Directed by Mike Hodges
As the result of a head injury, brilliant computer scientist Harry Benson begins to experience violent seizures. In an attempt to control the seizures, Benson undergoes a new surgical procedure in which a microcomputer is inserted into his brain. The procedure is not entirely successful.
George Segal Joan Hackett Richard Dysart Donald Moffat Michael C. Gwynne William Hansen Jill Clayburgh Norman Burton James B. Sikking Matt Clark Jim Antonio Steve Kanaly Al Checco Gene Borkan Burke Byrnes Fred Sadoff Robert Ito Jason Wingreen Jack Colvin Jordan Rhodes Ian Wolfe Dee Carroll Rutanya Alda Lee de Broux George Holmes Michael Jeffers Joe Pine Bob Harks Victor Argo Show All…
O Homem Terminal, El hombre terminal, Aivoryöstö, Homicides incontrôlés, O dolofonos me ta dyo prosopa, Az átprogramozott ember, L'uomo terminale, Czlowiek-Terminal, Der Killer im Kopf, Человек, несущий смерть, 终端人, Homicides Incontrôlés, คลื่นอำมหิต, 終端人
USAPG 
Japan 
Finland 
France Finland France Japan USA 
I have a hopelessly soft spot for these slow, sterile, and talky 1970s scifi films in the vein of Soylent Green or The Andromeda Strain, but as with many of those films there's an out-and-out shock thriller hiding in here and waiting for the right moment to burst out. One sequence begins as an homage to Psycho's shower scene and ends like a proto-Shining, with George Segal's computer boosted madman smashing a hole in a door to reach Joan Hackett's sympathetic doctor, and another features possibly the most visually striking waterbed murder in cinema history.
Casting Donald Moffat and Richard Dysart in two key roles makes me wonder if this might plausibly work as an unintentional prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing.
"The Interminable Man". Both Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick vouched on the record for the greatness of this movie, which should handily infer its ultra slow-motion approach to pacing, pathological fastidiousness, and aversion to dynamic storytelling. This is not a movie about thrills or the fear of medical advances or even plot. Even though it came from paperback page-turner whiz Michael Crichton, it's like an even more hardcore anti-entertainment procedural mood piece further beyond the homework of watching "The Andromeda Strain", completely foreign from any of his popcorn science rides like "Westworld", "Jurassic Park", "Congo", "Looker", "Twister"...
Its prime directive seems to be somewhere between "art installation" and a "let's dare an audience to sit through a realistically simulated medical…
2nd Mike Hodges (after Pulp)
1/5- Posters I Like
2/10- Decades (50s, 70s)
I’m strangely in love with this cold, clinical little sci-fi horror. I don’t know who decided to make the first act, involving Harry’s painstaking surgical process, so incredibly detailed, but it’s absolute genius. What it does is build, piece by piece, the dehumanising system that abstracts his personhood in the name of scientific progress. That it will cure a man of horrific seizures seems entirely secondary to the antiseptic dealings of Donald Moffat, Richard Dysart et al, who chuckle at their ability to induce sensory stimuli in the brain of a very dangerous man. What’s even more troubling is that these…
A disappointing choice to wrap up the ‘70s sci-fi series on Criterion Channel. I had hoped the combination of an assured hand like Mike Hodges and George Segal in a rare sinister role would be livelier than this under-realized Frankenstein conceit about a surgery that turns a man into a malfunctioning machine. A few effective sequences here and there, like a tense and extremely long surgery scene performed in astronaut-like gear, but pretty half-baked overall.
For a large part, Michael Crichton's novels are really kinda shit. Disclosure is sexist, Rising Sun is xenophobic, The Lost World is a hole in my memory, and The Andromeda Strain only taught me that, in a pinch, Sterno strained through a paper towel means the party doesn't have to stop after the liquor stores close.
But as a guy who developed filmed entertainment, the sonofabitch hit more than he missed, particularly when it came to medical stories. Crichton was, after all, an MD, so the minute there's medical science in a Crichton story, things generally get better. Which explains why Twister was the fork in the road to Jan de Bont's eventual career selling cars, but that's not the…
The most interesting film I didn’t like in a really long time…
Mike Hodges may not have seemed the first choice for adapting one of Michael Crichton’s chilly sci-fi cautionary tales…but then again, neither did Robert Wise with The Andromeda Strain a few years earlier. And while both share a forensic approach to the science on show, Hodges disposes almost entirely with any notion of humanity in amongst its hubristic expose, instead replacing it with the theme of the growing isolation of modern life, the replacement of the joys of personal contact with an austere sense of ‘achievement’ above all else, especially in the face of incoming technology.
George Segal suffers from a form of epilepsy that sees his seizures…
The Terminal Man aka The Trouble with Harry
More like The Interminable Man, eh?
"I fell asleep. Have I missed anything?"
The above is actual dialogue from the film, but also something you might find yourself saying while watching The Terminal Man.
Since being injured in a car accident, a computer genius has been experiencing seizures that make him violent. He decides to undergo an experimental surgery to end his violent tendencies. Surgeons implant a computer chip in his head, but the mechanism malfunctions, turning him into a killing machine. I don't know what to say. Intriguing concept to be found in here with some striking imagery but unfortunately it doesn't really come together. It starts with incredibly long but tense surgical procedures and there's this coldness coming from the hospital setting and minimal sound. But most of the time I find it dreadfully slow and kinda boring. The titular character's supposed to be sympathetic but it's hard when the film never explores the character. Even when he's on his murderous rage with ugly wig on, that doesn't feel as exciting as I expected it to be.
This adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel of the same name doesn't seem to get much love here on LB, and while it's no masterpiece, I found its theme of a mind-computer interface gone haywire quite prescient for 1974, especially when you consider that Elon Musk has been in the news lately for frying out monkey brains with his Neuralink experiments.
I also enjoyed the dry, clinical. and downright Kubrickian procedural aspects of the film which mostly take place in a gleamingly white and imposingly inhospitable hospital filled with nurses wearing almost nun-like headgear, and doctors with plexiglass space helmets, giving the surgical proceedings the feeling that you're in a church, not of religion, but of science, where everyone worships at…
Not enough Psycho George. This drags A LOT so you will have to make your own fun. I got through it by repeatedly bellowing the title in this cadence.
There are certainly some inspired visual moments in this, like the waterbed, or the grave, but the whole film just feels like a nice shirt that needed ironing. Everything is here to make a killer movie, there are just too many wrinkles for it to be truly great.
Terminal Boredom. Mike Hodges directs this severely dated techno-thriller (high on the tech and low on the thrills), adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, with a clinical detachment that undercuts its impressive cast and funereal pacing that negates its promising premise. George Segal plays a man beset by murderous blackouts who undergoes an experimental computer-chip implant meant to control them. But when the chip malfunctions, his seizures increase, sending him on a serial rampage. The trouble is that a plot that was once firmly within the realm of science-fiction now plays as speculative fiction, so Hodges' focus on surgical procedure for a full hour, which may once have been deemed cutting-edge, is now a dry, dull momentum killer from which…
