The Medusa Touch

Chaos and destruction are all around as crews continue the clean up from an airliner crash city center last night. Tonight, we find ourselves in writer John Morlar's (Richard Burton) apartment, as he intently watches TV coverage of a NASA space mission going awry. As his intense eyes stare at the impending doom for the astronauts, his chair is suddenly spun around and his head is repeatedly and brutally beaten by an attacker from behind camera. Just prior to the beating, Morlar's eyes look right into the attacker's and he calmly says "a response at last". An investigation into the beating death has the detectives shocked to find that Morlar has survived barely, and they rush him to the hospital. He has his head totally bandaged (except for eyes and nose) and is plugged into multiple machines and monitors, hoses, tubes, etc. Obviously he is in the ICU, and here he stays for the rest of the movie. We follow the detectives' investigation into the beating at Morlar's apartment; how he lives, gets along with neighbors, his traits; his artwork, furnishings, his writings, etc. His writings are cryptic, obscure, dark and ominous, dealing with many past catastrophies and disasters. The detectives find that Morlar had been seeing a psychologist. They find the psychologist, Dr. Zonfeld (Lee Remmick) and try to discover what's up with Morlar. They find that he felt like he had some kind of power to create catastrophe. Zonfeld doesn't give much to the detectives other than to state he was delusional, so they go back to the apartment and hospital to dig up some more info. Morlar's hand trembles and he's given a pencil...he writes a warning about the old cathedral wall, which had been cracking lately, causing much worry about a collapse. Detectives think there is more to learn from Zonfeld. From this next visit to Zonfeld, the story is told through flashbacks from Zonfeld's and Morlar's points of view while she was interviewing, analyzing Morlar. She reveals that he felt he had caused the deaths of many people that had wronged him in the past. His nanny, his parents, his school professor, his estranged wife and her boyfriend. He felt that he learned that he could cause almost any type of catastrophe. She still claimed to the detectives that she felt it was all in his head, a delusion. She seems disinterested in his case and makes the police feel that there was no worry from her about the validity of his claims. Morlar's almost flatline brain activity ocasiionally gets a blip or two when his hand wants to warn of the collapse of the wall, so the detectives really watch him close. A bit more pressure on Zonfeld, and she accompanies the police to the hospital. Seing Morlar causes her to confess that Morlar's claims had begun to seem possible, and he had actually gotten her to come to his apartment. She witnessed him stare at the airliner as it took off, and watched it fly straight into the city center as he stared it to it's death. The detective believes now that Zonfeld has more to do with this, and goes back to her place the next day, to find her dead, from a self-induced injection. She left a taped confession that she had tried to kill him, to prevent the space disaster, but had failed. She has now convinced the detective that Morlar could cause these disasters. As police watch morlar in the hospital, the cathedral wall begins to crumble just as the Queen is arriving for a visit. Police rush all around trying to prevent death and destruction, but only our detective knows what is the cause. He rushes back to the hospital to remove the life support from Morlar. As Morlar's little jiggles and wiggles on the brain monitor fade, the falling cathedral catastrophe wanes and we sigh relief that it has all ended. The police look at Morlar's flatlined body, and are about to leave when the EEG monitor begins to make creepy squeaky sounds, and the flatline becomes very active. Then we look at Morlar's bandaged face, as his intense eyes open wide.