The idea of a race car driver turned ESP detective with his spunky female side kick is an odd one to cast Leonard Nimoy in. He plays the part as if he were a William Shatner type playboy. Though it's fun to see Nimoy play a girl chasing devil-may-care part, it doesn't play into his strengths. He also is forced to wear a horrible array of bad clothing-- witness the pink turtle neck sweater that would be something he'd steal out of his grandmother's closet, or the array of safari type leisure suit jackets he's forced to wear. But this aside, if you can look past these poor and distracting choices what you have is still rather odd sometimes in a good way but often in doesn't-really-work way.
The opening pre-credit sequence is well done--despite poor rear screen car footage--these first precognition flashes to images as he's driving are well done, setting up a "what the hell is going on here?" feeling. Then you have a really awful title sequence with some awkward freeze frames of actors smirking in what seems like it should be tense situations and some terrible Brit sounding jazz pop music behind it all.
So at that point you have pretty much seen the best and worst the movie has to offer, but now the story begins. The lead character doesn't seem all that deeply baffled by his ability to see into what turns out to be the future, more or less. He almost seems to say "Hey man, I guess I have visions now, groovy, so let's have some lunch and hang out."
He heads off to U.K. with spunky gal sidekick and then proceeds to mostly just hang out at a sort of B and B where he meets various but not too compelling or in-jeopardy characters. Nothing much seems to be going on until it seems there is a character who has returned from he dead. This seems like the moment tension will start to build but it seems to have no impact on most of what's going on for a very long time afterwords. It's like the film has no interest in the one really interesting thing that's happened since the pre credit sequence.
There are other occasional flashes of him recognizing elements he saw at the start of the show, and or seeing new things. There is one very nice false lead he gets that's quite clever. It's very late in the show before he and his sidekick sit down to talk about possible suspects, which is a good thing as up to that point it doesn't seem like they are paying much attention to whatever little is going on.
But there is no growing sense of danger to the show and the suspense and style of ESP bits take up very little screen time. The Director does a good job with those ESP bits but the rest of the show is flatly directed and though the music score is bad there is also almost no music to give real context for the seeming random conversations between people that take up much of the running time. And for something intended for commercial television there doesn't seem to any interest in holding the viewer through the occasional fade to blacks where the commercials would have been.
Then there is a decent wrap up to it all, followed by kind of cheesy set up for it to go into series form which it never did.
I watched the recent DVD release and watched the longer of the two versions on there--it certainly felt too long, but I didn't watch the ten minute shorter version mostly because it is a stretched and distorted version of the 4:3 aspect ratio version I had just watched. I hope this is just a manufacturing mistake and they didn't think you'd be fooled into thinking this was truly a widescreen version of the film.
So there you have it, I guess I was satisfied to see it as I had long heard of it, but if you aren't a die hard Nimoy fan you could well be baffled and bored into wondering why you bothered. Nimoy and the girl do have some chemistry but without a consistently involving story it doesn't matter much, especially in a one off movie as it exists now.
