing of horror movies. The Manitou captured my imagination
when I saw it as a high-school teenager. In contemplating how I would review The Manitou, I groped for a way to show
my enthusiasm while still commenting on the outlandish premise. I looked at how
different my life is now than when I was a teenager. Showing a couple
in-the-bathroom-grooming comes from a married man’s perspective. Once I had
that angle, the strip basically wrote itself.
