While driving through a tunnel, wealthy newlywed Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill, Scanners) experiences a terrifying vision of a woman being walled up, “Cask of Amontillado”-style, by a man with a limp. It’s hardly Virginia’s first brush with clairvoyance, having “seen” her own mother’s cliffside plunge to suicide 18 years earlier. (Never does The Psychic top that prologue sequence in shocks.)
As a surprise for her husband (Gianni Garko, Devil Fish), Virginia plans to restore a mansion he hasn’t used since bedding babe after babe in his playboy bachelor days. To her horror, she recognizes a wall there as the one from her blackout dream; sure enough, inside is the skeleton of a female believed to have been in her 20s. When it’s revealed that the mystery woman was one of Mr. Ducci’s numerous conquests, Virginia works with her shrink and authorities to prove her spouse’s innocence and find the true killer, not to mention decipher the remainder of her clue-filled hallucination.
That’s the problem with The Psychic, a mostly mainstream effort from excess specialist Lucio Fulci (The Beyond): It spells out its own denouement with alarming simplicity. If viewers pay any reasonable degree of attention, they’ll have the ending solved by the second scene — not an exaggeration. I thought surely Fulci’s story would have more to it than that. It did not.
While she is quite the knockout, O’Neill’s abilities as an actress stand in indirect proportion to her looks. Fulci’s camera asks little of her but to stand still with eyes widened and mouth agape, so he can zoom in for a close-up. Over. And over. And over. Just because his film is about a psychic and titled after a psychic doesn’t mean it should settle for predictability. —Rod Lott