I managed to banish it from my mind for the holiday, but over the years it kept coming back to me and bringing an overwhelming sense of dread. The bleakness of that ending, the total lack of hope, the feeling that there was no point in the hero even trying. It really lingered. The last few years have had their fair share of bleakness – dunno if you’ve seen the news at all – and the film has come back into my head a few times. I found myself wondering whether tracking it down and watching it as a grown-up might kind of exorcise it.
But I didn’t know what it was called, or who was in it, and had definitely not got the name of the mad scientist right. It was hard to know where to even begin finding it. Luckily, I have dorky friends, and even more luckily, they in turn have spectacularly dorky ones. Those few plot points, insanely, were enough for a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend to get me a title: Murderous Vision (1991).
Looking through the IMDb entry, it’s definitely the film, sporting the tagline “The Mind of a Killer, Through the Eyes of a Psychic.” It stars Bruce Boxleitner (best known for starring in Tron), Laura Johnson and Glenn Plummer, perhaps best known as the guy in Speed whose sports car is destroyed by Keanu Reeves. Dean Norris, now known as Hank from Breaking Bad, has a small role.
But it’s not the kind of movie that shows up on Netflix – it was never even issued on DVD. You can buy the VHS sleeve – no tape, just the sleeve – on eBay, and there’s one actual VHS tape available in Australia, but the hell with that. I’d also have to find a working VCR somewhere, and that seems like a lot of work.
However, the nice thing with this kind of stuff – largely-forgotten cheapo movies with basically no cultural footprint – is that the copyright owners aren’t likely to be particularly fussed about it. There’s not a lot of money to be made from bootlegging Murderous Vision 31 years after its television debut, even from hardcore Bruce Boxleitner fans.
All of which is to say, someone’s stuck it on YouTube.