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, 恐怖の魔力/メドゥーサ・タッチ, 메두사
Thrillers and murder mysteries Horror, the undead and monster classics mystery, murder, detective, murderer or crime scary, horror, creepy, supernatural or frighten cops, murder, thriller, detective or crime horror, creepy, eerie, blood or gothic horror, scientist, monster, doctor or experiment Show All…
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…
Painfully predictable, completely devoid of surprises and a waste of potential to make The Medusa Touch a tragic tale of loneliness and emptiness.
Never heard of this film? You don’t miss much
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,…
Found this underrated gem while looking for more Lee Remick movies. She plays a psychiatrist helping a detective (Lino Ventura) reconstruct the life of an assault victim clinging to life in the coma ward in a London hospital. The victim, a middle-aged writer named John Morlar (Richard Burton), believed himself to have the unnatural talent to cause destruction and death simply by willing it so.
If you like movies where you find yourself occasionally nodding in agreement with dangerous misanthropes' societal critiques (if not their methods of redress), then you'll probably like this one. Burton is as surly and nasty as I hoped he'd be. He has several great scenes, but my favorite was the one where he catches his…
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…
If you mixed the trends in the 1970s toward disaster movies, upscale horror, paranoid thrillers and New Hollywood social commentary, you might get something quite like this. The Medusa Touch is never for a second convincing on its own merits and it’s never particularly thrilling or scary, but it is still strangely interesting as a bitter time-capsule of the nihilism of its troubled decade.
The movie is about a writer with telekinetic powers (Richard Burton in misery mode). Apparently he can only use them for destruction. Poor sod went Carrie on his boarding school, the first among many moments of doom in his life. His psychiatrist (Lee Remick) isn't much help. Burton just thinks the world into anarchy and chaos.…
I won't claim to predict the future, but I reckon that this 1978 film will never date, at least in my lifetime, because (low-tech medicine aside):-
- Multiple casualty disasters will always happen;
- Incidents will always seen more dramatic when inspected by foreign detectives who aren't familiar with local customs;
- Eisensteinian editing will always allow flashbacks within flashbacks when done as seamlessly as they are here;
- English boarding school masters will always seem suspicious (as JK Rowling has proved);
- 9/11-style plane crashes will live on in our memories forever;
- There's even a gay-coded character without it being a "thing";
- He might even be having it off with the hero without it being a thing!…
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…
