Jan Burrell | Through the Shattered Lens

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.

The 1977 film, Ruby, opens with a scene set in 1935. The Great Depression is still raging and the only people making money are industrialists like Joseph P. Kennedy and gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. In the Florida swamps, gangster Nicky Rocco (Sal Vecchio) is betrayed by both his gang and his pregnant girlfriend, Ruby (Piper Laurie). As Nicky’s bullet-ridden body sinks into the bayou, Ruby goes into labor and gives birth to Leslie.

16 years later, Ruby owns her own drive-in. The theater employs several members of the old gang and Ruby is herself married to one of Nicky’s former partners, the crippled and blinded Jake Miller (Fred Kohler, Jr.). Ruby’s lover is another former member of the gang, Vince Kemper (Stuart Whitman). Leslie, meanwhile, is now 16 years old and has never spoken a word in her life. Ruby laments that she never made it as a lounge singer but she does a good job running the theater and it seems to be a popular place to see movies. She’s even able to show Attack of the 50 Feet Woman, even though that film came out in 1958 and Ruby is set in 1951. That’s the power of having mob-connections, I guess.

When strange things start to happen at the theater, it could just be a case of Ruby having bad luck and the former gangsters that she’s hired not being particularly good at their jobs. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Nicky swore to get revenge on everyone with his dying breath. One employee is found hanging in a projection booth. Another is found hanging from a tree. Another is left in a cold drink machine and the lady who puts in a quarter to get a cup of tea instead gets a cup of blood. While Ruby might be in denial about the fact that her business is obviously cursed, Vince realizes that something has to be done so he brings a psychic/exorcist named Paul Keller (Roger Davis, who also provides some narration at the start of the film).

Of course, it’s not just ghosts that Ruby and the gang have to worry about. Leslie is acting strange as well! At one point, Leslie even speaks but it’s not with her voice. It’s with Nicky’s voice! Leslie has been possessed and soon, Nicky himself is appearing on the drive-in’s screens and repeating, “I love you, I love you.”

Ruby is a real mess of a film, one that attempts to rip-off The Exorcist while tossing a bit of Carrie in as well. Director Curtis Harrington plays up the campier aspects of the story and Piper Laurie gives a scenery-chewing performance that suggests that she realized it was pointless to try to take anything about Ruby seriously. Stuart Whitman plays Vince as being the most well-meaning but also the most clueless man in Florida while poor Roger Davis is stuck with the most earnest role in the film and, as such, gets the unenviable task of trying to explain what’s going on in a rational manner. There’s nothing rational about Ruby, which goes from being a film about gangsters to being a film about ghosts to being a film about possession without even stopping to catch its breath. It’s a deeply silly film but one gets the feeling that it was made to be silly. Ruby works as long as you just accept the weirdness of what you’re watching while you’re watching it and you don’t give it too much thought afterwards.