If advocates and opponents of abortion rights can agree on one thing, it might be the unmistakable creepiness of fetuses that pop up anywhere but inside the womb. David Lynch's Eraserhead capitalized on the primal horror of fetus-like creatures gone wild, as does 1984's The Jar. As the latter film opens, heavily bearded Gary Wallace has just survived a car crash. Though inexplicably bathed in puke-green light, he gets out to help the mysterious stranger (Les Miller) who hit him. Miller beckons Wallace to retrieve a package containing the titular jar from Miller's car. He does, but he's understandably puzzled both by Miller's inability to synchronize his speech with his mouth movements, and by the way he seems to give off burnt-orange light. After traveling to Wallace's apartment, Miller mysteriously vanishes, leaving behind only the jar, which is wrapped in brown paper and contains a hideous fetus-like creature. Wallace tries to get over his ordeal, but he's plagued by hideous nightmares, irritatingly extreme camera angles, hallucinations, viscous red paint masquerading as blood, and low-budget optical effects. He sticks the storage unit from hell in his closet, but learns that merely moving evil to a less visible area does little to vanquish its malevolent power. Wallace next tosses the jar into a Dumpster, which causes him to vividly hallucinate that he's being crucified. Out of sight is hardly out of mind, and thoughts of the jar continue to menace him when he strikes up an awkward conversation with a pretty neighbor (Karin Sjöberg), who's apparently attracted to hirsute, sullen loners tormented by evil storage containers. Back home, the violent hallucinations continue, putting considerable strain on his blossoming romance with Sjöberg, who has the misfortune of walking in on her new beau while he's crying out for the wicked jar-entity to leave him be. After an epic hallucination in which the now-familiar crucifixion motif leads to a Vietnam War-themed vision, Wallace accidentally kills Sjöberg and gives in to madness, content that his place in film history as an extremely poor man's Jack Nance has been secured.
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