After years of being hard to find even in its crappy cropped VHS form, and weeks of being recalled because there was a problem with the sound, this week finally sees the DVD release of Lucio Fulci’s THE PSYCHIC from Severin Films (an up and coming label that mostly releases old EMANUELLE movies and things like that). They say it’s “Uncut For The First Time Ever In America!” which apparently means there were some scenes cut out in the old version, but does not mean it is some kind of unrated gorefest that will make you puke or challenge your religious convictions. This is one of Fulci’s thrillers, made in 1977, a few years before he started stabbing eyeballs in his horror movies like ZOMBI and THE BEYOND. It’s got its moments but it’s not as extreme as the stuff he was later known for.
Jennifer O’Neill is the psychic of the title. I mean I don’t believe she identifies as a psychic, she’s just some lady, but one day while driving through some tunnels she freaks out a little and has some visions. It’s nice to go back and see a psychic vision before the invention of Avid farts, because the images don’t cut away as fast and they are not accompanied by whooshing or thudding sound effects. Anyway, she sees a dead body and a bunch of cryptic imagery (a red lamp, a broken mirror, a magazine, a statue on its side, a wall with a section chopped out of it). Then when she moves into her new vacation home she realizes that some of the things she saw were in her home. So the movie is about her premonition coming true and her trying to do the detective work to figure out what she was seeing in her vision and by extension how to solve the murder.
One thing that’s cool about it is that the premonitions are kind of self-fulfilling. It becomes a catch-22 like you’d have in a time travel movie. For example, she sees this wall and figures out that it’s the same one that, in her vision, had a big hole in it. This inspires her to dig the hole out of it to find out what’s inside. Much later she ends up getting stuffed into the hole and bricked up without so much as a cask of amontillado. So if she had just not been paying attention to her psychic visions none of this ever would’ve happened. She would’ve been okay. (more…)
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