Although most of your universe's critics actually appreciate this film, there are some who misunderstand this classic. For example, reviewer Superwonderscope writes, "This is probably one of the only movie in all movie history where a blank screen can be a better spectacle." Reviewer imdb-579 writes, "It has no entertainment value, at all." And reviewer garrett-I writes, "This film is only recommended for those individuals who enjoy watching the worst films ever made."
Read on for the truth about the classic The Psychotronic Man...
A helicopter flies over Chicago. The film cuts to a suburban barbershop, presumably somewhere in the greater Chicago area, as a barber named Rocky Fosco cuts a young man’s hair. Rocky, who resembles a bewigged and mustachioed Willem Dafoe, closes the shop, takes the cash from the cash register, and drinks what must be alcohol from an unlabeled bottle of hair product. He drives outside the city, listening to a country music station. His travels allow for some beautiful helicopter shots of the open road—shots in which the door of the helicopter is visible only occasionally.
When the sun goes down, Rocky simply pulls to the side of the road, reclines the driver’s seat, and goes to sleep. He is awakened later when his head falls onto the steering wheel, and he finds his car is in the middle of a foggy windstorm. He opens the door to get out but nearly falls into a bottomless abyss; his car appears to be hovering in midair (or possibly suspended on an unseen grease rack).
He then wakes up later to find himself parked on a Chicago street. Of course, he simply pulls out of his parking spot and drives home. He wakes up yet again in bed, confused about his apparent dream. His wife greets him after she sends their two kids to school. She takes one look at him, says, “Again?” and then drops an Alka Seltzer into a glass of water.
“But I don’t have a hangover, damn it,” he tells her.
“Well, then, go see a doctor, Honey.”
Rocky does so. The doctor shows him some irregularities in his head X-rays, so Rocky tells the doctor about the dream he had last night (his retelling of the dream takes approximately the same amount of time as the nightmare itself). The doctor has good advice: “Rocky, you gotta lay off the booze.”
At work in his barber shop, Rocky has a terrifying telekinetic experience trying to cut a little boy’s hair. The chair rises and falls by itself and a pair of scissors jumps away from Rocky’s hands. Of course, as anyone would, Rocky runs out of his shop, gets in his car, and drives again to the location of his nightmare. As soon as he parks, he is approached by an elderly man walking a dog. The man, unprompted, says in a thick New England accent, “Moved out here after the wife died for some peace and quiet. You know something? There been some mighty weird things been happening around here.” Rocky goes to his house and asks him about these “weird things.” The man says he heard a rumbling sound last night, then heard screaming coming from the roof of the house, or maybe the treetops.
Rocky has another experience in which the man’s coffee percolator smashes against the wall. Then, more seriously, the elderly man picks up his shotgun. The filmmakers cut outside and we hear a gunshot. Seconds later, we see the police investigating the man’s murder — he has been thrown halfway through the wall of his own house.
The police, led by Lieutenant O’Brien, investigate the murder, finding tire prints that simply disappear from the dirt. Surprisingly, they do not consider the possibility that the car levitated telekinetically into the sky.
At night, Rocky’s doctor sits in his office reading the newspaper, where he finds the story of the murder and puts two and two together, as Rocky’s dream occurred at the same place. Not one to hesitate, the doctor calls the police immediately. Although it is in the middle of the night, the police station is full, so Rocky’s call is put through to Lt. O’Brien. The audience is allowed to watch not only the thrilling phone call but also the doctor’s brooding about the incredible situation while he waits for the police to arrive at his office. Unfortunately for the doctor, however, somebody else arrives.
It’s Rocky.
Rocky wants to talk to the doctor about his experiences, so the doctor goes into the next room and loads one of the largest syringes ever manufactured with a sedative.
Before he injects Rocky, Rocky opens the door and sees what is going on. In a frightening scene, we watch a vase of flowers explode before the doctor is thrown telekinetically through the window, falling half a story and landing as a bloody mess in the street.
Lt. O’Brien and his partner Sgt. Jackson investigate the scene of the doctor’s murder. O’Brien finds medical records about Rocky and reads them, but he doesn’t share his information with anybody else. He runs out of the office in pursuit of Rocky.
Meanwhile, Rocky goes to a bar that is full of dancers and partiers. He meets Kathy, the beautician who runs the store next to Rocky’s barber shop — with whom he is having an affair. They make love in a dark room for approximately ten minutes. Shockingly, he tells her he can’t be with her permanently because he has two children with his wife.
Elsewhere, at the Chicago Institute of Psychology, students are examining and dissecting corpses (activities that psychology students famously perform all the time). Lt. O’Brien visits their professor, an expert on parapsychology, but the professor will not admit that telekinesis exists. “Only theories exist in the study of parapsychology,” the professor tells him. He adds, “The Russians have established a premise in this field. It’s called psychotronic energy.”
Understandably, Lt. O’Brien asks, “Could you be more explicit, sir?”
“You must understand the subconscious mind is an untapped reservoir of acquired information. In fact, some parapsychologists believe that in rare cases this submerged power will surface.”
“But do you believe in this…psychotronic energy? Yes or no?”
The professor simply walks away.
Later, Sgt. Jackson and another plainclothesman, Maloney, sit in their car eating and smoking and surveilling Rocky’s house. Inside, Rocky fights with his wife and packs a bag, saying, “I gotta get away from her. And fast!”
Suddenly, his wife screams and Rocky gets into his car, allowing the director to organize a thrilling car chase. Jackson checks on Rocky’s wife, who is flustered but okay, then joins the chase in his own car. After several minutes of exciting footage of police cars chasing Rocky’s car (some of which footage is shot from a helicopter), Rocky pulls into a blind alley — but he escapes by levitating his own car so it moves past O’Brien’s police car! (The audience sees only the car gliding downward the last few feet, which is an impressive effect in itself). Then the chase resumes, but it ends quickly as Rocky’s car slams into a dumpster and bursts into flames.
Rocky has escaped, however, and he runs through the streets of Chicago, past the Chicago Theater, as policemen chase him on foot. Rocky loses them in a rat-infested alley, but Detective Maloney chases him and corners him against a wall. Rocky then uses his psychotronic powers to make Maloney throw away his pistol, which Rocky grabs before running out of the alley to continue the foot chase.
In the end, Rocky is surrounded in the furnace room of an apartment building. He uses his powers to telekinetically push all the policemen away from him, which kills Maloney when he falls against a piece of electrical equipment.
Eventually, Rocky hides at the top of the building. When O’Brien sees him, he orders, perhaps cruelly, a SWAT team with snipers.
In a shocking twist, O’Brien is confronted by a federal agent, who tells him they have been watching Rocky, and he is to be captured, not killed. “For your information, Lieutenant, this guy’s a rare breed. Probably the only one of his kind in his hemisphere. Our intelligence reports confirmed that he possesses psychotronic powers that can well benefit our national security.”
“At what price?” O’Brien asks.
The agent says dismissively, “Enough. I’ve got my orders. I just gave you yours.”
Undaunted, O’Brien orders a sniper to kill Rocky, which he does. Rocky falls off the building, leading to a subtle smile from O’Brien.
In a final twist, however, Sgt. Jackson tells Lt. O’Brien, “Damn, Lieutenant, he’s not down there.”
In the final shot, a surviving Rocky walks into a bleak forest as the camera zooms in on him.
The End
On top of its exciting helicopter shots and thrilling police chases, The Psychotronic Man makes Chicago look like a highly appealing city, from its suburban barber shops to its buzzing theater district to its gigantic hypodermic needles to its dedicated police force. Rarely has Chicago been portrayed so thoroughly in a motion picture. Director Jack M. Sell and co-writers Peter Spelson (who plays Rocky in this film as well as Uncle Pete in another classic, 1981's Bloodbeat) and Phil Lanier must truly love the City of the Big Shoulders to portray it so effervescently.
As with most of the films covered here, The Psychotronic Man sets up a sequel but no sequel was ever made. Jack M. Sell directed other movies -- the Forrest Tucker vehicle Outtakes (1987) and the Troy Donahue vehicle Deadly Spygames (1989) -- but he never revisited the character of Rocky Fosco, the Psychotronic Man. In the end, he must be gratified that his first directorial effort added the term for a new film genre for cinephiles to endlessly discuss and pick apart...which is really all one could ask for, when you think about it.