No hair-raising tales with Psi
By CLAIRE BICKLEY (Toronto Sun)
October 4, 1996

An unseen force closes on the hand, compelling the changing of the channel.

Paranormal phenomenon?

Nah.

Just a reasonable reaction to the series Psi Factor: Chronicles Of The Paranormal, premiering tomorrow night at 10 on Global.

This eye-rollingly stupid X-Files Meets Unsolved Mysteries draws its plots from "the actual case files" of a California-based believers group named the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research, a team apparently on speed-dial to every unusual occurrence around the globe. The title only sounds like a haircare product. Psi is a letter in the Greek alphabet, symbolizing the unknown.

Mixing reality TV re-enactment techniques with drama - there are two stories in each weekly hour - an incident is presented and actors playing OSIR scientists investigate.

Team leader is the wooden Professor Connor Doyle (Paul Miller), a Secret Service type often seen dictating into his ear-piece.

"Case log update," Doyle says in episode one, Dream House, in which an unfinished house attacks the owners and construction workers.

"Accoustical, atmospheric and nuclear flux technologies have been introduced to the environment. All elimination procedures have proved thus far unsuccessful considering bridge procedure with OSIR A.I. specialist."

Say what?

"Operatives specializing in alternative information using metaphysical techniques," says Doyle.

Help. A ton of gibberish has fallen on me and I can't get up.

The cast seem to have been directed to portray the OSIR scientists as robotic brow-furrowers who talk like textbooks. Not that they don't brighten at any suggestion that events are paranormally-based. In Dream House, no sooner has a psychic theorized that apparitions are future versions of the homeowners sending them warnings from a parallel dimension, than these scientists are nodding like dashboard dogs. Hey, forget all those readings we've taken with those goofy gadgets that look like the prop department hung everything it could find from a strap. Parallel dimension. Of course.

Psi Factor is attached to its techno-hooey accoutrements to the point of unintentional hilarity, as in Dream House when the team gathers in their mobile headquarters to audio- and video-monitor a meeting between the homeowner and - oooh, the heart races - his realtor.

"He's changed his mind," Doyle says urgently, as the men dicker over price.

"Come on, come on," urges a team member.

Real edge of the seat stuff.

For all its gizmos, Psi Factor is most in love with old-fashioned hypnotic regression, a technique featured in all four of the episodes sent for screening.

Here's one mystery solved: It is possible to overact an introduction. Host Dan Aykroyd, called upon to introduce and wrap-up each case, delivers his lines in the clipped diction of his Joe Friday Dragnet performance.

And what lines they are.

"Blayne learned the somewhat elusive but ultimately obvious truth," Aykroyd says in insipid homily number one.

"That sometimes a dream home is not built with wood, brick or stone but rather on the foundation of love, the contentment and happiness of one's family."

Deadpan and dead serious, Psi Factor is absolutely ridiculous.