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A dilated pupil is rhymed in the glassy bulge of a bedpost, with the wall between them providing a split-screen and an Oedipal rupture, seconds later an electric heater spoils mother's post-coital bath. The eponymous culprit (Robert Thompson) is next seen on a hospital bed, immobilized by a scrambled cortex yet malevolently staring and spitting at the world. "How's our creature from the Id this afternoon?" The experiment is not so much to cure life as to extend death, explains the chief physician (Robert Helpmann) to the new nurse (Susan Penhaligon), a young divorcée with protracted relationships of her own. Reluctantly playing mediator to the urges churning inside the comatose patient, she becomes the target of his telekinetic jealousy: Her flat is wrecked, her ex-husband (Rod Mullinar) has scorched hands, the playboy doctor (Bruce Barry) nearly drowns in his own pool. The dour matron (Julia Blake) gets a lethal thrill, though not before voicing her cheerful worldview ("No justice, no compassion... only fear"). The joke is that it's Johnny Got His Gun disposed along Hitchcockian models, mainly Psycho plus sprinklings of Rebecca and Spellbound. A screen at once controlled and eruptive for Richard Franklin, storyboard and seizure side by side. (A characteristic gag has the sanatorium's neon sign short-circuit in close-up until "ENTRANCE" reads as "TRANCE.") Respirator and heart monitor comprise the tight image of clinical whites unsettled by flashing color (cf. Boorman's Exorcist II), the caretaker's typewriter receives the message from the subconscious. Caliban and the case for euthanasia, the male gaze as a literally stunted form of possessiveness, as reflexive as a brained toad's hop. "Disease, like God, moves in mysterious ways." With Helen Hemingway, María Mercedes, Frank Wilson, and Walter Pym.
--- Fernando F. Croce |