Whatever the merits of the best-selling novel may be, this cinematic adaptation is a disaster at nearly every turn, often making a potentially disturbing story a laugh riot, instead! Strasberg plays a woman afflicted by the cinema's most annoying peach blouse....er, make that a huge knot on the back of her neck, which is getting bigger and bigger with each passing day and confounding all the doctors examining it. In desperation, she turns to her ex-lover Curtis, a false medium who reads tarot cards to little old ladies while wearing a fake mustache, a velour robe that has the signs of the Zodiac printed on it and quite possibly the tightest jeans in the history of the movies. The couple rekindles their romance and she is admitted to the hospital while Curtis scrambles for answers. He turns to an old pal, a mystic played by Stevens (in Light Egyptian makeup and a curly, chestnut brown fright wig) and her husband (played by former child star, now rotund and bearded, Corcoran.) They hold a séance at Strasberg's home where her aunt (Sothern) makes a brief appearance in Marilyn Monroe's "Happy Birthday Mister President" wig and enough foundation to cover all the clowns in the Ringling Brothers Circus. When that blows up in their faces (literally!), they try Meredith, a craggy and fussy old anthropologist who, for reasons best left alone, has a curly, blonde wig among the artifacts in his attic! (What is it with this film and bad wigs?!) Meredith refers Curtis to a present day Medicine Man (Ansara) who is reluctant to help out a paleface woman, but does anyway when he realizes the severity of the incident. It seems that an ancient evil spirit from the Native American realm has burrowed itself in Strasberg's neck and is about to be reborn!!!! Unfortunately for everyone, she's had so many X-rays to find out what's wrong that when he comes out, he's dwarfed and deformed, though still quite powerful (as demonstrated by his stripping the skin off a live human male and freezing the entire floor of a hospital, one hapless nurse right along with it!) Ansara tries to hold him at bay with some colored sand and a couple of sticks being tapped together, but ultimately, it falls to Curtis and Strasberg herself to make inroads at stopping him. This horrendous, yet compulsively watchable, film has a plethora of classic bad movie moments. A few highlights include: Curtis gyrating around to canned disco music as he pours himself a beer into a wine goblet, Stevens attempting to keep a straight face in the light of her ludicrous role (she eventually exits the film altogether without explanation), Sothern's home being trashed, yet her false eyelashes never move a tad (she barely registers in this film at all, a person would have to hit "pause" to get a decent look at her!), surgeon Cedar being forced to cut himself with his own scalpel by the unborn ancient hobgoblin, a nod to the 70's disaster cycle in which a hospital office shakes and rattles as if it were unused footage from "Earthquake" and the heinous space effects when Strasberg's room becomes an inter-dimensional playground (complete with her doffing her hospital gown and taking on the creature TOPLESS!) Most nutso of all, though, is the brief contribution from Tuttle. Like Nolan, who has a bit during the opening credits, she plays one of Curtis's easily-taken-in customers. Looking not unlike Clara Peller from the "Where's the beef?" Wendy's commercials, she is overtaken by an unseen force and begins spouting an old Indian mantra. Then she rises up magically and levitates down the hall, finally getting hurled violently down a flight of steps (or rather, her blatantly obvious MALE stunt double does!) The whole thing is just too bad for words, not aided by Curtis's unwelcome self-satisfied smugness and sarcasm in his role. When he barely bothers to keep a straight face, how can an audience invest in the already hard-to-take story? Strasberg, daughter of the legendary Method actor Lee Strasberg, does manage to register the necessary level of agony and torment for her role and Meredith has fun with his cameo, but most everyone else seems embarrassed to be there (and most of them should be!) This is not to say that the film isn't fall-down funny during many points, which is its primary selling point today.