THE EYES OF CHARLES SAND (1972)

In a nicely creepy opening, we see Charles Sand (Peter Haskell) walking through a dark room, empty but for candles and a coffin. As he approaches the coffin, the body inside sits up, glares at him with white eyes and points menacingly. Charles wakes up in a cold sweat from this nightmare to a ringing phone. It's his aunt Alexandria (Joan Bennett) calling him at 3 in the morning to tell him his uncle Edward has died—and she knows about his nightmare. It turns out that with the death of Edward, Charles has inherited the psychic gift of "the Sight," a rather ill-defined ability to have paranormal visions. He has no control over it and can't avoid the visions. At his uncle's funeral, he sees a mummified corpse standing outside the mausoleum of the Parkhurst family. He also sees a frantic woman in a fur coat trying to get his attention. She's not a supernatural figure, but Emily Parkhurst, and Charles gets drawn into her family drama. She is convinced that her brother-in-law Jeffrey has killed her brother Raymond, but Jeffrey and his wife, Katherine, tell Charles that Jeffrey is in Europe. They're concerned enough about Emily to be on the verge of committing her to an asylum. What follows is a series of events that make us wonder if Emily really has gone off the deep end (especially when Charles meets Raymond at the Parkhurst house) or if she's being gaslighted. But as Charles keeps having spooky visions, he's sure that something's wrong, and that he can help Emily somehow.

Another October, another month of reviews of horror and sci-fi films (if I can dig enough up for the whole month). This TV-movie, from the classic era of such things, was a pilot for a show that didn’t get picked up. As a stand-alone, Emily’s story is wrapped up, but Charles' story is left open. If it had gotten a spot on ABCs schedule, it likely would have shown Charles using his sight to help a different person each week, with maybe some slight development of his character over time. Haskell, who resembles a more traditionally handsome Malcolm McDowell, is fine as Charles, generally a stoic figure in the face of his paranormal experiences. Sharon Farrell as Emily overdoes the hysterics a bit, but Barbara Rush and Bradford Dillman are effective as Katherine and Jeffrey. Adam ("Batman") West has a relatively small guest star role, but his first line of dialogue is to refer to Charles as a "boy wonder," which made me chuckle. Many boomers who saw this in their youth were mildly traumatized by its spooky opening, but overall it's got more of a thriller vibe than flat-out horror. The DVD from Warner Archive looks nice. I had a bit of a crush on Peter Haskell, pictured above, when he was on Bracken's World in the late 60s, when I was still young enough to not quite know what was going on with that, so it was especially fun for me to see this. [DVD]