As basic and trite as its title, PSYCHIC presents Zach Galligan as Patrick Costello, a clairvoyant college student who uses his gift of second sight primarily to score with the chicks.
All this poor man's Edgar Cayce has to do is fondle an item belonging to a girl and he psychically knows all about her--interests, activities, turn-ons etc. Patrick tries to use his touchy-feelie ESP to cozy up to sexy scholar Laurel Young (Catherine Mary Stewart), but instead he gets visions of a
local serial sex-killer in action. The otherworldly finger of guilt points to Laurel's steady boyfriend, Dr. Theodore Steering (Michael Nouri, in creepy low voice and dark glasses), an upstanding but unmistakably sinister psychologist. When Patrick presents his phantom "evidence" to the police
they instead seize him as a suspect in the murders. Can Dr. Steering's rampage be stopped? Will true love triumph over evil and adversity? Does the high-school letter jacket Galligan wears hide the fact that he's too old for this role?
You don't need a crystal ball or tarot deck to foresee what will happen next in PSYCHIC, but a VCR or cable hook-up might help; the lacklustre occult thriller raced to reach both media, and while it showed up first on tape some might mistake it for a made-for-TV quickie, such is the predominant
small-screen banality. The psychic visions of murder, which fulfill the R-rating's quotient of violence and nudity, indulge in hallucinatory f/x--distorted sound and color, plus interrupted motion thanks to removal of intermittant film frames.
Director George Mihalka used the same visual techniques for his earlier astral-projection chiller THE BLUE MAN (a.k.a. ETERNAL EVIL). (Violence, profanity, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations.) leave a comment
