THE PSYCHIC
Strike three for Fulci
I just watched this, the last Fulci movie I intend to ever watch again for the remainder of my life. (Brian's note - okay, I caved, I have since seen The New Gladiators, which I thought wasn't half bad. I'm not going to shut out this guy's movies like this; I mean, I keep seeing Fred Olen Ray's movies, right?) I was pretty excited when I picked it up in the store - reading the back, I was delighted to have found what appeared to be (are you sitting down?) a Fulci movie with a plot. So I brought it home (along with Bava's Hatchet For The Honeymoon, which is way better than this) and popped her into the VCR.
The opening scene was...well, hilarious. I can't tell if it was meant to be funny or not, but that doesn't matter - I haven't laughed that hard at a movie in a fewweeks. A little girl psychically envisions her mother'ssuicide (anyone care to take bets on whether a reason for this suicide is even suggested?) - and, sure enough, the lady jumps off a cliff, and one word came into my mind as I saw her plummetting from the edge - "TOONCES!!!"Really, she looked just like that. Anyway, then we're treated to a few hysterically funny shots of the lady smacking her face on the rocks on her way down - with each of these impacts enough to take off a little more of her face, but not enough to actually propel her body into a position that's anything other than always pointing straight down. If you're lookin' for laughs, you've came to the right place.
But, after that, things went waaay downhill. I mean, if I had a choice between watching this movie again and watching some kid take a bag of peanuts and divide them into piles based on how many nuts are in each shell, I'd have to go with the kid, becauseat least there's a chance the kid's violently allergic to peanuts.
We're treated to a "chase" scene between our heroine and one suspect, which starts out well but goes on for so long without anything resembling a genuine payoff that it's basically like watching two people walk. Wait, that's exactly what it was. Same thing happened in Species II. This is not a good thing.
We're given a psychic image of a cigarette in an ashtray, a vision that keeps coming back throughout the film. And when it finally comes true, when the cigarette's finally there, what does it mean? Nothing. It's just a cigarette in an ashtray. It's like me having a psychic vision of applying deodorant tomorrow morning. Whee.
And Fulci's direction is just plain laughable. It's a joke. This is the fifth time I've subjected myself to one of his films, and the best that I can say about the best of the bunch, The House By The Cemetery, is that it has a few creepy moments. The rest - garbage all (but I gave The Gates Of Hell a "ball" for some good "ick" moments and a curiously pleasing sense of chaos and complete abandon of plot). At least here Fulci doesn't confuse gore with horror, which he does in all the other movies...but then I realized that his movies need that kind of gore to keep me from falling asleep.
I mean, he just doesn't give the audience credit for noticing stuff. If something or somebody is the only thing shown in the frame, that's what we're going to look at. We don't need the camera to zoom right in and make it take up the whole frame. I mean, we've noticed. We don't need help. But he does that dozens of times in the film. As if to make the audience go from "Oh, look, it's Jennifer O'Neill" to "OH MY GOD IT'S JENNIFER O'NEILL!!!"
That's not to say that there weren't things I liked about the movie. The plot actually did turn out to be pretty good, if incredibly slow-paced and devoid of horror. The ending was all right too, and the score, despite many lapses (every time O'Neill had a vision, we'd get this loud, overbearing OH MY GOD SHE'S HAVING A VISION music), is really cool, witha crazy violin soloist that sounds like he's playing in "The Devil Went Down To Georgia". I also liked the simple visual effect used during the visions, making them ripply, as if showing the fluid nature of the future, although such an idea was never actually used in the plot. The future was always pretty cut-n-dried here.
But overall - crap, crappety-crap. Whatever it is all the Fulciphiles here see in the guy, I don't see it - or, alternately, I see it and think it's crap. Sorry guys - oh, hell, I'm not sorry - but when somebody allows a painted sign in one of their films that reads "DO NOT ENTRY", this doesn't strike me as a director that's particularly dedicated to his craft. A great director I keep hearing about, but not what I keep seeing. Maybe it says something for Fulci's talent in that it must truly take tremendous talent to take a great idea like a battle between a zombie and a shark and make it jaw-droppingly dull.