Anyone familiar with the more outrageous moments of Lucio Fulci’s output will no doubt be aware that once the maniacal sod entered the gorier era of his career, there wasn’t an eye he wouldn’t pop or an artery he wouldn’t tear in his quest to be the bloodiest son of a bitch on the block. However, those whose knowledge of the filmmaker begins and ends with the sight of a zombie fighting a shark in Zombie Flesh Eaters, might be rather taken aback at the news that he made some far more subduded horror films too.
In fact, before he started to become famous for wrangling shuffling, throat tearing zombies, Fulci was responsible for a couple of Giallo pictures which where basically Italian whodunits with more salacious sexual movies and stylised violence thrown in for good measure.
How does a man known for regularly throwing narrative logic to the wind fare when he’s forced to keep the reigns tight on a far more complex plot? No need to contact a psychic to find out…
Even from a very young age, Virgina has had latent, psychic abilities which reached their peak when she sensed her mother’s suicide in England all the way from Florence Italy. However, as the years passed, the need for her to display an uncanny sixth sense has all but evaporated and she lives a content life with her rich, businessman husband Francesco as she renovates properties to pass the time.
This all changes one fateful day when she’s rocked by a powerful psychic vision as she’s out driving in her car that buffets her with fragmented, disorienting imagery that seems like jigsaw pieces scattered within her brain box. What such things as a painting, a random magazine cover, a broken window and a yellow cigarette have to do with anything is initially unclear, but what is clear is that she’s witnessed the murder of an old woman whose body was walled up to avoid detection. As weird as that is, things get impressively weirder when Virginia recognises the house she’s renovating as the one from her vision and sure enough, after a bit of elbow grease, she discovers a skeleton hidden away in a bricked up section of the room.
Now utterly convinced that her vision was actually a smorgasbord of clues to solving this mystery woman’s murder, Virgina doubles down on figuring out who this woman was and what caused this horrible end. However, after the police begin their investigation, large discrepancies start to appear between what Virgina saw and the actual details of the crime. Firstly, the skeleton is discovered to have been about 25 years of age at the time of death and is definately not the bloodied old woman she originally saw and soon other confusing differences rear their conflicting head. But psychic abilities are a tricky sort, and soon the question isn’t whether she saw a murder or not, but whose murder did she actually see?
Anyone who has sat through the nonsensical plot of The House By The Cemetery, or the sheer, baffling confusion of Manhattan Baby would be rightfully worried about Fulci tackling the pinpoint intricacies of a Giallo film, but truth be told, The Psychic isn’t the director’s first Giallo rodeo. After the trippy likes of Don’t Torture A Duckling and Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (don’t worry; a more Giallo-friendly alternate title for The Psychic is Seven Notes In Black), Fulci is more than capable of holding his attention span long enough to make this wilfully complex film make a certain amount of sense.
The main gimmick is that we’re essentially watching a murder being solved in reverse, but it’s not necessarily the one we think and Fulci takes great enjoyment from slowly prising apart the individual facts from the crime that’s already occured and the crime that’s yet to be. If I’m being brutally honest, I would exactly call the movie a fast paced thriller, but the slow drip alignment of facts does prove to be suitably intriguing to keep you hooked, even if you guess the big twist around halfway through.
However, this does mean that those who have come seeking the director’s trademark use of excessive and outlandish violence will have to settle with a bizarre opening scene where Virginia’s mother commits suicide by flinging herself of a cliff in Dover only to have her face cheese-grated into oblivion by the out hanging rocks as she whizzes past. In true Fulci style, it’s not in the least bit convincing, but it’s certainly original and completely unexpected. Other than that, The Psychic is rather dry – disappointingly so if you’re the kind of ravenous gorehound who grew up on the auteur’s particular brand of mayhem – but credit has to be given that the film is as coherent as it is.
The cast go through the usual Giallo motions nicely with Jennifer O’Neill’s flummoxed heroine going from confused, to horrified, to determined and back again and all the while looking devastatingly stylish in the most bleeding edge fashions. Everyone else gathers together to fill out the rest of the cast, but if you’re hoping for a long list of suspects, The Psychic comes up weirdly short with only a couple of potentially guilty parties to pick from.
And thus we come to the movie’s major flaw – the fact that figuring out what exactly is going to happen isn’t particularly hard if you either A) pay attention; or B) read the Anerixan one sheet that basically gives away the entire twist in its fucking tag line. Still, even then (it’s Spoiler Warning time) it truly isn’t much of a strain to surmise that the murder Virginia has foreseen is her own and usually being a step ahead of a whodunit is a massive drawback. However, the sheer ruthlessness of the ending (we think Virginia is saved, but the abrupt appearance of the credits leaves everything callously up in the air) and the stylishness of the telling gives the movie the edge it needs to survive this niggle.
Twisty, turny and as stylish as you’d expect from a Giallo entry, The Psychic even lives on thanks to a snippet of Fabio Frizzi’s appropriately dramatic score showing up in Kill Bill Vol. 1. But while it’s more restrained nature separates it somewhat from Lucio Fulci’s more infamous, viscera strewn cult hits, it’s still an above average vision of what the director could accomplish if he just took things down a notch.
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