La grande menace

Hmm. Some of the reviewers here have complained about the film's slow pacing. Well, yes...compared to the MTV style edited movies of the past 5 years, I'd have to agree. But, the pacing is also necessary in order to show the slow psychological breakdown of the lead character. It's a slow burn type of story, and the filmmakers were much more concerned with building a creepy atmosphere than bombarding us with CGI effects, blood and gore, and whatever else passes for supernatural horror these days.

Besides, Richard Burton on a bad day is better than most actors at their best.

If "Jason X" and other hollow, special effects driven films are your idea of horror...then this isn't the film for you. The Medusa Touch is a methodically paced thriller, aimed at genre fans who enjoy a more thoughtful kind of horror film. If you enjoyed "Don't Look Now," then this is the type of film for you.

If you have the rare opportunity to catch this obscure film, you should at least give it a fair shake. Then you can decide for yourself.

Though top billed in this, Richard Burton features but sparingly as a man with a tortured past. His recollections to his psychiatrist "Dr. Zonfeld" (Lee Remick) are relayed to police inspector "Brunel" (Lino Ventura) after he ("Morlar") is found savagely beaten at his London flat. As the investigation expands, it is clear that the normal rules do not apply here. "Morlar" shouldn't even be alive, yet his brain activity coupled with a spate of accidents and with the ever more revealing - but sensational - revelations about his disaster-prone past lead "Brunel" and the Assistant Commissioner (Harry Andrews) to a conclusion that, well, they just cannot believe. Ventura is good in this, as is the understated, but effective Remick. There are plenty of twists that keep the obvious from becoming too obvious, too soon, and when called upon, Burton contributes well in a sort of manic, epitome of evil, manner. It is a bit dialogue heavy at times, but the last twenty minutes are great drama well put together. A good bit of telekinetic terror!

And he isn't kidding! An unusually rigid, dark and hazy telekinetic crossed disaster driven supernatural-thriller, predictably told and methodically directed, but the spectacle starts out like a cerebral murder-mystery before the bleak, schlocky mayhem bursts from the seams. Once a weary-eyed Richard Burton starts staring into your soul... only means upcoming doom is near. About an hour away... give or take.

The story follows a French detective Brunel (Lino Ventura who's great here) on temporary assignment for Scotland yard, as he investigates the attempted murder of a writer, John Morlar, who now lays comatose in a hospital bed. However there's something strange about this case, and this man. He learns from Morlar's psychiatrist Dr Zonfeld (a really cold Lee Remick), and Morlar's journals, he believed he could predict the future, and eventually cause disasters, or even death.

This leads to a lot of red herrings, where motivations are unravelled through Brunel's consistent digging of the facts, although it's not hard to figure who was the attempted murderer. So when that's finally revealed, everything suddenly changes and the story comes into its own feeling like there's a lot more at stake. The script through flashbacks, interestingly gives an insight into Morlar's decaying mindset, as his psychic ability grows and bitter distain for life (especially for the establishment) festers. Therefore the morbid nature of its bubbling intentions builds and shocks begin to multiply, which always seem to end in tragedy, and once its starts... there's no going back. It's going to end, like it began... Morlar will see to that with an excellent, fitting ending.

I remember seeing this on TV many years ago, and I'm glad I caught it at such a young age. Back then it was really scary, but even today - when we're blessed (or cursed) with visual effects that are so convincing - it is still capable of sending a shiver up my spine.

The film's pace is methodical, but Richard Burton admirably conveys a sense of quiet menace as he loses his grip on sanity during a series of flashbacks. The acting by the other leads is solid enough, but the film is all about Burton's chilling psychic powers, and when they are let loose at the film's climax, the result is genuinely shocking.

Any modern-day remake of Jack Gold's The Medusa Touch would probably skew much younger in its casting and energy-level, its plot fleshed out by race-against-time set-pieces. If Gold's version works significantly better than seems likely, it's largely because of its world-weariness and sense of crusty experience, allowing its melodramatic contrivances to seem like expressions of shared frustration and common anticipation of doom. Richard Burton is among the stiffest and intemperate of leading men, so it works pretty well to cast him as a man driven by those very qualities, allowed several vituperative rants about societal hypocrisy and the general mediocrity of people individually and collectively: the premise is that he has the capacity to destroy at will, from individuals who cross him, to planes that he pulls from the sky for the hell of it (the retrospective echo of 9/11 is impossible to shut out), or even beyond that, to tamper with the workings of manned space probes. Lino Ventura (his presence on the British police force amusingly attributed to an exchange program with the French) comes in to investigate after Burton's Morlar is attacked in his home and left for dead - the film dramatizes the fruits of his investigation in flashback, interspersed with the growing anxiety as Morlar clings to life against all odds, his malicious capacities and intents possibly intact. The extensive use of other establishment actors in small parts, the alertness to time and place, and the breadth of Morlar's fury (encompassing the family, the education system, the law, the church, etc.) gives the film an unlikely symbolic force, allowing the character to embody whatever undiagnosed or unaddressed ills are slowly poisoning us. At the risk of auteur-seeking excess, it's thus tempting to see the film as a companion piece to Gold's sensational The Reckoning, which dramatizes a very different form of rage-filled triumph over the English establishment.