The Psychotronic Man, from 1979, isn’t a standout 20th century b-movie, but it is a bizarre little piece of regional cinema. If the internet is to be believed, it also lent its title to Michael J. Weldon’s Psychotronic Video magazine, which, from 1980 to 2006, covered pretty much the same kind of material that is this site’s bread and butter. Psychotronic Video is long gone, but public appreciation of the kinds of films we mutants like is as strong as it has ever been, if the proliferation of streaming services offering up the stuff is any indication.
Directed by Jack M. Sell, from a screenplay by Sell, Phil Lanier, and Peter Spelson, The Psychotronic Man follows Spelson (who also produced) as Rocky Fosco, a Chicago barber who begins to manifest destructive psychic powers.
It all begins when Rocky is feeling crabby after a day of cutting hair, and decides he needs to take a drive to blow off some steam. Off to rural Illinois we go, as Rocky, and Sell, take viewers on a runtime padding sequence of drinking, driving, and helicopter shots. Rocky’s method of blowing off steam is to keep driving and pouring whiskey down his throat until he gets sleepy and has to pull over to the side of the road and pass out. Man, the ’70s were wild.
Rocky then has what he thinks is a nightmare, as he wakes and finds his car floating in the air and no way for him to safely exit. Soon he wakes up at a stop sign, hoping the floating car was a nightmare, and drives home, disturbed by what happened. The next day, Rocky starts moving stuff around with his mind involuntarily and freaks out, as one would. He decides to return to the scene of his supposed nightmare, and his telekinesis leads to a death, and police involvement.
The final act of the film is an extended cat and mouse sequence that takes up a good thirty minutes, featuring a car chase, a foot chase, gunshots, psychic warfare, a poorly-dubbed G-man, and denouement. Along the way we get an 81-minute long film that could have withstood ten minutes of cuts (there’s an hour and a half long cut out there, and I can’t begin to imagine what Sell filled that version with), some rote and clichéd character development, and cheap filmmaking that looks more like an educational or industrial film than a feature picture.
The look and feel of this flick is of a cinematic relic. The credits claim the film was shot in Panavision, but at times it looks like Super 8mm. Many shots are vignetted in 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and, as crisp as the print I saw was, the color was washed. The only time colors came close to popping was in night scenes. This movie has the strange look of being both cared for and neglected. Someone out there, unnamed in the credits or on IMDb, made the effort to clean up this flick, but didn’t do any color correction. That’s weird in this day and age, but it does much to preserve the film as an artifact of its time. Should one have seen The Psychotronic Man in a theater back in the day, it would probably have been a print that had been roaming the country for a few years, from grindhouse to drive-in and back again, and a whole lot of brown would be expected. Well, a whole lot of brown is what modern viewers get, too. It’s a look and feel that is appropriate, though, since just about everyone and everything in the movie was brown to start.
Sell may have directed, but this film feels more like it was Spelson’s passion project. He’s in most scenes in the movie, to almost a vain extent. He’s no better an actor than anyone else in this dog, yet experienced viewers can sometimes sniff out who was the main driving force behind a movie, and Spelson seems to have been the guy. For one thing, he can be added to the list of a movie’s stars that have a blissful lack of self-awareness of their talents and their quirky looks. Add to that a Chicago accent that would make Dennis Farina blush, and the movie has something of an endearing lead, even with the drunk driving and telekinetic violence.
Spelson isn’t enough to save the movie, though. Michael Weldon may have found inspiration from this movie, but, again, that was just for its title. The body of The Psychotronic Man is low-budget drivel, with that final act coming alive enough to rouse fading attention spans. The Psychotronic Man slips into the lower half of the Watchability Index, displacing The Devil Below at #345. This is a shitty movie that is more interesting than it is watchable, so beware.