Promising beginning, then takes a turn toward exploitation and never really recovers its dignity. As usual with Koontz material, the ideas are cool and novel, and the execution is improbable and peculiar. Julie Christie carries a lot of the film on her own, which is of course terrific, but the material she has to work with is hysterical and unpleasant and a bit gross. The title is terrible, as the story is significantly about computers, and the title makes one think it'll be another Exorcist ripoff. It has shades of that, but most accurate is a contemporary assessment of this movie as a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rosemary's Baby. Except it sucks.
Of interest here is the computer anxiety that infuses the whole enterprise. In that way it's a sibling to Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Red Scare upgraded to IBM Scare. I really like this subgenre, which never really got organized but gave us some interesting (if rapidly obsolete) stuff: Crichton's The Terminal Man, the goofy Tom Selleck thriller Runaway, et al.
I, and anyone living in the 21st century, could have predicted that a 1977 "smart house" was a terrible idea. Whenever I come across stories like this set so early in the computer age, I want to shout "you fools! you're not ready! what've you got, 128K of RAM? you can't run a house on that!" But that's what makes it fantasy, I guess.
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