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Haskin's The Power is a forgotten forerunner, mainly this is North by Northwest multiplied by Kiss Me Deadly. Cinema by any other name, telekinesis, its tremors and hemorrhages. Gifted young monsters "like twins," the vacant coed (Amy Irving) and the glowering athlete (Andrew Stevens) weaponized in the landscape of Seventies paranoia. Sight and touch, a sanguinary new dimension out of the throbbing brow. Chases within chases, dueling paternal figures, the graying swashbuckler (Kirk Douglas) and the espionage vulture (John Cassavetes). "Occasionally, you make a connection between the timeless world and the physical world." Brian De Palma building on Carrie's hormonal flares, nothing but racy combustion of image and sound—form versus content illustrated with the derailment of a toy train, and, should anybody miss the joke, there's a moving camera on Irving and Carrie Snodgress cooing over chocolate sundaes. Children have their magic, adults can only approach it with audiovisual paraphernalia (a bogus terrorist attack becomes an indoctrination film). "Visualize sitting in an empty theater in front of a blank screen..." The send-up of conspiracy thrillers allows for the sustained surrealism of planes of artifice meticulously put together only to spectacularly fly apart like a short-circuiting carnival ride. Remarkable coups abound: A circular sweep is combined with rear-projection to provide the paranormal prodigy's view, protracted slow-motion sends characters crashing through windshields, stuttering jump-cuts slice into frames and bodies. The levitating concubine (Fiona Lewis) out of Teorema, the subversive kiss that triggers bloody tears. "Anybody can achieve alpha with a little patience." De Palma's hysterical stretto transforms the Great American Independent into a splatter piñata, and opens the road for Cronenberg's Scanners. With Charles Durning, Carol Eve Rossen, Rutanya Alda, Joyce Easton, William Finley, Dennis Franz, Hilarie Thompson, Laura Innes, and Daryl Hannah.
--- Fernando F. Croce |