Magic

Cat Ellington

February 15, 2017

'We're gonna be star-arrrs.' — "Fats" It had been two weeks after seeing Phantasm that my family's weekly "Movie Date Night" continued on with the next film treat on our list: Magic, the Richard Attenborough directed psychological horror, in which the now legendary Anthony Hopkins stars as Charles "Corky" Withers, an aspiring magician and Ventriloquist, whom, "in partnership" with a profanity-spewing ventriloquist dummy named "Fats", perform their comedy shticks before live audiences and tog…

Wuchak

May 13, 2024

7/10

**_Anthony Hopkins as a schizophrenic magician and Ann-Margret the woman he loves_** A shy man finds success as a ventriloquist with his dummy “Fats,” but vacations in his hometown in the Catskills where he seeks to reunite with a high school friend. As his agent tries to find him, the woman's hubby might show up. Burgess Meredith and Ed Lauter play the latter two. “Magic” (1978) is a slow burn Hitchcock-ian psychological drama/thriller that mixes bits of "Psycho" with the creepy mannequin…

CinemaSerf

June 29, 2025

7/10

After a distinctly rocky solo start, “Corky” (Anthony Hopkins) has become quite a celebrated ventriloquist but that fame with “Fats” has come at a price. Indeed, it’s not always clear who has their hand up whom? In order to take a breather from all this lucrative adulation, and despite the insistence of his more venal agent “Greene” (Burgess Meredith), he seeks somewhere more remote to recharge his batteries. That somewhere just happens to be where his boyhood crush “Peggy” (Ann-Margret) lives w…