Visions...

I saw this film on TV in the mid-late 80's and thought it rocked. All I could remember was that some guy had scary visions of bombings and murders, and when he looked at someone he had had a vision of, the screen sort of shattered like a mirror. At the time I thought this most impressive, especially for an old TV movie. It has always stayed in my mind and I wish that it would be shown again on mainstream terrestrial TV, instead of the pap that we are currently being served up!!! But I would disagree that Hollywood should do a remake, because big budget remakes suck - I give you "Psycho", "The Italian Job", "Starsky & Hutch" etc. although if they did, let's see Vin Diesel in the Telly Savalas role. He's got the slaphead for it!

Back in the 1970s, the major networks made a ton of made for TV movies...and some of them hold up very well today. One of the better ones is "Visions..."...a really interesting and tense supernatural thriller.

Professor Lowell (Monte Marcum) is a brilliant man...a graduate of MIT even. But he also has another talent..precognition. These glimpses of the near future might seem like a great thing...but they are also a curse. One day he begins seeing images of a bomber planting these devices all over Denver. He knows one of them is going to go off soon and he goes to the police. However, the police lieutenant (Telly Savalas...a year before becoming Lieutenant Kojak) thinks Lowell is either a nut...or he's planting the bombs himself. But try as he might, the Lieutenant can't prove Lowell did anything wrong. In fact, his grilling and testing Lowell shows that he can, indeed, see the future...at least in bits and pieces. So what's next? See the film...and it's currently posted on YouTube.

The acting and especially the script are excellent. While I don't believe in these sorts of things, the film does a great job of making you forget these doubts and makes you feel for Lowell and his 'gift'. Well worth seeing and a heck of a good movie from start to finish.

No matter what you may think of Telly Savalas as a very unpolished police officer without any scruples, here he starts as bad as ever, thinking the man who foresaw a sabotage bombing must have been the brain and person to plant the bomb, and going through all sorts of psychiatric tests with him to get him nailed, until he predicts another bombing which he impossibly could have been involved with. That at last makes Telly Savalas change his mind and start taking the clairvoyant seriously and start using him for the prevention of further bombings, which is not successful, and his lovely girl protests violently against having him used for his powers to help the police, and there is an interesting development here of the policeman's mind. The case is clear and gets constantly clearer, as the hunt for the bomber goes on with the awareness of the importance of every second, which makes this thriller truly exciting. It is well done, well thought up, well directed and ends well in spite of all, but of course it would have been better if Monte Markham had been taken seriously from the beginning. It's the same old story, the more dead serious you are, the less you are taken seriously.

When I read Visions of Death's synopsis, I thought it sounded fascinating. I knew I was gonna like it, but I was blown away, quite honestly. I agree with the reviewer who said it's kick-a**. I know it sounds lame to say that of a movie from the early 70s, but trust me, the action is a thousand times better than what's coming out nowadays. Contemporary films just go overboard with violence. I really do believe less is more, and this movie exemplifies that, as do other thrillers and crime dramas from several decades ago. This has a solid story. Monte Markham was perfectly cast as Mark Lowell, a college professor living in Denver, and a clairvoyant who has spent all of his life not telling anyone about his psychic abilities, including his girlfriend (Barbara Anderson). His predictions had always been harmless, but one morning as he's going to his class, he starts having indiscernible visions of a man walking around what looks like a factory. He can't see his face, but he's able to see that he's planting a bomb. The visions are intrusive, so much to the point of disrupting his instruction, causing his students to notice that he's behaving oddly. Figuring the safety of the public is more important than trying to keep his clairvoyance a secret, he goes to the police department to tell them what he saw. A short time later a building actually explodes, and he's pegged as a suspect by Lt. Phil Keegan (Telly Savalas). When he finds out Mark is a clairvoyant, he automatically labels him as psychotic, even going so far as to have him take tests for 24 hours straight, so he can make mistakes and prove his theory that he's deranged. As the movie progresses, he helps the police with the investigation, leading Keegan to realize he had misjudged him. What a foreign concept to so many people - not making assumptions about a person based on our own preconceived notions. We can really use more films like this. The acting and pacing of the story were all top-notch. It was highly intriguing to be of the made-for-TV variety. Just like the movie that came out before, Thief, it rivals mainstream, box office hits.

I saw this movie on late-night television and to this day, I remember sitting bolt upright in bed during one scene - it was that compelling!

Monte Markham, Telly Savalas, and Barbara Anderson all do a wonderful job in this movie that, by thirty years, predated all the psychic shows we see today - 1-800-Missing, Dead Zone, Medium, not to mention the shows of the real-life psychics John Edward and James Van Pragh.

Markham plays a psychic trying to stop a mad bomber. When he touches someone, he can see what's going to happen to them, and, if they're going to die, they kind of digitalize in front of him - i.e., when the pixels break up on your digital transmission. Though he can't control the visions, with the help of Savalas, he learns to channel them better.

This is a very suspenseful, exciting film. Hopefully it's available somewhere.