In the 1979 made-for-TV movie, Mind over Murder, Deborah Raffin stars as Suzy.

Suzy is a model and an actress.  She has a nice apartment, which she shares with her football-loving boyfriend, Ben (Bruce Davison).  She has a best friend (Penelope Willis), who is constantly looking to get laid.  Her latest job requires her to dance with a man who is dressed up like a giant hamburger.  It would seem that, by the standards of 1979, Suzy has the perfect life.

However, her life is turned upside down when she suddenly starts having visions.  All of the action around her will either switch to slow motion or stop altogether while Suzy has a vision of a scary-looking bald man (Andrew Prine) stalking her.  Her most disturbing vision involves Suzy hearing the sound of a pilot begging for help while his airplane crashes.  Ben tells her that she’s probably just working too hard but, the next morning, Suzy looks at a newspaper and immediately sees a headline about a plane crash.

With Ben dismissing her concerns, Suzy takes it upon herself to meet with the two detectives (David Ackroyd and Robert Englund — yes, Robert Englund!) investigating the plane crash.  They are surprisingly sympathetic to Suzy’s story of hearing the plane crash before it happened.  They arrange for her to meet a psychic researcher, who explains that Suzy must have some sort of mental connection to whoever was responsible for the crash.  While Ben continues to be skeptical and jealous of all the time that she’s spending with one of the detectives, Suzy keeping having disturbing visions of the bald man….

Considering its origins as a made-for-TV movie, Mind Over Murder is a surprisingly frightening film.  This is a film that proves that slow motion can make just about anything creepy and Deborah Raffin does a good job of showing us just how much Suzy dreads those moments when everything starts to slow down and she realizes that she’s about to get hit with another vision.  That said, what truly makes this film frightening is the performance of Andrew Prine, who plays the bald man as being every woman’s nightmare.  He’s a misogynist, the type who is convinced that every woman should be in love with him and that those who aren’t should be punished.  Whether he’s appearing in Suzy’s visions or stepping into her reality, Andrew Prine is never less than terrifying.

Along with featuring a scary performance from Prine, this film also features a genuinely likable one from Robert Englund.  Englund is playing a nice guy here.  In fact, before he made horror history in A Nightmare in Elm Street, Englund almost always played nice guys.  It’s interesting to watch him here, with his friendly manner and his polite style, and to imagine the roles Englund would have ended up playing if he hadn’t gotten typecast as a horribly scarred serial killer.

The first hour of Mind over Murder is brilliant.  The final 30 minutes, unfortunately, find the film turning into a far more conventional thriller, as Suzy’s visions are replaced by the Bald Man actually coming after her.  That said, this is still an effective horror thriller and one that deserves to be rediscovered this Halloween season.