Director: Joy N. Houck Jr.
Writers: Joy N. Houck Jr. and Robert A. Weaver
From: Pure Terror (only 3 remain!)
Watch: archive.org
The romantic partners of a man with a disturbed past end up murdered. Is he having a relapse or is something else at work?
We open on Wesley having sex with his fiancée. When they finish, Wesley has what looks like a migraine attack and his vision is clouded by a blue swirl. When his fiancée asks if he’s okay, he snaps at her and leaves. She goes to church to make confession and the person posing as the priest stabs her through the eye with a knitting needle, killing her.
Then not much happens. Wesley spends the next year drinking, gets mugged by some guys at a bar, and is saved by a nurse. They start dating but, once again, he gets the blue swirl, snaps at her, and then finds her dead on the beach with an axe in her chest. Wesley is accused of the murder, but his handler/mother’s employee bails him out. When they return home, a female reporter is waiting for Wesley and invites him to a bar that night.
At the bar, Wesley is recognized from news coverage of the murders and gets into a fight. His psychologist is called in to get him out of jail which is when we learn that, thirteen years prior, Wesley was institutionalized for shooting his brother. We’re more than halfway through the film at this point. The doctor takes Wesley home, Wesley’s mom refers to conversations with her husband, and the doctor acts confused.
Wesley has a dream where he’s hooking up with the reporter, but she turns into his mother and he strangles her. Wesley seems to leave, someone kills the doctor, and Wesley arrives at the reporter’s house. They start to sort of hook up (?). It’s unclear because it seems like it is a romantic situation, and then like she’s accommodating him to protect herself, and then her sticking her neck out to protect him when they hear the police have issued an APB after finding another woman’s body.
She goes to the house to get the doctor who can provide Wesley an alibi, the cops catch Wesley at her place, but he convinces them to go to his house. The reporter has been captured by Wesley’s mother, the real killer, and is being held in a room with the corpses of Wesley’s brother and father. The mother explains she’s been taking revenge on Wesley for murdering her other son and driving her husband to suicide; since Wesley took everything from her, she won’t allow him to have friends. Cops rush in, shoot her, and she dies just before Wesley walks in and starts screaming. THE END.
That we don’t learn about Wesley’s past until more than halfway through the movie pretty much sums up what’s wrong with it: nothing is happening and nothing is telling us what to be worried about. The movie would be much better if we had a sense of any of the characters, but, despite all the time spent with them, none of them do or say anything that defines who they are.
Plus the mother being the killer the whole time and channeling her dead husband was kind of obvious. The movie gave off big Psycho vibes from the start so the twist wasn’t a twist at all. Normally, when you manage to recognize that there’s a twist you can start spotting all the clues throughout the movie. Here you have the mother, after the fiancée’s funeral, step into another room to talk with the father. Two characters having a conversation off screen? It’s one person talking to themselves and this is a Psycho rip-off.
However, that happens really early in the movie. We don’t get another nod to the mother imagining conversations with her dead husband until the doctor shows up and looks confused when she says she’s been discussing Wesley with her husband. The doctor is about to say something, then decides to wait. Those are the only two clues. Nothing else happens to suggest the twist so nothing else in the movie is pointing toward the ending. With nothing pointing toward the ending, there's no sense of motion or matter in the movie.
So it’s not a recommend because it’s pretty dull. No energy, no wit, no mystery, it just plods along to its inevitable and obvious conclusion. The only thing in the movie’s favor is that it’s in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here.
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