SOBSESSION

OBSESSSION (1976)
dir: Brian DePalma

SOBSESSION
MAD #191, June 1977
w: Larry Siegel
a: Harry North, Esq.

The movie also has a ransom note but I think it's a coincidence there's a ransom note on the cover of this issue. They would have gone with Marathon Man or The Jeffersons if they were using a movie or TV show on the cover. But I'll use it anyway.

In 1959, Micheal Courtland (Cliff Robertson) and his wife Elizabeth (Genevieve Bujold) are having a party to celebrate his real estate venture with Bob LaSalle (John Lithgow).

That night, Michael and his family are about to go to bed, his wife goes to say goodnight to their daughter Amy, and he checks in on them to find they are held ransom. He goes to the police, who suggest he pay the ransom with fake money while they arrest the captors. In chasing them, they end up accidentally killing his wife and daughter, for which he blames himself.

Michael uses his half of the land to build a monument to his family, modeled after the church where he and his wife met. Years later, he and his partner go on a business trip to Florence, stop by that very church, and he wants a minute alone. As he's walking through the church, he sees a young woman who looks exactly like his wife Elizabeth.

He starts talking to the young woman, Sandra, asks her out, starts dating her, and grooms her. He asks her to marry him, and first they visit her dying mother.

He takes her home and when he's at work, she looks in a locked room, the room Michael shared with Elizabeth that he's kept as it was since he lost her. (He's not there like in this parody). That night he has a dream he is being married and that Sandra is the reincarnation of Elizabeth. He wakes up to find the same ransom note that was there sixteen years ago.

Michael rushes to see Bob and get ransom money that he needs to save Sandra. (The story of how Sandra is really Michael's daughter is told through flashbacks and not through dialogue at the airport like here). He finds out Bob set this whole thing up to swindle him out of his half of ownership of the company and kills Bob. Sandra/Amy remembers what really happened as she's being sent back to Italy, the plane had to return due to weather, and she attempted suicide on the plane. Michael does not know that Sandra is really his daughter when he goes to kill her for being in on the con, but realizes it when she sees him and calls him “Daddy”.