EYES OF LAURA MARS
I see...I see...crap.

  Did I ever mention that I hate "psychic-link" movies?

And here's their king - I don't know if this is really the wellspring of this crappy corner of the genre, but it's certainly the film most often cited as it, also cited as the most watchable.  With John Carpenter credited for the story and co-credited for the screenplay, my revulsion toward the prospect of sitting through this was tempered somewhat. Nuts to me - the movie still blows; Carpenter is by no means infallible, and when all he's got is a co-writing credit, well, last time I saw that on the screen it was attached to a marvy little gem called Silent Predators (rolls eyes).

Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is an oh-so-chic photographer in VERY 1978 New York (check out that disco soundtrack) who takes the kind of pictures that make people keep asking if photography is really art.  Y'know...chicks in lingerie and furs pulling each other's hair while cars are ablaze behind them, that sort of thing.  She likes to combine sex and violence in her pics, and soon we find out where she gets her inspiration from; she not only has a  psychic link with a serial killer who's knocking off a lot of her acquaintances, but she's been getting visions like this for some time.  (that these visions are never explained is a gimme, but it's nice to see she was doing something constructive with them before they started to involve people she knew) Enter a hunky cop (Tommy Lee Jones, my, how the years added a little gruffness to his voice), and the investigation's on.

Rene Auberjonois - yeah, Odo, and you'd never know it except for that unmistakable brow - plays Laura's...uh, agent?  I dunno.  All I know is that he's got huge hair and in one scene wears an outfit that looks like the kind of thing a blaxploitation-movie pimp would wear to a board meeting. (has he had a nosejob since?)  Brad Dourif plays her bodyguard, wild-eyed, hair in every direction, gee, d'ya think we're supposed to suspect him?  Raul Julia plays her ex-husband (the kind of guy who thinks that if a woman pushes him away when he tries to kiss her, nothing will ignite the flames of passion better than forcing it on her).

If this really is the source from which the psychic-link subgenre sprang, it's easy to see why all of the imitators are so bad.  The movie they're imitating sucked too.

There's all sorts of logic-defying nonsense here, like when one cop manages to shoot AROUND A CORNER with what must be one of those magic "curveball" bullets.  Or when, despite the fact that we learn later that when Mars gets her visions, she can't see anything else, she manages to successfully run down a loooong hallway, around a corner, and down the stairs.  Actually, she usually moves around just fine when she's getting her visions, so I guess this aspect of the film was only introduced to give us a "reckless driving scene" (where's the banjo accompaniment?).

Performances are all fine, but the disco music's awful, and there's even a "Love Theme From...", performed by Barbra Streisand, sure to send knitting pins plunging deep into the ear canals of viewers everywhere.  And the plot's as stupid and lazy as you'd expect from any of these damn psychic-link movies.  Hey - it doesn't matter if I'm prejudiced if they all suck anyway.

Directed by Irvin Kershner, just before George Lucas picked him to helm The Empire Strikes Back.  I don't know what George saw in this movie (or, say, S*P*Y*S) that made him think Kershner was a good choice, but God bless 'im for it, cuz everybody knows that Empire was the best of the bunch.

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