Who is Adam Hart?
That is the mystery that Professors Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) and Margery Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette) have to solve. Someone is using psychic powers to kill their co-workers in a research laboratory. The police think that Tanner is guilty but Tanner knows that one of his colleagues is actually a super human named Adam Hart. Hart is planning on using his super powers to control the world and, because Tanner is the only person who has proof of his existence, Hart is methodically framing Tanner for every murder that he commits.
The Power is underrated by entertaining movie, a mix of mystery and science fiction with a pop art twist. It was also one of the first attempts to portray telekinesis on film. Similar films, like Scanners, may be better known but all of them are directly descended from The Power. George Hamilton may seem like an unlikely research scientist but he and Suzanne Pleshette are a good team and The Power makes good use of Pleshette’s way with a one liner. Also keep an eye out for familiar faces like Arthur O’Connell, Nehemiah Persoff, Michael Rennie, Gary Merrill, Yvonne DeCarlo, Vaughn Taylor, Aldo Ray, and even Forrest J. Ackerman as a hotel clerk.
When she was a young girl, Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin) was a member of Unity Fields, a group of hippies led by the insane Franklin Harris (Richard Lynch). When Harris ordered the cult to join him in a fiery suicide pact, Cynthia was the only one to refuse. While all of the cult members when up in flames, Cynthia ended up spending 13 years in a coma. When she wakes up, she has no memory of the incident and finds herself as a patient in a psych ward. She has a support group to provide therapy. She has two doctors (Bruce Abbott and Harris Yulin) watching her every move. And she still has nightmares and visions of the long-dead Harris, appearing around the hospital, sometimes burned and sometimes not. When the members of her therapy group start to die, Cynthia is convinced that Harris has returned to claim her.
Charlton Heston is Matthew Cormbeck, a driven archaeologist. (Could an archaeologist played by Charlton Heston by anything other than driven?) In 1961, he discovers the long-lost tomb of an Egyptian queen named Kara. Ignoring both the birth of his daughter and the warning inscribed over the doorway, Matthew enters the tomb and discovers the mummified Kara. At the same time, his stillborn daughter, Margaret, comes back to life.
Alan (Corbin Bernsen) may be a wealthy dentist in Malibu but he still has problems. He has got an IRS agent (Earl Boen) breathing down his neck. His assistant, Jessica (Molly Hagan), has no respect for him. His demanding patients don’t take care of their teeth. His wife (Linda Hoffman) is fucking the pool guy (Michael Stadvec). When Alan feels up a beauty queen while she’s passed out from the nitrous oxide, her manager (Mark “yes, the Hulk” Ruffalo) punches him and then goes to the police. Under pressure from all sides, Alan loses his mind and a crazy dentist with a drill means a lot of missing teeth.
Andrea (Virginia Madsen) is a small town teenager who has just received a scholarship to attend the Ettinger Academy, a formelyr all-male boarding school. Andrea is excited because some of the most powerful and wealthy people in the country have graduated from Ettinger. Her boyfriend (James Wilder) is less excited because he worries that Ettinger is going to change Andrea. He might be right because all of the students at Ettinger are emotionless robots who read the Wall Street Journal and listen to classic music. Even Andrea’s new friends, who all seem normal, soon change into mindless preppies who wear sweaters over their shoulders.
Following the death of her husband, Susan Gordon (Karen Black) relocates to Los Angeles with her teenage daughter, Megan (Rainbow Harvest). An angry goth girl who always wears black and bears a superficial resemblance to Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, Megan struggles to fit in at her new school and quickly attracts the unwanted attention of the school’s main mean girl, Charlene Kane (Charlie Spradling). Fortunately, Megan has an old and haunted mirror in her room that can not only bring her rotting father back to life but which Megan can also use to kill all of her tormentors.
Jeff Mills (Tim Daly) is an attorney who might be unlucky in love but who still owns a copy of every movie that Frank Capra has ever directed. (There is even a scene where two of his friends are seen looking at his movie collection and saying, “He’s got every movie Capra ever made!”) Miranda (Kelly Preston) is the beautiful and mysterious woman who Jeff saves from an abusive boyfriend. Within minutes of meeting her, Jeff invites Miranda to say with him in his apartment. For Jeff, it is love at first sight but his friends (Rick Rossovich and Diana Bellamy) worry that Jeff is getting in over his head with a woman about whom he knows nothing. Weird things start to happen in Jeff’s apartment and a woman (Audra Lindley) shows up in his office, taunting him about how she dug up his mother’s bones and used them in a black magic ceremony. Eventually, Miranda confesses that she is on the run from a Satanic coven that was planning on sacrificing her but is she telling the whole truth?
Through the Shattered Lens 