The popularity of disaster and horror films in the 1970s is often explained by the socio-economic trends which caused great anxiety among the audience, especially the Baby Boomers who were experiencing a serious economic crisis for the first time in their lives. Those trends were even more prevalent in pre-Thatcher Britain, a country widely believed to be in a state of terminal decline. Unsurprisingly, they were reflected in the cinema, and one example can be found in The Medusa Touch, a 1978 film directed by Jack Gold, one of the more unusual combinations of the horror and disaster genres.
The plot begins when the writer John Morlar (played by Richard Burton) has his skull smashed by an unknown assailant. While he miraculously survives the incident and fights for his life in hospital, the investigation is taken up by Inspector Brunel (played by Lino Ventura), a French detective who came to Britain as part of an exchange programme. He talks to many people who knew Morlar in the past, including his psychiatrist Dr Zonfeld (played by Lee Remick). Through flashbacks he learns of Morlar’s past, including a childhood marked by the bizarre and unexplained deaths of his parents and other people around him. It turns out that Morlar, who became an utterly misanthropic individual with a passionate hatred for the rest of humanity, believed that he possessed telekinetic abilities that allowed him to cause death and destruction. Zonfeld was at first sceptical of those claims, but as time went on and strange, increasingly spectacular disasters began to happen around her, she apparently changed her mind. At the end, Brunel begins to believe those claims, while Morlar, despite being near death, apparently concentrates his energy to cause a disaster at a public gathering of the British elite.
Critics were unkind to The Medusa Touch, which can best be explained by the fact that its basic premise had already been used in high-budget Hollywood films like Carrie and The Omen, which, in comparison, made this film look cheap, derivative and exploitative. Although the budget is relatively low by top Hollywood standards, director Gold tries to compensate for it with energetic direction, especially in the final scene when the protagonists have to race against time in order to prevent a catastrophe. The main problem of this film lies in the casting. Burton, otherwise a capable actor, simply tries too hard in his portrayal of a telekinetic monster, and he is not helped by a script that puts anti-establishment rants in his mouth, trying to explain his murderous rage as political views being brought to their genocidal conclusion. Lino Ventura, a great actor of French cinema, plays a character who replaced Inspector Cherry, the protagonist of the original novel by Peter Van Greenaway, and his presence, mandated by French producers taking part in the shooting, is not very convincingly explained. Despite that and a number of repetitive scenes, The Medusa Touch is sometimes a very unpleasant, sometimes quite effective film that looks better now than it did at its premiere, probably due to some of the fictional scenes having a disturbing resemblance to later real-life events like 9/11 and the Chernobyl disaster.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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