The Power (1968)

(On Cable TV, September 2019) It just takes a few moments in producer George Pal’s The Power, as the title pulses in unison with a heartbeat, to realize that we’re headed into weird science-fiction thriller territory. The strangeness soon intensifies as a government man walks into a respectable-looking laboratory in which human endurance tests push volunteers to their frontiers of pain … for space science! (This is unnerving, but never actually portrayed as evil. Nor is our sadistic scientist portrayed as anything but the story’s hero. And you won’t believe the set design. But let’s move on.)  But for sheer plotting contrivances, wait a few minutes as a conference begins and an overly dramatic scientist states that a questionnaire has revealed the existence of a super-powered human sitting around the table. Even a convincing demonstration of power doesn’t bring the audience closer to guessing who’s the superhuman. Of course, this wouldn’t be a horror/SF hybrid without superpowers being used for evil, and soon the nature of reality takes a turn (in a rather charming late-1960s way) as the bodies start piling up. I shouldn’t be too hard on the story, which is adapted from a Frank M. Robinson genre SF novel. But this little-known movie adaptation takes things in uncanny directions, with eerie moments sandwiched between inelegant exposition and classic suspense movie thrills. It doesn’t make a shred of sense (why would a super-smart person, even evil, let himself be detected, let alone go on increasingly baroque ways of killing off everyone around him?) but there are a few good moments along the way. Heck, we even get to attend a swinging sixties party in between the chills and thrills. And ho boy, what about that cimbalom score. A surprisingly normal-looking George Hamilton (by later super-suntanned standards) stars as a dashing scientist, with some assistance from bouffant-coiffed Susanne Pleshette at a scientist used as love interest and a dapper-thin Michael Rennie as a government agent. There are dozens of ways The Power could have been made differently—funnier, scarier, smarter, more believable. But none of those more restrained way would have had the dash of craziness that the result does. The last few minutes are an audibly delightful mixture of the entire film’s highlights mixed with proto-psychedelic imagery and a plot twist that explains a few things. Good movie? Not really. Worth a look? Almost certainly … but you must expect some weird stuff by late-1960s MGM standards—it’s no accident this one landed in 1968, just as Hollywood was beginning to stretch its muscles in terms of what it could be doing outside the constraints of traditional filmmaking.