La peau d'une victime

"Murder In My Mind" opens with a relatively plausible sci-fi premise - the transfer of one person's short-term memories to another via injected brain cells - but quickly becomes much more "fiction" than "science", as the recipient starts assuming the personality and feelings of the "donor" as well. In any case, the film kept me engaged from beginning to end, and that's what matters the most. Its premise is not strikingly original - didn't "Unforgettable" do something similar in 1996? - but it does add a twist on the usual serial killer formula. The characters are not strikingly original either - the young, inexperienced female FBI agent who has to prove her worth, the gruff but ultimately kind-hearted boss, the scientist who risks everything for love but later has second thoughts, the serial killer with a childhood trauma - but they are so well-played, by a well-chosen cast, that they become real. Nicollette Sheridan essentially has to play two roles - herself and the woman whose memories she now shares - and she is (and looks) pretty terrific. (**1/2)

There is a belief amongst the Romany people that the human eyeball contains the image of the very last thing a dead person saw . There is no scientific rationale for this and the producers of MURDER IN MIND have taken this unscientific idea one step further and suggest that the brain of a dead person contains their final thoughts as they died , ideas that can be transplanted into another person`s head . It struck me that whoever came up with this premise were short on their own ideas

This premise does the TVM no favours . It`s a bad premise and it`s a bad TVM with sci-fi fans put off by the run of the mill script and the intended female audience put off by the idea that it`s a sci-fi thriller . Being someone who hates TVMs I was hoping that it might redeem itself via some clever ideas but I got rapidly bored as it becomes obvious that the real story revolves around a newbie female cop called Callain Pearson getting patronized by some tough old sweat detectives led by Cargill which we`ve seen far too often in these type of movies . The harder this TVM tries to satisfy both a Sci-Fi and female TVM audience the more it fails to satisfy either camp

(Miner Spoilers) Somewhat strange murder mystery that combines police work with brain-cell transplant biology to track down a serial killer. Petite and pretty Callain Person, Nicollette Sheridan, is both the hunter and the hunted in this film as she takes over the mind of the "Rose Peddle" serial killers latest victim and thus brings him out of his lair, and into the open, where she set a trap for him.

Murdering four attractive blond and blue eye young women the killer makes a fatal mistake on his part, when he's interrupted trying to strangle victim #5 Marlena Wells, Stellina Rusich, who survived.

Even though Marlena is in a coma with no hope of coming out of it the fact that she not dead gives Callain the chance to break the "Rose Peddle" serial murder case wide open. Not just being an FBI agent Callain is also a lab assistant to her boyfriend and biologist Arthur Lefcort,Peter Coyote, who's experimenting with transplanting brain cells from one rat to another to see if the rat receiving the cells has the same mind of the rat that it got the cells from.

Having Arthur reluctantly implant a number Marlena's brain-cells, that she took from the FBI crime lab, into her brain Callain slowly begins to see what's in Marlena's mind and it's those images that leads her to track down who the serial killer is. Callain at first feeling that Marlean's boyfriend Jack, Peter Outerbridge, murdered her, by seeing him a in disturbing flashback. It later turns out that he only broke up with Marlena, just days before she was assaulted, and had nothing to do with her being put in the hospital.

Not telling her boss Agent Cargil, Stacy Keach, about her mental condition he feels that Callain is some kind of weirdo but as the evidence piles up,confirming her "hunches", he slowly begins to accept her conclusions and in the end it's that belief in Callain's psychic ability by him that saves her life. There's a strange and interesting relationship between Callain and Arthur in the movie that at first makes you wonder if your seeing the same movie or two films with different actors and Miss. Sheridan being in both of them spliced together.

You never really understand what Callain is doing in Arthur lab as his lab assistant and then being out on the streets as an FBI agent,is she holding down two jobs at the same time? Arthur who at first gave Callain the brain-cell transplant later feels that it may very well destroy her identity and lead her to become Marlena. Arthur insists that Callain throw away the bottle of pills that he gave her to keep her body from rejecting Marlena''s brain-cells, which Callain doesn't. Was it that Arthur was afraid that he'll lose Callain to Marlena's boyfriend Jack who she was starting to become romantically involved with?

The fact that she knows so much about the "Rose Peddle Killer" does, like Callain predicted, bring him out in the open to finish the job on Marlena that he started but it also brings him straight into the trap that Callain, together with her boss FBI Agent Cargill, set for him.

Caught this one on cable the other night. Saw that it Nicollette Sherridan (Desperate Housewives) in it. Figured I'd check it out! It was a good, suspenseful movie! Sheridan plays a FBI agent, even though they don't actually call them FBI agents, that's on the trail of a serial killer. She gets injected with what's believed to be a victim's brain things. I really liked her part in the movie. Peter Coyote plays the Dr. that helps her try and find out who is killing all these women. There's a "taste" of romance in this one. I liked how they didn't really go into that much. They just kept with the story line! If you could catch it, it's definitely worth it!

The treatment by Tom Swale veers from sci-fi psychology with a person having a "memory transplant" and "short term sensory experiences", to the hunt for a serial killer known as the Rose Killer. Unfortunately, the protagonist, Washington FBI agent Callain Pearson, is played glacially by Nicolette Sheridan. Pearson is the beneficiary of the experimental transplant from brain dead witness to the killer, Marlene Wells (Stellina Rusich), since her boyfriend Arthur Lefcourt (Peter Coyote) also happens to be a neurosurgeon at Oak Park University Medical Center. The gimmick here is that Marlene behaved the femme fatale, which allows the buttoned-up Pearson to act out - smoking, dancing, and even smiling. However, the denouement reveals little connection to the identity of the killer, who conveniently has his own Freudian memory experience at the climax.

Sheridan is attractive enough to bring off the bad girl turns, and also has the skill to carry a fearful crying scene as Pearson, however her face remains closed to the camera, predetermining what it records as opposed to allowing us to read any flowering emotion.

Coyote and Stacy Keach as Pearson's superior are wasted in their supporting roles, and even Peter Outerbridge as Marlene's boyfriend artist Jack Bolinas is finally a red herring. Director Robert Iscove uses blue tints for Callain's memory, and subjective hand-held camera with the obligatory heavy breathing for the killer's POV. We get fast music for 2 chases, though Iscove does make a joke of a SWAT team's methods of entry when they are called to the Center.

Swale's teleplay features howlers such as "If I can't count on you to help me, I can't count on you". "When all else fails, sometimes the best logic is illogic". And the "classic idealisation/devaluation syndrome - he forces them to reject him to validate his stalking and attacking". Plus apparently FBI agents aren't trained in hand to hand combat, since there are 2 incidents where without a gun, they are defenceless.