L'étrangleur invisible

Morrison's supermarkets are currently selling this movie in their bargain DVD bin. I decided to risk picking it up on the off-chance that it might be a forgotten SF classic. It isn't. The print was awful. It looked like it had been fished out of a sewer and then sand-blasted. I gave up trying to watch the film itself as it just seemed so ridiculous. What I could make out of the acting and direction, which wasn't much, brought to mind a bad episode of Prisoner Cell Block H.

Don't take the risk! Learn from my mistake! I had to have a big argument with one of the managers at Morrison's before they would give me my money back.

The Astral Factor is about a psychopath, imprisoned for murdering his mother, who somehow learns how to make himself invisible by studying books while incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane. Needless to say, he escapes and goes on a killing spree.

This one begins quite well in all fairness but it soon gets somewhat tedious. The storyline is such a bad basic idea you have to wonder how the likes of it ever got as far as to be given the green light for an actual movie. Well, while it was made as film, it seemingly sat on a shelf for near enough ten years before actually being released. It's really not all that surprising to be perfectly honest. While the story is pretty terrible, it's not really that that is the chief problem. Sometimes bad stories make for good films after all. No the issue is probably that, with very few exceptions, movies about invisible men are almost always terrible. What can be more cinematically tedious than an invisible character? What it does mean though, is there are some very silly murder scenes which I guess could provide some laughs I suppose. But for me the best aspects about this one were the appearances of Elke Sommer and Stephanie Powers. Sommer starred in a few interesting cult films in the 70's and her presence is always welcome, while it was strange to see future 'Hart To Hart' TV star Powers cavorting about with her butt exposed. She played the detective's trophy wife! She does zero housework and spends all his hard earned cash. She and Sommer were at the very least interesting diversions in a film in need of them.

A convicted strangler, studying the paranormal in his jail cell, learns to make himself invisible. As an invisible man, he escapes from prison to stalk and strangle the five women who testified against him at his trial.

This film is interesting in that it seems to be like "The Invisible Man" or "Hollow Man", as it follows a criminal who can become transparent. But the plot is quite different -- he can turn solid or clear through the power of his mind, and is actually already in prison when the film begins. This does not involve any sort of scientific experiment, but rather more of a spiritual ("astral") approach.

Although this is a low-budget crime mystery thriller, it is certainly entertaining and better than I would have expected. I actually found it pretty clever, and really enjoyed the unique angle. Does the killer leave fingerprints? How does he turn his clothes invisible?

Although I saw the movie on Netflix, it is readily available for anyone who wants to track it down. The DVD has been released into cheap box sets and I think you might even be able to watch it for free online. Whether or not it deserves a new DVD or BD release with features is debatable, and if it is in the public domain, it would probably be hard to convince anyone to do that.

Bonus: Genre fans might be happy to see Elke Sommer ("Lisa and the Devil") and Marianna Hill ("The Baby").

A mentally ill prisoner, through some sort of yogic meditation, manages to make himself invisible and escapes. As a child, he'd been unwanted by his celebrity mother, who nevertheless kept him close to her and didn't let him create a life of his own. He had strangled her, and apparently other women, giving him the nickname of "the celebrity strangler."

Having escaped, he goes after celebrity women who had testified against him. The police, having learned he was into reading mystical books in prison, for some reason contracted a para-psychological institute. The institute thinks perhaps the strangler is killing women by astrally projecting himself. In reality, he's merely strangling them while he is invisible (and naked). He nearly gets caught when to reach one woman, he has to don a scuba suit to get out to her boat. It's more interesting when he manages to strangle a woman in front of many witnesses simply because they don't realize what is going on. Eventually, a trap is set for him.

I kind of wonder if this was originally done as a TV movie, perhaps as a pilot. There doesn't seem to have been any reason for introducing the lead cop's girlfriend/wife Candy and the psychics unless they were to return in subsequent episodes.

It's not very good, but it's not terrible.

Incarcerated killer learns to transcend existential boundaries and temporarily abscond from his gaol cell, preying on a vast array of glamorous former Hollywood starlets. Detective Foxworth is baffled by the apparent lack of physical evidence, and begins to speculate on a supernatural cause. Aside from an original premise and a great cast of former 60's sexpots (Powers, Lyon, Hill, Sommer and Parrish), with names like 'Bambi' and 'Candy', there's not much right with this tepid mystery.

Mother fixated killer Ashmore does little other than look constipated, perspire and affect intense mind grips, while Foxworth's perplexed expression suggests he's struggling with the concept of the killer's meta-physical abilities. As an audience, it was also a struggle to remain engaged, as the movie laboured from one murder to the next seemingly without selection or purpose. Powers is entirely irrelevant to the plot, a vexatious waste of talent simply for the status her name brings to the dull production. Whatever value the original idea had, it quickly evaporates, the all too brief cameos being the only partially redeeming qualities.

Wasting an attractive cast, "Invisible Strangler" has invisible special effects, paltry production values and incoherent dialogue to match its laborious narrative approach. Female viewers will be less concerned with the bevy of babes on show, and more appalled by the blatant misogyny of the storyline. A disappointing revision of "The Invisible Man" borrows heavily from "Psychic Killer" released a year earlier in 1975, and should have been so much more entertaining.