77 - The Sentinel

    A young lady rents her own apartment, and finds that the other tenants are especially bizarre.  As her health deteriorates, her boyfriend investigates the building, and the story, and her role in matters, is revealed.
    I found this movie mentioned on the wiki article for horror films, and I had never heard of it.  It has a remarkable cast - Burgess Meredith, Ava Gardner, Christopher Walken, Beverly D'Angelo, Jeff Goldblum.  Of course, many of those have small parts, but still, it's an impressive ensemble.  Many of the summaries out there give a substantial spoiler, which is only revealed during the last ten minutes.
    It's a good movie.  The pacing is a little slower than things would normally be, by modern standards, but it's still impressive.  It's hard to tell exactly what direction things are going, and there are some unexpected moments of strange horror.
    There's an unusual type of horror, and it can be remarkably effective, or it can be completely forgettable.  It's when the audience is shown something that doesn't quite make sense.  We don't have enough information to put the pieces together.  Most notably, this happens in The Shining, with the shot when Shelly Duvall is running up the stairs, and looks down the hallway at the pair of men in the room at the end of the hall.  This movie uses a few of those moments, but they're mostly lumped together at the end.
    One of the signs that this is a good movie is that I finished it wanting more.  I wanted more backstory, I wanted to learn more about a lot of the secondary and tertiary characters.