(Streamed via The Film Detective)
Deborah Raffin stars as a dancer who begins having strange premonitions. When she has her visions, the world stands completely still around her while she receives flashes of the future. A creepy bald dude is often in the center of her premonitions, and she teams up with an investigator (David Ackroyd) to put together the pieces of her mental puzzle before it’s too late.
This Made for TV movie has a pretty good cast. In addition to Death Wish 3’s Deborah Raffin we have ‘70s staple Andrew Prine as the bald psycho, X-Men’s Bruce Davison as her uncaring boyfriend, and Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund as Akroyd’s partner. Raffin does a solid job in the lead, and her invested performance keeps you watching, even when the plot begins to chase its tail.
Director Ivan Nagy (who would later gain notoriety as a one-time boyfriend of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, and eventually wound up directing porn by the end of his career) creates a modicum of atmosphere during Raffin’s prolonged slow-motion visions. The problem is these sequences get a little repetitive as the film is entering the homestretch. There’s probably about two too many of these long scenes, but I guess he had to do what he had to do in order to fill a two-hour time slot.
The good news is just when you think you’ve had it up to here with the psychic shit, the movie switches gears from an ESP drama to a full-blown woman in peril movie. The last act gets a real shot in the arm thanks to Prine’s intense performance as the sketchy, sweaty psycho. His crazed theatrics help push Mind Over Murder over the top to become a first-rate TV thriller.
Naturally, Prine gets the best line of the movie when he asks Raffin, “What do you want to do first? Make love or DIE!”
AKA: Premonitions. AKA: Psychomania. AKA: Deadly Vision.
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