The Sender

Roger Christian, 1982

The Sender starts with a great premise (a telepathic man who unconsciously projects his nightmares into other people's minds) and completely squandered it. The whole affair is extremely lifeless and clinical, and they take great pains to demonstrate that, while the telepathy is real, the hallucinations are not, which leaves you with kind of a "so what?" effect. Maybe it's more respectable that way, in the "we're not making a horror movie, we're making a psychological thriller" way that dominated the mid to late 90's. I guess, in that sense, The Sender was ahead of its time.

The bleeding mirror sequence was pretty great, though. If they'd tried more fun stuff like that and maybe designed the story so that there was something at stake for anyone ever, they might have had something.

2.5/10