OUCH!........THE INCREDIBLE STABBING MAN GETS OFF "THE COUCH"......

The Couch (1962)     Worth talking about if only to remember and praise Grant Williams.......a long lost forgotten actor to everyone except hardcore Sci-Fi movie buffs........

                 He looked like all the other studio-processed Slabs-'O-Beef' that rolled off the Hollywood assembly line in the 50's and 60's......impossibly blonde and impossibly good looking.

                  But with a huge difference. This was no dead-eyed monotone hunk like Troy Donahue and his ilk........believe it or not, this guy was an actor........the real deal.......a pretty boy, yes, but with the chops to equal any big male star of the day......

                   He was given a few shots to break through......this movie and the role of Scott Carey in what became a classic of 1950's science fiction cinema,  Jack Arnold's "The Incredible Shrinking Man"........

                   And you'd better believe he was up to the task. Tragically, neither film jump-started his career. As good as "Shrinking Man" was, science fiction and horror still remained parked in the low budget ghetto of studio offerings.

                   Williams went back to strictly jouneyman TV work in the Warner Brothers private-eye show factory...("Hawaiian Eye", etc, etc.....) He died of peritonitis at 53, with his last film credit in 1972......

                     But given the opportunity, Williams left us with a bravura piece of work in "The Couch", playing a murderous psychiatric patient who bedevils the police by sneaking up on random strangers with an ice pick.......only after announcing his coming murders in advance on the phone.

                    The movie itself, written by Robert ("Psycho") Bloch, is no great shakes........it's ultra low-budgeted, backlot, black-and-white Warner Brothers.........probably meant to support one of their top-of-the-line movies in double-feature theaters and drive-ins.

                       But Williams hurls himself into it, delivering a multi-layered, sympathetic yet scary performance as a young man whose mind's been fractured by horrific childhood abuse at the hands of his father. If he'd gotten to strut his stuff like this in a major film, it would have made him a star.

                     You will enjoy some amount of creepy suspense in the film's extended climax, when Williams stalks a hospital, masquerading as a surgeon to finish off one of this victims...........but the film doesn't do all that much to take advantage of its terrifying central idea......a killer with no real motive for his murders......he's literally the Grim Reaper come to life and you die at his hands...only by random chance, like a lightning strike.

                     But BQ remembers you, Grant. And for your frightening, skilled work as The Incredible Stabbing Man, 3 ice picks (***). Check out his actor who could have done far, far more than flee from giant cats and tarantulas.......he may have been the Shrinking Man, but his talent was giant-sized.