Wonderful character development!

A Major Disappointment

A Disappointing Continuation

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

FEAR is a virtual reprise of the '70s Faye Dunaway movie THE EYES OF LAURA MARS, about a psychic who has a connection to various serial killers. This concept has been repackaged and reworked to fit in with then-booming psycho-thriller genre, so this time around we get a young psychic woman who engages in a battle of wits with an equally psychic serial killer.Said starlet is played by none other than Ally Sheedy (WAR GAMES), pretty effective here as the old-before-her-years woman gifted with a talent she never asked for. I particularly liked the way the film avoids the usual clichéd scenes of the psychic character railing against their power and struggling to come to terms with it. This time around, she knows it's her gift and she gets on with it.Sadly, the film is less effective than it should be, thanks to a play-it-safe script and direction from Rockne S. O'Bannon (a guy who cut his teeth as script editor on the similarly lacklustre THE NEW TWILIGHT ZONE). I mean, it's not bad, but it's not as good as LAURA MARS and given the concept it should be a heck of a lot better. We get good performances from Sheedy and the likes of Stan Shaw in support, although Pruitt Taylor Vince is underutilised and hardly menacing. The murky blue "psychic" vision shots also date this one to the year in which it was made.

this psychological suspense thriller was way better than i expected.it reminded me a lot of the 1976 movie,the Eyes of Laura Mars,starring Fay Dunnaway.not only is the subject matter very similar,but the style is also the same.instead of just being a normal by the numbers movie about serial killers,this one has the psychic ingredient added to the mix.it's not the first movie to do this.for example the aforementioned The Eyes of Laura Mars,but it does do it well.the suspense is nearly off the charts.the music by Henry Mancini has a lot to do with that.it's also not that predictable in terms of what is happening and how it ends.it isn't gory either.it's all about the suspense,or Fear,if you will.a nice refreshing change from the usual slice 'n dice,hack and slash gore-fests.not that there's anything wrong with that.by the way this is not the movie starring mark Walberg.it's with Alley Sheedy,who's pretty credible in a very serious role.for,me,Fear is a solid 8/10

**SPOILERS** Interesting but uneven thriller that has to do with full-time writer and author and part-time psychic detective young Cayce Bridges, Ally Sheedy,tapping in on a serial killer on the looses in L.A that the local newspaper dubbed "The Shadowman", Pruitt Taylor Vince.At First getting strange visions at a TV talk show where she's pushing her latest book ,about her psychic powers,Cayce cuts the interview short and goes to the police to prevent the killer's latest atrocity. Cayce is snickered at by Det. Webber, Stan Shaw, but when she reveals things about him and his family that only he knows.Det.Webber and his partner Det. Wu, Keone Young, go to the house, that Cayce directs them to, not only finding out that she was right but that they got there too late to save the Shadowmans latest victim."Fear" goes one a step beyond the usual psychic detective movie when it turns out that the Shadowman is himself psychic and knows that Cayce is watching him. Besides killing his victims, which he likes to instill enormous fear into before he murders them, the Shadowman taunts Cayce to try and catch him knowing that she's able to watch him.This weird game of cat and mouse that the Shadowman plays with both Cayce and the police gets very personal when he shows Det. Webber that he not only knows where he lives but that he'll murder his entire family if he and the LAPD dare to apprehend him. Cayce for her part gets crank calls late at night from the Shadowman who by scaring her gives him a high almost as good as the one he gets from his terrifying and murdering his victims.Cayce tries to keep the Shadowman from knowing that she's watching him and when she unknowingly slips up, watching him when he's doing his laundry, he becomes very enraged. Changing from an in-control killer to an out of control psycho almost getting himself caught by he police, that Cayce tipped off on his whereabouts. As Cayce tries to leave L.A for New York City the Shadowman, now strangely hooked on her, murders her booking agent Jessica Mareau, Laura Hutton,and makes her psychically watch the whole grizzly scene threatening to kill one person an hour if she leaves. Cayce has no choice but to stay in L.A and be held hostage, like everyone else in the city, by him. The ending of the movie is it's weakest part when the Shadowman reveals himself to Cayce in a fun-house hall of mirrors,obviously copied from the 1947 Orson Wells movie " Lady from Shanghi", with the killer ending up acting more like a scared slobbering wimp then the brutal cunning and almost omnipresent psycho that he was up until then.

As soon as the movie begins, we know how it's going to end. And yet "Fear" stays captivating the whole time. What makes it so interesting is the exploration of human emotion: the use of fear as a tool of communication. Yes, this is a movie about psychics and psychopaths, but it's also a movie about exploring the depth of human understanding.