6/2/09: Baffled! (1973)

TV-MOVIE MONTH
Several of the filmmakers of yesterday's offering worked on various incarnations of Star Trek; today's choice stars Mr. Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy. Indeed, Nimoy's participation was my sole reason for being interested in Baffled! Regrettably, the movie is fairly weak, cheaply made, horrendously scored and full of bad acting, especially by Nimoy.

He stars as Tom Kovack, a race-car driver who starts having strange psychic visions that take him to a hotel in England, where some curious things are going on. He is aided by psychic-phenomena enthusiast Susan Hampshire, whose attractiveness is one of the very few things that kept me from falling asleep. Together they try to put the pieces of the mystery together, and of course by the end of the movie they have done just that. The formula reminded me of two much later TV series; it's sort of a cross between Medium (a person's visions are connected to a crime) and The X-Files (male and female team up to solve an otherworldly mystery). Both of those series were infinitely better than this dull movie of the week. The opening credits sequence and the very last scene make it painfully obvious that this was a pilot for a show. Why it never happened will definitely not leave you Baffled! Rating: 2/5.