Rating: 3.5

Psychic Killer directed by Ray Danton

We’ve all heard the expression “if looks could kill,” but how about thoughts? What if it were possible to kill somebody, no matter the distance, using the power of the mind to manipulate objects? Well, that is precisely the setup of Ray Danton’s 1975 horror outing Psychic Killer, an undeniably shlocky yet undeniably fun exercise in out-of-body homicide. In the film, we meet a 33-year-old mental patient named Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton, father of Timothy, 42 here in his final film), who repeatedly declares his innocence of the charge of murdering his dying mother’s doctor (his mother had had no health insurance,

The Maniac directed by Michael Carreras

Up until recently, I had been aware of only two films with the title Maniac: the 1934 camp classic directed by Dwain Esper and the repugnant 1980 picture with Joe Spinell as a deranged mannequin lover. The existence of the British The Maniac, a 1963 product from the great Hammer Studios, thus came as a nice surprise for me.

Part of the Hammer “Icons of Suspense” six-film box set, the picture shares a DVD with the studio’s 1958 film The Snorkel,

The Haunting of Julia directed by Richard Loncraine

You’ve got to feel a little sorry for the characters that Los Angeles-born actress Mia Farrow portrayed in her three big horror outings of the late 1960s to mid-‘70s. Her Rosemary Woodhouse, in the 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby – surely one of the classiest fright fests of that great decade – was not only set up by her husband and later knocked up by Old Scratch himself, but was later the unwitting deliverer of the son of Satan. In 1971’s See No Evil,