Senator Nick Rast (Blowup, Barbarella, Deep Red) has a son, Alex, with leukemia and a loveless marriage to his wife, Sandy (Carmen Duncan, Turkey Shoot). In fact, a doctor goes as far to tell them that they should just let their son die as the film begins.

At a birthday party, Alex meets a clown who makes him smile. That clown ends up being Gregory Wolfe (Robert Powell, Asylum, The Asphyx),a faith healer in the mold of Rasputin (hint: the name Rast is tsar backward). The more time he spends with Alex, the better the child feels. Sandy also falls in love with Wolfe, despite the fact that he does some insane feats, like holding Alex over a cliff to make him come to grips with death.

Meanwhile, the senator is controlled by Doc Wheelan (Broderick Crawford, All the King's Men and you know the rules when it comes to Old Hollywood actors) and he warns him that Wolfe isn't what he seems and could be a danger to his family.

Also called Dark Forces, Harlequin was to originally star David Bowie as Wolfe and Orson Welles as Doc Wheelan. Director Simon Wincer has quite the strange directorial history, with films like Free Willy, The Phantom (the Smash Evil! version),plenty of episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles and NASCAR: The IMAX Experience.

If you know the story of Rasputin, this film follows it, with Wheelan's men killing Wolfe over and over again, but the results of meeting the Harlequin makes Rast reconsider his life as his son takes over the mantle of that Wolfe left behind.

This is seriously one odd movie, but Powell's performance (and frequent costume changes) make it something truly special. It feels like more viewings will unearth more hidden meanings, but upon watching it once, I'm hooked.

Again - as seems to be a theme this week - this film should have a bigger cult than it does. Then again, the Alamo Drafthouse programming team shared it as one of their 2017 discoveries, so perhaps more folks will start sharing their love of this film. Has anyone reading this seen it?

For years now, I've been trying to see and review every horror film from the '70s and '80s, as listed in my Aurum Encyclopedia of Horror; I've ticked off the majority of the best known titles, and have now entered the 'mopping up' phase, with just a few hundred less-well-known movies to see before I am done. The problem is that the ones I have left to watch are either extremely difficult to find, are often not very good, or aren't what I consider to be horror. Harlequin is NOT horror in my opinion: it's a strange contemporary retelling of the story of Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic who gained influence over the family of Nicholas II in the early 20th century.

Robert Powell plays Gregory Wolfe, who works his way into the life of senator Nick Rast (David Hemmings) after he cures young Alex Rast (Mark Spain) of leukaemia. After performing this apparent miracle, Wolfe becomes companion to Mrs. Rast (Carmen Duncan),but is the man's magic real or illusion? Nick Rast's superiors claim that Wolfe is a fraud, while the magician tells Nick that he is being used as a political puppet. But who is speaking the truth?

The only genuinely scary thing about Harlequin is Wolfe's fashion sense: he wears a studded black leather and silk outfit that wouldn't seem out of place in a Las Vegas show (the ensemble completed with painted nails and glittery eye-brow make-up),and he dons a very silly, padded, multi-coloured harlequin costume for the final act. However, Powell's quirky Bowie-esque outfits are in perfect keeping with the overall tone of the film, which is quite simply bizarre, the film frequently making not a lick of sense (the levitating marbles in Alex's room, the grimy portrait of Wolfe on the kitchen floor, and little Alex's transformation at the very end).

4/10. Just about worth seeking out if cinematic strangeness is your thing. But it's not horror.

Despite a potentially rich premise and the presence of David Hemmings (a personal favorite of mine) , this was a rather disappointing and overly confusing film. The plot more or less is a bizarre re-working of the Rasputin legend and revolves on a charismatic magician who infiltrates in a political family to cure the son of his leukemia, but then continues with interfering in the husband's career as a replacement-senator. This terrifically mystic idea is pretty much ruined by a bad script, a whole lot of supernatural mumbo-jumbo and a wooden performance by Robert Powell. I was hoping to see some exciting horror effects and eerie make up but "Harlequin" is very tame and lifeless. David Hemmings is okay, and so is the young actor Mark Spain. Especially after his cure, he turns into a spooky and mysterious little brat. In short: this easily could have been one of the most ingenious fantasy-tales of the eighties but it became a failure instead. Director Wincer went on directing less ambitious and more comic movies such as "Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man", "Free Willy" and "Crocodile Dundee in LA".