A French detective in London reconstructs the life of a man lying in hospital with severe injuries with the help of journals and a psychiatrist. He realises that the man had powerful telekinetic abilities.
Richard Burton Lino Ventura Lee Remick Harry Andrews Alan Badel Marie-Christine Barrault Jeremy Brett Michael Hordern Gordon Jackson Michael Byrne Derek Jacobi Malcolm Tierney Philip Stone Robert Lang Avril Elgar James Hazeldine John Normington Robert Flemyng Norman Bird Jennifer Jayne Frances Tomelty George Innes
Dotek Meduzy, La grande menace, 메두사, 恐怖の魔力/メドゥーサ・タッチ
Painfully predictable, completely devoid of surprises and a waste of potential to make The Medusa Touch a tragic tale of loneliness and emptiness.
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I am not a Richard Burton fan. He makes compelling choices, but the projects Burton is drawn to usually don’t appeal to my sensibilities. Perhaps a passing resentment to rainy afternoons of my childhood in which Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was the only thing on television. I discovered The Medusa Touch a few years ago while on a Ventura kick, and am in perpetual surprise that it isn’t better known and regarded.
When an author (Burton) is brutally beaten in his home and left clinging to life in a coma, it falls on a French detective (Lino Ventura) to discover the assailant. A murder mystery that plays out in flashbacks, with the majority of the narrative coming from a…
There were few actors who could touch Richard Burton as an actor. He had an ability to make even the most clunky of scripts sound like Shakespeare. He truly was one of the greatest actors the medium of cinema has ever seen. Anyone lucky enough to catch him in a live play in a theater has my envy and respect.
Burton, for all his illustrious stage work liked the money he made from movies. It furnished his lavish lifestyle and romantic life with Elizabeth Taylor and he'd have been the first to admit to taking big paychecks to star in some right old shit. "The Medusa Touch" however is one of Burton's less well known films from the late seventies,…
A very British take on the burgeoning ultra-modern horror themes of the 70's - imagine if Scanners or Carrie had been made by the BBC as a Panorama special - it makes great use of its cast even if it can't escape it's somewhat televisual feel.
Richard Burton is an author who has been violently assaulted. The police investigation into his attack as he lies near comatose in a hospital bed leads to his psychiatrist who begins to share the life of her patient via flashback, beginning to show that Burton was a man convinced of his own power to bring death and destruction to those he wished ill upon merely by thinking it........
The cast are uniformly good -…
Dieser Film hat mir als Kind eine Höllen-Angst eingejagt und ich bin gerade ganz schön überrascht, dass der immer noch ziemlich gut funktioniert.
Richard Burton is John Morlar, a man who insists he is responsible for a number of worldwide disasters. When he is attacked in his flat, the crime is investigated by Detective Brunel (Lino Ventura) who follows the trial back to Dr Zonfeld, the psychiatrist Morlar had been visiting for sometime in search of a cure. In Brunel's attempts to discover the killer, he also has to decipher if this claims of this man were true or just the ramblings of a madman.
This is Burton in full-on brooding mode, given the space and time to fill the screen with his eloquent speech and dominant presence. The story works in flashback mode after his character is bludgeoned to into a coma…
Oder auch „der Schrecken der Medusa“......
Es gibt Filme, die einem, trotz wiederholter Sichtung, immer wieder in die Couch pressen und einem fasziniert zurücklassen, mit welcher Lässigkeit diverse Genres gemixt und Atmosphäre und Spannung erzeugt werden, .
Beginnend als simpler Kriminalfall werden im Laufe der auf verschiedenen Zeitebenen spielenden Geschichte dem Zuseher zunehmend die Füße unter dem Boden weggezogen und man bekommt wohl einen der effektivsten Genre-Crossover der Filmgeschichte präsentiert:
Kriminalfall/Whudunit - Mystery/Horror - und Katastrophenfilm.
Die Präsenz von Richard Burton, obwohl hier schauspielerisch unterfordert, ist intensiv, der restliche Cast (Lino Ventura, Lee Remick) souveran unterstützend , der Score unterstreicht perfekt die Atmosphäre , die Action bzw Katastrophenszenario ist wohldosiert, und die Frage nach dem „wer?“ oder „kann er es…
What starts out as a murder mystery with Richard Burton's character literally having his brains bashed out by an unknown assailant, has turned into a disaster movie by the close, and a pretty top notch one at that.
John Morlar is a former barrister turned novelist who can at the very least foresee death and disaster and, he believes, bring it about. While early on in his life the deaths of a nurse, a schoolmaster and his parents, all of whom have displeased him in one way or another, come about in unusual circumstances, all of them can, and have been, explained away as accidents. However the film leaves plenty of room for ambiguity. Maybe they are accidents, maybe he…
It's hard to be terrified when you're rooting for the villain. That's not usually a problem for me (because I like rooting for villains), but here it strips the only potential release from boredom away from this film. Instead of having any tension whatsoever, we're left to wade through far too many minutes of procedural doldrums until the film turns not into a horror piece, a thriller, or whatever, but a disaster movie. While the blood splatters of rich people and cops are an enjoyable way to end things, the fact that the [redacted] is diverted from the scene of destruction truly just ruins everything. At least let that scion of slave-traders die the death she deserves, for fuck's sakes.
Easy to follow story (despite the recurring flashbacks) that gives you what you want, what you came for: sleights made against Richard Burton's telekinetic writer who in turn kills the bad messengers. The writer gets bonked over the head many times with a small statue; his brains are dashed but he remains alive. Whodunnit? A French Exchange cop is on the case in London. Lee Remick plays the writer's psychologist who might be hiding information. The production looks very made-for-TV but at least everything comes off skillfully if slow. Didn't bother me, the back-and-forth doings of our detective except that it seems like he's always a step behind. Of course he is---his case is nutty, and he won't be able…
“I‘m the man with the power to create catastrophe”.
And he isn’t kidding! An unusually rigid, dark and hazy telekinetic crossed disaster driven supernatural-thriller, predictably told and methodically directed, but the spectacle starts out like a cerebral murder-mystery before the bleak, schlocky mayhem bursts from the seams. Once a weary-eyed Richard Burton starts staring into your soul… only means upcoming doom is near. About an hour away… give or take.
The story follows a French detective Brunel (Lino Ventura who‘s great here) on temporary assignment for Scotland yard, as he investigates the attempted murder of a writer, John Morlar, who now lays comatose in a hospital bed. However there’s something strange about this case, and this man. He learns from…