Horrorfest 2017: The Terminal Man

Here's the second of Kubrick's favorites for the month, THE TERMINAL MAN, directed by Mike Hodges and based on a novel by Michael Crichton. Off the top of my head, I'll say this is the 2nd best movie made from a Crichton property, after JURASSIC PARK, and so good it's kind of a bummer it seems to have been forgotten by the passage of time.

This sci-fi horror story came out in 1974. Knowing it was a favorite of Kubrick's makes me wonder if it was a direct influence on THE SHINING. Both films have sharp, exact visuals, both are adapted from mainstream beach reads and both intersperse "day of the week" title cards to break up the action.

They're also both about a man's descent into insanity. In this case it's George Segal as a guy who undergoes a controversial new form of brain surgery to hopefully stave off seizures he's been suffering from. The seizures lead to blackouts, and Segal becomes violent during the blackouts, so the operating doctor (Richard Dysart) hopes the surgery (involving stimulating the brain with electrical impulses via implants) will help him return to a normal life. Oh yeah, did I mention Segal, a computer programmer, also suffers from paranoid delusions that machines are going to take over the world?

As you may have guessed, the surgery goes wrong and Segal eventually spirals into a psychosis where he's trapped in a blackout state most of the time, hunting down the doctors who operated on him, including a psychologist who wasn't convinced this was the best idea (Joan Hackett), and endangering innocent bystanders along the way.

Like JURASSIC PARK, THE TERMINAL MAN gets a lot of mileage out of the first half of the story by convincing the audience that this is REAL SCIENCE. Of course it's all BS, but we get to see basically the entire operation scene, and it's totally convincing as well as suspenseful. The way it's mocked up for the movie, you can visually understand the concepts of what the doctors are trying to do. That way, you're totally sold by the time we get to the last half of the movie that's all action.

Segal is great in his role and it was interesting to see him as something other than a nice old guy, which is basically all I've seen him play on TV in the last couple decades. Of course that's me forgetting that he was also in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINA WOOLF, but that movie's so scary I think I might have blocked it out on purpose.