Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci gained cult following for his occasionally stylish and fever-dream horror features (plus a western here and there). While there is some bloodletting and mutilation The Psychic, also known as Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes, is upscale by Fulci standards, a paranormal whodunit.
Despite the lack of flesh-eating zombies, the title will draw genre-fan attention in this new full-featured Blu-ray on the strength of the Fulci brand (he's a Quentin Tarantino favorite).
Jennifer O’Neill plays Virginia, wife to Italian aristocrat Francesco (Gianni Garko). Upon her mother's suicide in 1959, Virginia had her first psychic vision. Now, in the 1970s, the adult Virginia suffers clairvoyant impressions of an older woman who is gruesomely bricked up in the wall of a familiar room. It vaguely matches the decor in one of the deserted old houses owned by Francesco's family. Gaining entry, Virginia cannot resist attacking a wall with a pickaxe, exposing a skeleton behind the masonry.
Francesco is surprisingly nonplussed about the macabre murder scene, which turns out to be the remains of a 25-year-old beauty missing since 1972. Police seem both bemused and interested in Virginia's "evidence" of recalled psychic imagery: a broken mirror, a magazine cover, a lurking man, plus insistence that it was a 60-year-old lady being killed.
Eventually Francesco is arrested on suspicion. Virginia tries to free her husband, amidst so much scenes of high-born sophisticates standing around smoking that one fears these folks might perish of lung cancer well before uncovering the murderer.
Fulci is said to termed the script "mechanical," and horror/suspense buffs will recognize an essential redo of Nicolas Roeg's supremely eerie 1973 psychic psychothriller Don't Look Now (also with Italian settings and an art-world subplot), right down to an ambiguous open ending that will allow cynical viewers to imagine the very worst injustice. Derivative though it is, Fulci brings the feature off handsomely, in the mode of a competent journeyman director like Stanley Donen or Guy Hamilton, and O'Neill is a lovely object d'art herself.
The Shameless Blu-ray reissue of The Psychic (as the picture is widely known) is nothing to be ashamed of technically, with 2K restoration picture quality and disc-extra reminiscences by Lucio Fulci's actress-daughter Antonella, plus interviews with co-scriptwriter Dardano Sacchetti and one of the sound composers, Fabio Frizzi. A strong optional purchase with bonus Halloween appeal.