THE EYES OF ANNIE JONES (1964)
Article 3954 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-12-2012
Directed by Reginald Le Borg
Featuring Richard Conte, Francesca Annis, Joyce Carey
Country: UK / USA
What it is: Psychic thriller

When a woman disappears (though she has actually been murdered and her body hidden), her family enlist the help of a teenage psychic to find her whereabouts.

This movie has been on my “ones that got away” list for some time, but it’s one I expected would eventually turn up and it finally has. And though I’m always glad when a rarity manifests itself, I don’t necessarily expect it to be a hidden gem, and this one certainly isn’t. It’s one of those stories that really doesn’t have enough to it to sustain a feature length movie, even one that runs under seventy-five minutes. So, after the opening murder, the movie gets bogged down in tedious and uninteresting details, mostly emphasizing the teenage psychic girl’s attraction to the missing woman’s womanizing brother. The ending was particularly disappointing in the way it handles the fantastic elements; if it doesn’t go so far as to debunk them, it nonetheless relegates them to the realm of the inconsequential. In the end, I found the movie dull and ordinary.