The Screengrab : the brood

Take Five: Psychics

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz. It's hard to figure out why: It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist; it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson. Maybe people are confused by the premise: in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician. We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe. Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country. For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic. One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart. Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there: few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.

SCANNERS (1981)

There's nothing subtle or ambiguous, on the other hand, about David Cronenberg's early sci-fi terror masterpiece. Before his transition to an artist of the decay and dysfunction of the body in modern classics like The Fly, Cronenberg's obsession was the abuse and alteration of the mind -- and as he showed in movies like Altered States, The Brood and Videodrome, an unhinged mind could do a vast amount of damage. Nowhere is this given a sharper point than in his cult classic Scanners, which works pretty much like HIghlander except with exploding heads instead of sword decapitations. As shadowy corporations struggle to control the massive psionic powers of a handful of people, we witness the battle firsthand through the activities of a highly game cast which includes mopey Stephen Lack, sinister Michael Ironside, and hammy Patrick McGoohan. Scanners also features one of our favorite taglines ever: "There are four billion people on Earth. 237 are scanners. And they are winning." Choice!

THE FURY (1978)

After having wet his beak in the unhinged-psychic game with a now-legendary film adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie (see, there's king again), Brian De Palma warmed to the subject and cranked out a modest but highly energetic (and entertaining) teen-psychics-in-trouble picture called The Fury. Featuring Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens as the two fresh-faced kids who have to worry about blowing up a city block instead of needing to pick up some Clearasil, the plot revolves around their being sent to a government research lab where their overseers must walk a thin line between making sure their prize specimens don't get away and make them happy enough that they don't turn their considerable powers on their masters. Playing almost like a trial run of some of David Cronenberg's laer stuff, The Fury is bounding with energy (and not just of the psychic variety), and its B-movie plot is highly abetted by the top-notch cast, including a wildly overaheated Kirk Douglas as Stevens' father and a gravely understated John Cassavetes as one of the government flunkies.

AKIRA (1988)

As any teenager -- including the ones on this list -- can tell you, being young is no picnic. Your body starts to change, girls don't like you and you can't figure out why, you start feeling sick and alienated for no reason, and before you know it, you're hanging out with a bunch of nogoodniks in a biker gang. But if you start to develop horrific psychic powers, ones that can kill your friends, turn you into a grotesque monster, and even level the entire city of Toyko with the power of a nuclear bomb? Well, that, brother, as a very wise man once said, is when your heartaches really begin. Katsuhiro Otomo's groundbreaking animated feature, based on his own graphic novel series, featured stellar animation, top-shelf voice acting, creepy effects, a complex but not incomprehensible storyline (it turns out, to no one's real surprise, that a nefarious military intelligence project is behind poor Akira's transformation into a psionic monstrosity), and some great effects at the movie's unforgettable end all helped open up western markets to both anime and manga, transforming the world of comics and film forever.

INVINCIBLE (2001)

Anyone can make a movie about deranged psychics who threaten the lives of their loved ones. Leave it to Werner Herzog to up the ante by making a movie about a deranged psychic in the employ of the Nazi party who enlists a Jewish strongman to help him put on a carnival show about Siegfried, the legendary Aryan hero of myth. It's this kind of intensely focussed eccentricity, and reckless disregard for making sense, that seperates the men like Herzog from the boys. This was Herzog's first narrative feature after a prolonged stretch of making documentaries, and while it's not nearly in the same league as movies like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, it's still got his knack for breathtaking imagery and his gift for illustrating the mad inner lives of obsessives in spades. The psychic in question in Invincible is Erik Jan Hanussen, the doomed faux-Dane who, for a while, operated as Hitler's personal clairvoyant until falling out of favor with Der Fuhrer's inner circle and getting himself assassinated. His story is also told in the relatively straightforward biopic Hanussen (1988), but that movie can't compete with Tim Roth's giddy performance or Herzog's fiery direction.

The Ten Worst Medical Breakthroughs in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

THE TERMINAL MAN (1974)

The title character, played by George Segal, is a brilliant computer programmer who suffers from epileptic seizures and Acute Disinhibitory Lesion (ADL) syndrome. He has begun experiencing blackouts, and he's gotten in trouble with the law because of violent beatings he's inflicted on people while his cerebral cortex was out to lunch. Looking to help the poor guy out, doctors implant electrodes in his brain and hook them up to a miniature computer implanted in his neck. All this is meant to control his seizures and help prevent him from behaving violently, but Segal goes off his meds, the computer malfunctions, and the next thing you know, he's a misfiring killing machine, lurching about the city laying waste to people and waterbeds, and driven even crazier by his "delusion" that computers are taking over the world and waging war on the human race, a species of paranoia for which he himself could now serve as Exhibit A. After The Terminal Man was released, its message about the dangers of computers was taken to heart by everyone who saw it, the U.S. government banned any further development of computer technology, and Steve Jobs became a street musician. You are reading this on one of those new-fangled text-messaging abacuses.

SSSSSSS (1973)

Back in the early 1970s, when concern about global climate change was such an obscure topic that Al Gore was still jacking up the air conditioner to "frosty" and demanding to know "When the hell does it warm up around here?", Dr. Carl Stoner was on the case. Doc Stoner, played by the much-loved and deeply untrustworthy character actor Strother Martin, suspects that a new Ice Age might be coming, and he has his own radical plan for helping the human race to adjust to changing circumstances: he's working on a serum that will turn us all into king cobras. Unfortunately, the good doctor leaves himself open to charges that he lets his personal feelings guide his scientific process: he selects as his first test subject Dirk Benedict (later known as Face on The A-Team), who just happens to have been sniffing around the doctor's young daughter, played by Heather Menzies, who's beautiful when she takes off her glasses. (This being an early-70s exploitation movie, she ends up taking off a lot more than her glasses.) Soon Benedict is stumbling around the lab with a greenish complexion, scaly flaking skin, and his hair falling out, which in my experience would be enough to ensure that Heather Menzies would cut him off even if he didn't wind up turning into a snake.

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)

Generally speaking, sexually transformative surgery has gotten a bad rap in the movies; Ed Wood did very little to glamorize the field with his 1953 first feature, Glen or Glenda (A.K.A. I Changed My Sex), where the whole point seemed to be to transform a repressive society to make it acceptable for men with pencil-line moustaches to indulge their passion for Angora sweaters. Things hadn't gotten much better by the early seventies, when the writer-director Michael Sarne (compared by one of his colleagues to "a wolf with rabies") committed this blasphemous version of Gore Vidal's classic Pop novel. In Sarne's telling, Myron, played by film writer and Gong Show staple Rex Reed, goes under the knife and comes out as Myra, played by Raquel Welch. It would take a special commission composed of cooler heads than my own to decide whether, for the patient, that amounts to a step forward, a step back, or a lateral move. Incidentally, the surgeon is played by the venerable John Carradine, who must have felt comfortable in the role, because two years later, he played the medical sex researcher in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, who was engaged in such nefarious pursuits as "taking the brain from the head of a lesbian and putting it in the body of a man who works for the telephone company."

RABID (1977)

No list of movie medical mishaps would be complete without a bow to the work of David Cronenberg. In his debut feature, the 1975 Shivers (A.K.A. They Came from Within), a doctor working with parasitic transplants that he hopes will liberate an overly straitlaced society succeeds so well that he turns a Montreal apartment complex into a mindless rolling orgy that sets out, at the end of the movie, to infect the larger world. In his 1979 The Brood, a maverick psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) coaches his prize pupil into channeling her unresolved anger until she begins literally giving birth to murderous creatures who are pure products of her rage. Rabid is sort of the worst of both worlds, plus maybe a few more worlds you never would have thought of without David's kind help. Porn actress Marilyn Chambers plays an accident victim who winds up in the hands of a plastic surgeon looking to try out an experimental skin grafting technique. It somehow causes her to grow a phallus-like organ beneath her armpit, which she uses to impale people and feed, vampire-like, on their blood. Her victims in turn become frothing, murderous lunatics, who run amok like the infected people in Shivers, except not as friendly. If there's a common theme running through Cronenberg's early work, it may be the message, "Even if you don't like his movies, you can at least take heart that, thank God, he didn't become a doctor!"

SPECIAL BONUS BEST-- BEST PROGRAM OF MEDICAL REFORM:

THE HOSPITAL (1971)

This black comedy, written by Paddy Chayefsky, is set in a beleaguered Manhattan teaching hospital that's going to the dogs. The Chief of Medicine, Dr. Herbert Beck (George C. Scott), has to deal not only with the "radiant" bungling of his staff (exemplified by a pompous, strutting quack named Welbeck) but with a mysterious string of deaths among his staff members, whose bodies keep turning up in hospital beds and sprawled across chairs in the emergency waiting room. It's all right, though: it turns out that the staff members are being picked off by a saintly madman (Bernard Hughes) who, having suffered as a patient in the hospital, has been sort-of-murdering the doctors by putting them in situations where they'd be all right if they were subjected to timely care and basic competence, which he recognizes as supremely unlikely. Learning the truth, Dr. Beck points this reformer in the direction of Dr. Welbeck and wishes him godspeed.

Click here for Part 1.