Color, 1975, 87 mins. Directed by Ray Danton
Starring Paul Burke, Jim Hutton, Julie Adams, White Bissell, Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, Rod Cameron, Della Reese / Written by Michael Butler & Lane Slate / Music by Leonard Rosenman / Cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld
Letterboxed (1.85:1) / Dolby Digital Mono
Format: DVD - Elite Entertainment (MSRP $29.95)
The movie begins with Hutton running and screaming full force towards the camera, and it really never settles down for the next hour and a half. As Paul Masters, an innocent man unjustly convicted for murder and committed to a mental institution, Hutton really pulls out all the stops here as a basically sympathetic guy who finds himself consumed by the darkness of revenge after he acquires the ability to "project" himself out of his body and kill those responsible for his own incarceration and the death of his mother. Thanks to the aid of his doctor, Laura (Julie Adams, best known for Creature from the Black Lagoon), Masters is released after the real culprit is found, and he immediately causes the judge responsible for his case to shoot himself with a rifle during a tryst with a married blonde bimbo. In the most sordid sequence, the nurse who neglected Masters' mother and let her die meets her end in a hot shower stall, and pretty soon local cop Paul Burke (one of the unflattering depicitions of a supposedly heroic law enforcer ever committed to film) starts putting two and two together. After Burke sleeps with the doctor during a romantic interlude (an especially weird scene), Masters really finds himself going over the edge.
Considering all the recent fuss over the MPAA, it's amazing now that this film was even considered eligible for its PG rating. Sleazy, sordid, and filled with nudity and violence, this surreal oddity leaps from one bizarre setpiece to the next with little regard for logic. At least one sequence in which an opera-singing teamster is crushed by a concrete block indicates that the film was partially intended to be funny, which might explain some of the other goofy moments along the way (the nurse's go go dance, a butcher's hand getting ground into burger meat, and so on). Even Touched by an Angel's Della Reese pops by for an abrasive cameo appearance that must be seen to be believed, and it all ends with a surprisingly grim and sadistic finale (given away in the trailer, alas) that leaves the viewer with no one to root for. Not really all that good, Psychic Killer is at least never boring and should please any discriminating sleazy drive-in moviehound. Furthermore, Elite's transfer is astonishingly good, far better than those awful old Embassy VHS cassettes. The 1.85:1 framing shaves a little off the fullscreen transfer but looks far better composed, and the color and clarity are amazing considering the movie's budget and vintage. While Elite has really been ignoring some potential horror classics lately, at least this is a much better movie than Inseminoid and a far better transfer than their Evil Dead, so perhaps all is not yet lost.
For those uniniated into the fold of 1960s comedies, Jim Hutton (Timothy's dad) was an actor best known for playing nice, aw-shucks guys in froth like Where the Boys Are, Walk Don't Run, and Who's Minding the Mint?. However, when the 1970s arrived and cinema took a darker turn, Hutton shifted gears and tried to change his image. Perhaps the most startling case is Psychic Killer, originally filmed as The Kirlian Effect (hence the replaced title card), a low budget horror outing directed by Ray Danton, a former actor also known for directing such drive-in favorites as Deathmaster and Crypt of the Living Dead until he turned to TV fare like The Incredible Hulk.
