This is the best entry in the series I watched in tribute to its creator William Castle; the plot is certainly the most original and intriguing and, incredibly enough, somewhat predates James Cameron's THE TERMINATOR (1984) by a decade. A man (James Franciscus) is estranged from his wife (Elizabeth Ashley) over what she deems the excessive attention he gives to tragic premonitions received via recurrent nightmares. Though Franciscus had failed to save his father, he determines not to repeat the same error with his little daughter – and, in this case, manages to get Ashley involved as well (she even begins to have visions of her own!). The event that he witnesses this time around is his girl's death (shot while riding a horse in a carousel!) in the distant future – at the hands of a young man who, as it turns out, has yet to be born
so he has a hard time preventing the murderer's would-be parents from getting hitched!! What he tries to do, in fact, is seduce the boy's mother (Meg Foster from Laurence Harvey's WELCOME TO ARROW BEACH {1974}) away from her fiancé – even if it means Ashley has to witness the 'affair'! This seems to work because the prospective husband confronts them on the point of jointly leaving town and, in a tussle for his gun, ends up killed by Franciscus! The irony is that Foster is already pregnant
yet Ashley persuades her former hubby to spare her and, by extension, the baby too – arguing that the incident has brought the couple back together again, so the best they could hope for is to reshape their daughter's grown-up life! The title refers to a quotation imprinted over the entrance of the local courthouse – where Franciscus first sees the trial of his daughter's killer, but is then himself arraigned over the death of that same man's dad! An amusing idea during the prophetic passages – lifted outright, incidentally, from Castle's own comic fantasy ZOTZ! (1962) – involves a slowed-down soundtrack whenever the characters speak.