THE AMAZING WORLD OF PSYCHIC PHENOMENA (1976)
Article 1983 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-19-2006
Posting Date: 1-16-2007
Directed by Robert Guenette
Featuring Raymond Burr, Jeane Dixon, Jules Eisenbud

Raymond Burr takes us on a tour of the various forms of psychic phenomena, including telepathy, telekinesis, ghosts, life after death, reincarnation, and the ability to gain knowledge of events and people through the examination of physical objects they handled.

On matters such as these, I tend to be highly skeptical, but not entirely turned off to the concept that there may exist powers and forces such as those discussed here. I am, however, fully aware of how adept movies can be in fooling you, and any documentaries on subjects like this will be taken with huge grains of salt. Granted, I don’t think this movie was meant to convince the unbeliever; I suspect those that have far less skepticism will get a lot more out of this movie. Most of the reenactments are pretty cheesy and unconvincing, but it is worthwhile seeing footage of the actual psychics themselves. For me, the most interesting things about the movie were learning about some of these various psychic individuals, and if I ever wanted to pursue investigations into the subject matter, I’d find some people to start with here; in particular, I found Edgar Cayce (who is portrayed by an actor, but whose story sounds quite fascinating) and Peter Hurkos (who appears here as himself) seem interesting. The movie itself is pretty uneven; entertaining enough at times, rather dullish at others, and most of the subjects covered were things I’d run into before from other sources. To some extent, reviews of movies like this are useless; I think most people would know from the outset whether this movie would appeal to them just by looking at the title.