Michael Sarrazin plays the title character--a professor who is having strange, vivid and recurrent dream about another person's life. It's troubling him...especially since these all have the same story again and again...of some woman bashing her husband to death with an oar on a lake several decades ago! Peter seeks out help from various professionals but this gets him no where. Then, by chance, he sees a scene on television that is right out of his dreams---and it's in Massachusetts--a place in which he's never been!

The trail takes Peter to this town and there he's able to assemble the many details of the life that's stuck in his head...and now he's thoroughly convinced he's the reincarnation of this dead man! But here's where it gets really creepy. He meets the woman who committed this murder and begins dating her daughter...who is the daughter of the dead man. And, in a way, it's like Peter is having sex with his own daughter! Kinky, weird and definitely something right out of Freud!

So is this any good? Well, yes...but I have a SERIOUS caveat--there is a lot of nudity, a rape and some masturbation. It's NOT a film for kids or the prudish! And, much of this is very gratuitous. Oddly, despite showing so much nudity, in the final scene which SHOULD have been very bloody there is none! Still, a compelling story and it's well made and worth seeing.

I don't know whether or not "MST3K" ever showed "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud", but if they didn't, then they should have! This movie is so poorly acted, scripted and directed, that Mike, Servo and Crow would have no trouble throwing out remarks at it. The plot concerns Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin),who is having dreams about getting murdered, and then he starts believing that this happened to him in a past life.

How do you like that?! They took a potentially interesting story and made garbage out of it! Worst of all was what they did to Peter's girlfriend: they gave her lines like "Take it from me. When you're dead, you're dead." I would expect that sort of dialog in an Ed Wood movie. Considering that Michael Sarrazin's career fizzled after this movie, I can only conclude that this movie must have been the cause. And after he had earlier starred in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"! Someone needs to do a remake of "The Reincarnation of Peter Proud". Wes Craven could probably do it right.

In the 1960's and 1970's, a wave of interest in the occult and the supernatural swept popular culture in the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe. Many books appeared on subjects such as telepathy, mysticism, pantheism, possession and exorcism, and reincarnation. Even rock bands such as Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult rode the waves and even created their own sub-cultures, forging highways of exploration into unknown and mystical territories. Such wide-spread appeal on these taboo subjects would have been nearly unthinkable only a couple of decades earlier. Eventually films began to appear which mirrored the tastes of younger audiences interested in these subjects, such as Rosemary's Baby, the Exorcist, and the present film, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.

Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin in a very convincing performance),a young professor of about 30 years old living in California, isn't having dreams. He's having vivid image-visions of miscellaneous episodes instead of dreams while he sleeps. He sees vivid images of bridges, monuments, buildings, churches, and houses in color of places he's never been. And he sees people he's never met. Most people dream in surreal settings where houses are distorted and even the laws of nature can be thwarted, but most often occupied by people from their lives, such as family, friends and lovers with the occasional supporting character. However, Proud's dreams are for the most part more like visions of another life than surreal dreams. For example, he sees a child running down the stairs of a house to school while his mother plays the piano. Of all these vision-dreams, one in particular is the most disturbing. He witnesses the murder of a young man in a lake at the hands of a lover of some sort he has spurned. And when this vision-dream occurs while he's asleep, he speaks with the voice of the man being murdered, which freaks out his girlfriend.

Because he's not really dreaming but having visions, he's become irritable and seeks psychiatric help. The psychiatrists use him as a kind of lab rat in their experiments on sleeping and dreaming, they and determine he's not dreaming as normal. Although, Proud insists his visions are real. Then by chance he sees a documentary about small New England towns, and he notices a couple of buildings which appear strikingly similar to the ones in his dreams. He decides to investigate. He drags his live-in girlfriend to Massachusetts where they wander around the state looking for the town. He finally finds it, but his girlfriend returns to the West Coast.

Proud then begins to do more investigating, and he finds the house which appears the same as the one in which there was a little boy and his mother. He then explores newspaper records and finds a man was drowned in the 1940's just after the war in a lake near the town. The record says it was an accident but the vision implies the man was in fact murdered. He discovers the name and begins asking older locals about who this man was. He meets the deceased's daughter at a local tennis club and eventually meets the man's widow played by Margot Kidder in an equally compelling performance. The man's widow appears like an older version of the woman in the vision. Could this be the man who Peter Proud was in a previous life? His psychiatrist friend from California wants to document Proud's findings, but Proud is reluctant to reveal his discoveries.

Certainly not for all tastes, but this is a very compelling mystery-thriller with quasi-supernatural elements. There is very little action, save the recurring vision of the murder, and the climactic ending. Much of the film is about Proud's investigations and his eventual relationship with the murdered man's daughter. Spooky electronic music, similar in style to music in other films of the period, such as "Escape to Witch Mountain", are often used when Proud sees a building and there's a flash to his dream-visions.

Two larger questions are asked by the film. Did we live in previous lives? And, if we did, the more frightening question posed: is it in our best interests to discover who we may have been or leave well enough alone, as the old saying goes? Reincarnation and other questions about life after death are still popular, but the present film fed into an audience which was very hungry for this kind of material during the 1970's.