The Medusa Touch (1978)

French Detective-Inspector Brunel (Lino Ventura) has been lent to the London police from his native France for quite some time now. His stint in the UK does slowly near its end. To make things difficult, fate does put a rather strange and dangerous case in his way: John Morlar (Richard Burton), a misanthropic writer of very angry novels has been nearly beaten to death in his own apartment, and is now in a coma. The doctor responsible for his treatment (Gordon Jackson) thinks it is only a question of time until he dies, and if not for some very curious spikes in brain activity, he’d probably not even warrant the battery of equipment that lets him breathe right now.

Brunel’s investigation paints a curious picture of the victim: bitter, cynical, perpetually angry, and obsessed with catastrophes and large accidents, the man had few friends (if any), his psychiatrist Dr. Zonfeld (Lee Remick) probably being the closest person in his life still alive. Yet she seems rather cagy about something concerning her patient. Still, Brunel’s slow and systematic efforts begin to suggest that Morlar suffered from a curious delusion, the conviction that he had some sort of psychic power that killed anyone who made him angry. Given how many of the people who did that actually died in strange accidents, there might even be something to the man’s idea.

Late in life, Morlar even seems to have developed some control over his powers, which, combined with his clear conviction of his own superiority over basically everyone surrounding him, and his seething hatred for the powers that be, would have made for a good motive for killing the man. Particularly since Morlar started to make plans for the future…

Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch seems to be a bit of a marmite film, with people apparently hating the film with quite some passion, or treating it like one of the great undervalued British horror films in the Nigel Kneale vein. I belong to the latter group, surprising nobody.

But then, it’s not difficult to understand why someone might not enjoy a slow-moving investigative movie that mostly consists of Lino Ventura talking to people until we flash back into a past that shows us some of the horrors the world inflicted on Morlar, and then the horrors he inflicted on it in turn. The film’s portrayal of its comatose antagonist here is fascinating, because it seems like an honest attempt to understand the mindset of the man, find compassion for him, yet also clearly portray his later reactions to the general crappiness of the world as just as horrifying as the world itself. It’s very much a film about a guy turned monstrous by his surroundings, but he’s now a monster nonetheless. Even more interesting, as played by Burton, he’s never likeable, because he is much too convinced of his own importance and superiority over everything human. It’s not a pleasant or convenient route to take for the film - making him an innocent betrayed or a simple fanatic would make this much easier to digest - but it certainly adds an additional quality of disquiet. We all have felt like Morlar, after all, and with his power, might we have turned out like he did? It’s not even as if he weren’t right about at least fifty percent of the things he is so angry about.

Politically, you might read this as a film about the violence that can be evoked by politics birthed of anger, of how the horrors of the world can bend and twist people so much they become just as cruel as what surrounds them. This, needless to say, can go either way, politically, and without psychic powers, you can easily imagine Morlar ending up as a Nazi or an RAF terrorist.

Apart from subtextual complexities, I also simply find The Medusa Touch often highly effective as a piece of SF horror. There’s a quality of brooding and slowly increasing dread to the affair, created with the help of subtly disquieting and disorienting editing, and Michael J. Lewis’s fantastic score, a mood that is only increased by the fact that we are led through the tale by a man so clearly down to Earth as Ventura’s Brunel. He feels so real, witnessing him step into the world of the uncanny feels wrong in all the right ways for the film.

Burton, never one of my favourite actors, is pretty much perfect for the role: projecting an inflated ego was never difficult for the guy, but here, he adds an undertow of genuine hurt hidden under all the anger and bitterness and self-obsession. As it turns out, Burton also has one of the most convincing death stares I’ve ever seen in an actor.

All that and a climax that includes Not-Westminster Cathedral falling down like London Bridge makes for a pretty irresistible movie in my book.

In short: The Omen (1976)

When the baby of ultra-rich American ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife Katherine (Lee Remick) is stillborn, Robert all too quickly accepts the offer of a shady priest (Martin Benson) to secretly adopt a child born orphaned. Without even telling his wife, obviously.

As we all know, that turns out to have been a very bad idea, because little Damien is the Anti-Christ, as evidenced by various bizarre deaths that begin to occur around him once he’s a couple of years older (and played by Harvey Stephens), deaths which he seems to cause by very vigorous and loud playing (now that’s what I call true horror). Eventually, thanks to the efforts of a doomed priest (Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor himself) and an equally doomed but more long-lived photographer (David Warner), and because Satan’s really very unsubtle about his work, Thorn does find out what’s what, but alas, the forces of good in this one are just terrible at their jobs.

No, seriously, given how big a thing the Anti-Christ is, and how obvious the stuff going on in Richard Donner’s film, it’s pretty weird that there’s not a whole commando unit of exorcists sticking magic knives into the kid. But then, it’s also pretty weird that rich guy Thorn never bothers to acquire or simply hire some practical help when it comes to fighting off Satanists, evil doggies and so on. That’s really the film’s major problem: a script by David Seltzer that’s often painfully implausible even if a viewer is perfectly willing to accept its idiot version of pulp Christianity. Not that it’s terribly good at characterisation, either, for the Thorns, and even the gosh-darn anti-Christ stay half removed from the audience, or from much of what you’d want to interpret as believable impressions of actual human emotions. Don’t confuse this with the Italian approach to horror though, these people are deeply uninvolving and boring instead of strange and moody. While I’m bashing the script, it’s also sometimes dragging its heels painfully, coming in at twenty minutes or so longer than the material can carry.

However, there’s one saving grace to Seltzer’s script, namely the ability to come up with weird, often disquieting murder set pieces, which fits perfectly with director Donner’s ability to stage them. Indeed, it is Donner’s work at letting these weird elements come to life by using every camera trick, every skewed angle, every moody matte painting or creepy set he can come up with, throwing basically the whole visual history of horror cinema up to this point on screen that has turned this into a perennial classic. In fact, Donner’s so good at creating a mood of the Gothic in a contemporary guise, all the film’s weaknesses feel more like small problems than the critical failures they should be, so a film that should objectively be a bit of a polished turd feels rather a lot like a classic of its genre. I blame the Anti-Christ.

In short: Hennessy (1975)

Belfast in the mid-70s. Despite a certain amount of IRA connections, Niall Hennessy (Rod Steiger) has sworn off all violence for whatever Cause. This changes when his wife and daughter are shot – not exactly on purpose - by a panicked British soldier (who is afterwards promptly killed by an IRA sniper) during a minor riot that goes catastrophically wrong.

Before his family is even buried, Hennessy takes off to London – the promised killing of the whole British squad involved by his former IRA buddies isn’t quite enough for him, it seems. Instead, Hennessy’s planning to blow up the British parliament on opening day, timed to kill every MP, the House of Lords, the Queen and most of the rest of the Royal Family. That’s not a plan the IRA would reasonably underwrite, so Hennessy is soon hunted by his former best friend Sean Tobin (Eric Porter) as well as equally damaged Special Branch Inspector Hollis (Richard Johnson).

Don Sharp’s mid-70s thriller is – not unexpectedly – quite a good film that does some rather interesting things, most of them well. Particularly striking is the horrible awkwardness of the violence in it, the death of Hennessy’s family setting up the style in which the film portrays violence as something that – once put in motion – tends to escalate to the point of catastrophe, something that would be funny if it didn’t leave so many dead bodies; the idea of controlled violence committed by professionals leading to computable results contemporary action cinema loves a little too much is completely alien to the film. Here, things escalate, people make mistakes, and innocents have to die for them, until mass murder doesn’t feel so much like a choice anyone makes but as something they just happen to commit because that’s what using violence to solve any conflict in the end will lead to.

Sharp isn’t much for Peckinpah-style slow motion blood baths in his portrayal of bloodshed; the tone of the violence here is much more matter of fact, lending everything that happens a – quite horrible – kind of logic. Generally, Sharp goes for the gritty and unsentimental style you’d expect from this kind of thriller shot in 1975, and doing the expectedly good job with it.

The director also somehow manages to reign in Rod Steiger’s love for scenery-chewing, dragging a quieter and more effective performance out of him whose only flaw is the bad Irish accent. But then, the film is full of those – just listen to what Lee Remick does -so I won’t blame Steiger too much.