It seems I have been unintentionally compiling a list of attributes which should alert one to a person’s mental condition.  If there’s one thing I learned from 1975’s The Premonition, it is to never trust somebody prone to wearing a large cameo.

That is part of Ellen Barber’s ensemble for most of the time she’s on the screen.  She’s obsessed with finding her daughter (Danielle Brisebois), who has been adopted by Sharon Farrell and Edward Michael Bell.  Barber has roped in Richard Lynch and help with that search and eventual abduction.

I was surprised to recognize any of the actors in a film of obviously so low a budget, yet here is Lynch.  When we first see him, he’s on his job as a combination photographer and clown at a carnival.  Odd how this being partly set at a carnival says volumes about what kind of movie this will be.  And by that I mean cheap and trashy.

Befitting carnivals, and the mindset of many who might enjoy this kind of thing, there’s a theme of psychic powers in this film, through it felt unnecessary and tacked-on to me.

First, you have Brisebois and Farrell having visions involving Barber.  In an unexpected development in the second act, Barber will be killed by Lynch after successfully kidnapping her daughter.  With this, the spirit of Barber will try to direct Farrell to recover Brisebois though, admittedly, through rather obtuse means.  I will forever wonder why, if the supernatural beings can communicate with the living in movies like this, why they are always so frustratingly vague.

Then there’s the whole other subplot involving Bell, who flirts with the possibility of an affair with fellow scientist, a doctor played by Chitra Neogy.  I feel I must put “scientist” in scare quotes, as her field of study is parapsychology.  At a symposium to which she’s invited Bell, she warns him he needs to suspend his disbelief.  I think any endeavor where one is required to not think critically is unqualified to be labeled as a science.

Back before Barber’s death, when she was still tormenting Farrell, Bell seemed determined not to believe his wife’s claims somebody was after their adopted daughter. 

This guy is a real piece of work, thinking his wife is delusional when she receives a threatening phone call only for the person to hang up when he takes the receiver.  Is it that hard to believe there had been somebody on the line who then hung up?  And there’s his approach when he’s finally convinced something is wrong, and that is to take her to Neogy, to have some ESP experiments performed on her.  He doesn’t take her to a doctor, or call the police—he goes to a psychic.

I could never fully get a grasp on Barber’s character, and that may be partly because I didn’t believe one second of that performance, not even in her most deliriously mad moments.  And this is a character who is clearly insane.  One of the few lines which stood out for me is courtesy of her ex-husband, who when questioned by a detective (Jeff Corey, another actor I’m surprised to see here), says, “Missing?  She’s been missing since the day I met her.” 

This unstable behavior leads to such moments as when she goes to steal her daughter from Farrell’s house, only to instead steal the girl’s doll.  For whatever reason, she dons a bright red, satin dress for this mission.  That would be perfect camouflage for only one occasion, and that would be as cosplay for a Scarlett O’Hara convention.  Also, I was strangely bothered by the unfinished, unhemmed bottom of the garment.  I wasn’t sure if the character was supposed to have made the dress, and was too scatterbrained to finish it, or if a wardrobe person had been working on it and got fed up and quit.

Another sign of the low budget is lack of sets.  Normally, I would consider the use of real locations to be in a film’s favor, except these are some of the grossest places I have seen outside of a Harmony Korine picture. 

I usually cut films independent films of this type a great deal of slack, but I haven’t mentioned the one element of The Premonition which completely alienated me.  That would be Brisebois’s baby turtle getting stomped into goo during that first attempted abduction.  I do not care for animals dying in films, even if it faked or off-screen.  And this particular occurrence is real and inessential to the plot.  Inexplicably, a draft title for the picture was Turtle Heaven.  With all the many strikes against the picture, I feel free to stomp it into oblivion and I doubt it will go to a place called Movie Heaven.

Dir: Robert Allen Schnitzer

Starring Ellen Barber, Sharon Farrell, Richard Lynch

Watched as part of Arrow Video’s blu-ray collection American Horror Project Vol. 1