Guilty of Romance (2011)

Oh my goodness where do I start with this one? Probably with the honest admission that the only reason we went to see GUILTY OF ROMANCE, a title more suggestive of a romcom than the sleazefest it actually is, was because we had read a description of the opening scene, where the apparent remains of two bodies are discovered in a Tokyo love hotel. The parts that have been removed have been replaced by parts of shop window dummies, a lot of pink paint has been splashed about and the word ‘Castle’ has been daubed on the wall. ‘What follows’ said the pre-screening blurb, ‘is a descent into a sexual hell’. So even though its director might be horrified that this could be considered a genre piece there were certainly enough elements to suggest a possible evening of delirious whacked-out cinema. Which is exactly what we got.

            After the opening scene we are introduced to Izumi, a meticulously behaved housewife who is married to a bestselling novelist. Every day he leaves the house to go out and write at some undisclosed location, coming back late to compliment her on the precise alignment of his slippers and the correct temperature of his tea as she sits at his feet. The long days of nothing mean, however, that boredom soon sets in, and she gets his permission to get a job selling sausages at a local supermarket. It’s there that she’s approached by a personable young woman who says she can get Izumi work modelling, and before you can say ‘It’s probably not for Vogue’ she’s working in pornography and indulging in multiple random affairs, while feeling intensely liberated from her ‘normal’ life in the process. She meets Mitsuko, a prostitute who in the daytime is a lecturer at a highly respected university and who is obsessed with the works of Kafka, in particular The Castle. Mitsuko’s elderly mother knows all about her double life and during a bizarre tea party tells how her deceased husband also exhibited an unnatural interest in their daughter. Needless to say everything is headed into horribly wrong territory here and after the film spends rather too long procrastinating and over-emphasising the life of a Tokyo prostitute we get a completely insane ending that is going to be appreciated far more by trash film enthusiasts than the art house crowd I suspect this film was made for.

            The Guardian has called GUILTY OF ROMANCE an eccentrically confused mess as if that is a bad thing, but we art-house-trash-and-everything-else horror aficionados are well acquainted with movies that don’t make sense, have been thrown together with everyone’s fingers kept crossed behind their backs and of course out and out rubbish. GUILTY OF ROMANCE isn’t any of these but I can’t quite agree with the opinion held by some that director Sion Sono is a genius either. The film veers from the almost Bava-esque opening (mannequins, corpses, bright colours) to a much quieter but engrossing forty-five minutes, after which there is far too much meandering before everything goes completely mental. It’s apparently meant to be part of his ‘hate’ trilogy, but while almost every character in the film is up to things they really shouldn’t be, at no point did I feel myself really disliking any of them. Instead the film conveys a far more ambivalent attitude to the lives these characters have created for themselves. It’s a bit of a misfire and will probably leave some viewers open-mouthed while still being a far more viable option for a night’s viewing than the romantic comedy it most definitely isn’t.

The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1970)

It’s giallo time! Let’s make sure we’ve got the right ingredients. Gorgeous Edwige Fenech wearing very little and frequently nothing at all? Check. Mad Ivan Rassimov? Check. Hunky George Hilton? Bottle of J&B placed with the label prominently visible no matter where the two actresses in the scene concerned are standing or sitting? Screenplay most likely written by Ernesto Gastaldi? Check check check. With all these elements at director Sergio Martino’s fingertips the plot seems less than important, especially as we know in a couple of years he’s going to make TORSO, which is one third brilliance to two thirds random nudity and silliness. In fact that’s pretty much what we get here, but unfortunately with a little less brilliance than we might ideally like. A serial killer is terrorising Vienna (which is presumably where the Italian crew felt like taking their holidays that year), murdering young women in states of undress. While this is going on Edwige is living with her diplomat husband Alberto de Mendoza (who would be unrecognisable as Pujardov the mad monk in HORROR EXPRESS in a couple of years’ time) in a flat the interior décor of which can only have been thought up by someone who usually comes up with the design for types of toothpaste. Edwige’s unhappy, probably because she’s no longer with lover Ivan Rassimov, who used to cater to her ‘strange vice’, but perhaps because the matching horizontally striped curtains and wallpaper of her living room are enough to drive anyone to have a plethora of Martini bottles lying around. The bedroom’s not much better, where the stripes are vertical and brown, there’s a big red telephone and a large carton of cigarettes is always prominently on display. When Edwige’s friends start dying she suspects Ivan, who keeps sending her roses with cryptic messages attached, but then she discovers him dead so it can’t be him, can it? New lover George Hilton has some of the weirdest shirts ever seen in a 1970 film and a jacket that probably allowed him access to some of the less heterosexual nightclubs of the day but not much else. He doesn’t seem to cater to her ‘strange vice’ but then seeing as not much is made of it we’re not terribly sure of what it is until much later in the film. Does she like having her woolly jumper torn off her in the rain? Of having brandy poured over her naked body? No – it seems she has a ‘blood fetish’, which is explained late in the day by a trendy doctor in a sports car (there really shouldn’t be any other type in these films). We get to see very little of it indeed but to be honest that’s probably just as well.

            Halfway through the killer gets bumped off by one of his potential victims, so what exactly is going on? Whatever it is, it involves Edwige decamping to Spain with George where she ends up being gassed in the kitchen which, in the best sequence in the film, is made to look like a suicide attempt. By the end it’s clear Martino has seen STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and has decided to put together his own daft nudity-filled version of it. The ending requires the usual mammoth set of coincidences that no giallo fan would be satisfied without, and as the car with our heroine and the trendy well-dressed doctor drives away through the picturesque countryside we are once again treated to the film’s main theme. For once this isn’t composed by either Ennio Morricone or Bruno Nicolai but instead by Nora Orlandi and it’s not at all bad, with a couple of haunting melodies that do get a bit overused. THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS WARDH isn’t actually that memorable but there are moments that make it worth an evening’s viewing when your Argentos have been watched to death.

Terror (1978)

The most important thing you need to know about Terror is that it’s not supposed to make sense, and why should it? After all, it's a late-1970s British horror film inspired by Dario stream-of-scary-visual-consciousness-sometimes-when-he-was-good Argento. Once you understand that you realise that it doesn’t matter that the opening is meant to be a film within a film but then the witch that reappears at the end looks exactly like the presumed actress playing her in the prologue sequence. It doesn’t matter that pretty Glynis Barber gets chased through the woods and stabbed to death even though she has nothing to do with the family curse that’s just been explained to us. It doesn’t matter that Michael Craze discovers her pinned to a tree with a knife through the throat and then he disappears from the picture never to be seen again. It doesn’t matter that most of the victims have absolutely nothing to do with the aforementioned curse and don’t deserve to die, or that there’s a prolonged suspenseful sequence set during a rainstorm that climaxes with the appearance of Peter Mayhew and his big moustache. What matters is that the opening witch burning sequence is splendidly put together and stands up well even today, that most of the murders are very well staged, and that most of the actors and actresses concerned acquit themselves sufficiently during their screen time that you’re sorry to see them get horribly killed. What matters is that there are some great set-pieces, including an Argento-worthy scene set in a film studio where James Aubrey gets attacked by film canisters (SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, apparently, and that’s probably the only time that film’s going to get mentioned on here) and flung down a flight of stairs where he meets a fate similar to that suffered by Irene Miracle’s Rose in Argento’s INFERNO which that director made two years after this. What matters is the ‘How the hell did they manage that?’ bit where a car floats thirty feet above the ground. What matters is the completely crazy climax, shot for pennies but which still looks fantastic, where a bloody great sword shoots through the air to staple final surviving cast member Carolyn Courage to the fireplace with an emphatic ‘No-one, but no-one, gets out of this film alive’ before Ivor Slaney’s weird, spooky, deliciously unsettling synthesiser music kicks in again, the music that at the start of this delirious movie has accompanied what must have been one of the most unsettling title sequences cinema audiences of the time had seen, in which several of the horrifying set-piece murders are played out in slow motion, blood splatters and all. Director Norman J Warren has freely admitted that TERROR was put together by writing down scary ideas and sequences and then handing the finished shopping list to screenwriter David McGillivray who quite sensibly must have realised that to try and work everything into a story that made sense probably wasn’t the way to deal with the material, and he was right. TERROR should be approached with a big bag of popcorn and a love for this scary, surreal, crazy and sometimes outright daft genre of ours, because it deserves no less.

Insidious (2011)

Good movies about ghosts tend to be subtle. The most memorable ghostly movies of the last fifteen years (Shyamalan’s SIXTH SENSE, Amenabar’s THE OTHERS and Juan Antonio Bayona’s THE ORPHANAGE) displayed tremendous skill in conjuring up the kind of delicate dread atmosphere needed to make the kind of stories they were telling succeed superbly. Going further back, movies generally regarded as classics (THE INNOCENTS, THE HAUNTING) employ similar carefully structured storytelling to draw the viewer in. We’re shortly promised THE WOMAN IN BLACK from Hammer, and THE AWAKENING from writer Stephen Volk, and very good the trailers for both of those look, too.

INSIDIOUS is also a movie about ghosts, and it’s a rattling good one, but rather than a gentle journey into the cobweb-enshrouded depths of the supernatural, it’s more a ghost train ride into hell, complete with things designed to make you jump at every opportunity. So, enthusiasts of supernatural subtlety be warned – this probably won’t be your cup of tea.

            Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and his wife Renai (Rose Byrne) move into their lovely new dark gloomy house with their three children. It’s not long before weird things start happening that culminate in their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) falling from a ladder and ending up in a coma. Renai sees several spooky apparitions and the family move again, only for the manifestations to follow them. Cue the intervention of parapsychologist Lin Shaye and her comedy sidekicks Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson who determine that it’s not the house that’s haunted so much as the boy himself. Barbara Hershey, playing Josh’s mother and looking a good deal saner than in BLACK SWAN (thank heavens) has some secrets to reveal about her son’s past as well, and the stage is set for Josh to enter the astral plane to get his son back.

            Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell’s love for the genre is obvious in interviews and thankfully it translates well to the screen. Images and sounds redolent of early twenties horrors like NOSFERATU and the films of Dario Argento mean they run the risk of criticism for being derivative but, in the same way that a good comedy just keeps at you with plenty of properly funny gags, they provide the viewer with so many well-executed scares that INSIDIOUS is very difficult not to like. Add in some very clever framing and all kinds of things happening that you really have to be paying attention to notice and it’s difficult to catch everything that’s going on in a single viewing. The music’s good too – a mixture of electronic sound effects reminiscent of those pioneered by Delia Derbyshire and her team for LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE and very scratchy violins. It’s not often the composer gets screen time in a movie (I can remember Jerry Goldsmith getting a cameo next to an ice cream machine in GREMLINS 2 but that’s about it) but here Joseph Bishara gets to play the ultimate nasty demon as well, and a fine job he does of it.

Wan and Whannell’s previous horror efforts received mixed reviews, with both getting more than their fare share of negative notices. I’m not afraid to admit that I loved SAW, and DEAD SILENCE, while flawed, was a genuine attempt at the kind of old fashioned horror film that you just don’t see anymore. With INSIDIOUS they’ve proven that they’re getting very good indeed at being very very scary and I very much hope they’ll decide to stay within the genre for at least another couple of films.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

One can imagine at the beginning of the 1940s the executives at Universal counting the enormous mountain of money made by 1939’s SON OF FRANKENSTEIN and saying something along the lines of “We have GOT to make another one of these! But how can we make things a bit different? I know – how about we START this one with the locals blowing up Castle Frankenstein? We’ll end with a fire as well of course but no-one will expect it at the beginning!”

            And so that’s how the fourth movie in Universal’s Frankenstein saga opens. In complete contrast to those Universal executives, the inhabitants of the village of Frankenstein aren’t the slightest bit pleased with the outcome of the last film, especially as Bela Lugosi’s Ygor, presumably shot dead, is now alive and well again. “They tried to hang him and that didn’t work,” someone says in a desperate scriptwriter’s attempt to explain why he doesn’t look any the worse for wear for the bullets dealt him by Basil Rathbone at the end of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. Mind you, two burghers who appear in this opening scene (Michael Mark and Lionel Belmore) are the ones who were killed by the monster at Lugosi’s behest in the previous film and they don't seem any the worse for respectively having had a cart driven over them and having been bashed over the head only a short while ago. Continuity was never Universal’s strong point.

            Universal’s Castle Frankenstein was a little bit like Jason Voorhees of FRIDAY THE 13^TH  fame, having a completely different look from film to film and surviving more or less intact despite having been burned / blown up / flooded etc at the end of the last one. This time it gets destroyed via some pretty impressive model work early on, allowing the release of the monster from the sulphur pit it was knocked into by Basil Rathbone. “The sulphur was good for you!” says Bela as the scriptwriter again manfully tries to explain why the monster hasn’t just suffocated beneath all that eggy smelling rock. It has however caused him to become rather less expressive, have a different body shape, and look altogether more like Lon Chaney Jr than Boris Karloff, but then that’s because he is. Helped out of the cave by Ygor and subjected to rejuvenating lightning in one of the film’s most impressive scenes, the two of them are soon off to find Frankenstein’s other son Ludwig, played by baggy of eye and limited of expression Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who doesn’t look happy to be in this film at all. He runs the Frankenstein Institute for Diseases of the Mind, which seems to require him to have an old dungeon under his house equipped with prison cells and ‘soporific gas’, presumably in case his patients get a bit overactive. Sir Cedric’s assistant is Lionel Atwill who unlike his co-star looks as if he’s having his usual whale of a time as one of the true villains of the piece, the other being (of course) Mr Lugosi. Ludwig gets visited by the ghost of his father (Hardwicke again) in one of the series’ few nods to the supernatural before everything went mental later on with the monster rallies. Father Frankenstein tells junior that all the monster needs is a new brain so why doesn’t he get on and sort it out? Planning to use the brain of a colleague killed by the monster everything goes predictably wrong when Atwill arranges for Ygor’s brain to be substituted instead. The monster awakens and goes blind. Ludwig says some rubbish about the incompatibility of blood types causing trouble getting oxygen to the neurones but we all know it’s that poor writer being flogged by the execs to get the script finished in under 24 hours again so we forgive him. The house goes on fire and Evelyn Ankers and Ralph Bellamy get to walk towards the sunrise as everyone interesting is now dead and besides they have to fulfil some sort of function as the nominal hero and heroine.

           THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN isn’t bad. It’s a big comedown after Rowland V Lee’s predecessor but it’s not a disaster. Lugosi and Atwill keep things interesting from the acting point of view and director Erle C Kenton manages a few nice shots (the lightning bolts hitting the monster, some nice framing of Lugosi in the propped open lid of a grand piano) in amongst what looks like a very rushed job. Clocking in at 68 minutes this breezy fourth entry was a sign of the way things were about to go very quickly indeed as more and more monsters were delivered by the studio at a vastly increased rate over the next couple of years.

Blood On Satan's Claw - But Where Are Satan's Legs?

After the huge success of 1967’s WITCHFINDER GENERAL it was unsurprising that both companies involved in its production were keen to cash in on the success of that movie, as well as copycat efforts like Michael Armstrong’s MARK OF THE DEVIL. Both follow-ups materialised around the same time. AIP’s CRY OF THE BANSHEE was an incoherent sadistic British horror picture filled with unnecessary nudity and scenes of violence that as a whole didn’t really work. Oddly enough, Tigon’s BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW could be described in exactly the same way, but somehow it managed to be a completely different, far more unsettling affair.

       We’re in freezing gloomy seventeenth century England, with none of the fake charm, cosiness or glamour redolent of Hollywood’s depiction of the period. Ralph Gower’s plough turns up something nasty in a field – bits of bones, fur and a skull with one very blue eye (and attached worm). It disappears, leaving Patrick Wymark’s Judge (a finely balanced performance with just the right amount of veiled drunken threat behind a scary headmasterly authoritiveness) to doubt its existence. Sexy Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) finds the claw of the title and soon the children of the community are growing bits of nasty-looking fur on them as the thing (it’s never made clear exactly what it is) tries to resurrect itself.  Other odd things happen too – young Peter brings his new bride Rosalind back to his aunt’s farmhouse only for her to be driven insane in the attic by something we never get to see. When Peter goes up there he falls asleep only to be attacked by his own hand, now covered with the same fur, which he hacks off. Peter’s aunt disappears halfway through the film never to be seen again, and as the film becomes increasingly nasty and outrageous (the seduction of the village priest in his church by a naked Hayden, the horrifying rape and murder of Wendy Padbury) a relentless sense of downbeat dread drives the film towards it conclusion, where the creature is finally vanquished by Wymark’s sword.

            A fascinating mixture of the diabolically nasty and the diabolically daft, some of BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW’s lapses in logic can be attributed to the fact that it was originally planned as a three part anthology movie, and vestiges of all three stories remain in the final script. The fact that it still works can be put down to the conviction with which the movie’s properly unpleasant central conceit is played out. The idea of some horrible rotting thing regrowing parts of itself on children who are then willing to have them hacked off to allow it to be put back together is brilliantly horrible and the gloominess and isolation evinced by the landscape and period are just perfect for such a story. Attempted solutions are as unpleasant as the evil itself. Cutting the skin from a girl’s leg is considered pointless as it will just regrow but the local doctor goes ahead and does it anyway, without any anaesthetic. Wymark’s judge explains that the evil has to be allowed to take hold and possess enough children before he will be able to destroy it – a remarkable position for the ‘force for good’ to take in any horror film, and perhaps one we might only ever see in a film from the early 1970s. It’s very easy to pull BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW to pieces and make fun of it, not least because one can see the hand of producer Tony Tenser in some of the more exploitation-orientated scenes – indeed, towards the end of the film a girl is thrown in the river to be ‘swum’ on suspicion of being a witch apparently because a similar scene in WITCHFINDER GENERAL had gone down well with audiences. It doesn't make an awful lot of sense that Satan (or whatever it is) would grow its legs last, but the image (and sound) of the 'hopping fiend' is very scary indeed. In fact no matter how cobbled together, random and inexplicable much of the film is, there’s no doubt that it’s disturbing, unsettling and at times properly horrifying. Well done Tigon – I still can't quite work out how you managed it.

Psychomania - "The Word, Mother, Is Daft"

With a Region 1 DVD release out from Severin Films a little while back, with plenty of extras and struck from the best print available, what better film to launch the BritHorror Dungeon part of this blog with than PSYCHOMANIA, a horror film made in 1972 by British film company Benmar productions, whose only other foray into things cinematic was the equally daft and no less enjoyable HORROR EXPRESS. Known everywhere as ‘that zombie biker movie where Beryl Reid gets turned into a frog’ I couldn’t let another viewing of this particular film at Probert Towers pass without writing a few well-chosen words about it, the title of which makes no sense, but then neither does anything else.

            ‘The Living Dead’ motorcycle gang consists of a group of young RADA-trained actors with beautiful speaking voices trying to act evil. They are aided in this endeavour by the names given them by the script which include ‘Hatchet’ (played by the chubby little ginger chap from BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW, ‘Chopped Meat’ (who ends up a singing one of the strangest songs in popular horror film history but more on that in a minute) and ‘Jane’ (Ann Michelle, keeping her clothes on this time after the copious nudity of Tigon’s THE VIRGIN WITCH a couple of years previous and soon to appear in Pete Walker’s HOUSE OF WHIPCORD). Each member of the gang has their name written on their leathers, presumably in case they (or indeed the actors playing them) forget who they are. It also makes it very handy later on for the police to be able to identify the various perpetrators of any ensuing miscreant behaviour.

            The leader is Tom, played by Nicky Henson (Ian Ogilvy’s friend from WITCHFINDER GENERAL), whose girlfriend Abby is played by Mary Larkin. Despite being pretty much the only one left alive at the end of this as far as I’m aware Ms Larkin never went on to do anything of any significance afterwards.   

            The opening title sequence of this film is wonderful. John Cameron’s music theme is very seventies but it’s the right kind of seventies and when this sequence is watched now it lends an even more haunting otherworldly atmosphere to the proceedings. The incongruous image of motorcycles riding around fog-wreathed standing stones in slow motion is at once outlandish and engaging, and is almost perfect in its atmospheric scene setting. The movie which follows is also going to be filled with standout moments, albeit on the whole for reasons other than what one could hesitatingly call quality.

           After a little bit of road-based violence to get the film started (and to demonstrate just how nasty the bike gang is) Tom and Abby pop off to the nearest graveyard where their canoodling is interrupted by Tom’s interest in a frog who has been thrown onto the set. Popping his new ‘little green friend’ into his pocket he leaves Abby to probably seriously reconsider her position in a relationship where amphibians seem to take precedence, and drives back to the manor house where he lives with mum Beryl Reid, butler Shadwell (George Sanders) and some of the most hideous seventies wall-sculptures you will ever see. While Shadwell admires the frog (now housed beneath a transparent cover probably last used for a sponge cake) Tom brings us up to speed on how Shadwell never gets older, that the butler knows the secret of the living dead, and that the house has a room that’s been locked for eighteen years. Needless to say, Tom’s soon in the mysteriously dust-free and highly polished forbidden chamber, finding his dead dad’s NHS spectacles and having visions of a big frog and then Beryl doing something suspiciously like signing Tom’s soul away when he was a baby to a man with a frog ring. Tom should be okay, apparently, because he’s wearing a frog pendant, which leads one to wonder if the producers spent a day in 1971 at World of Frogs buying up their unsold stock, and then got screenwriters Arnaud D’Usseau and Julian Halevy to follow-up their previous movie hit HORROR EXPRESS with “anything (and we mean literally anything) involving frogs and motorbikes”.

            The ‘big secret’ is that if you kill yourself but believe you’ll come back then you will, which if it were actually true would mean a world full of the buggers. There’s probably more to it than that but I suspect the film-makers thought it would be irresponsible to divulge anything else, although somehow I suspect it involves more frog-based shenanigans.

            After some very poor shopping-centre antics and a road chase, Tom drives off a bridge and into the local river, killing himself. “We’d like to bury him out way if that’s ok” says Abby when she visits Beryl’s house. Trusting Beryl agrees without asking any more, so it’s a bit of a relief when it turns out that the gang’s ‘way’ involves burying Tom in his leathers and sitting on his motorbike in the stone circle. Lucky for Tom as well that ‘their way’ doesn’t involve jamming something sizeable up his bottom, covering him in treacle and placing him upside down on the town merry-go-round or he’d have some explaining to do when he came back to life.

            Which he does, in another impressive screen moment. “Do you want him back?” says George Sanders beforehand. “Yes,” says Beryl. “Yes, God help me I do.” Which is the cue, ladies and gentlemen for you to either hit the fast forward button, go and make a cup of tea, or brace yourselves for one of the most incongruous moments in movie history as this zombie biker horror picture grinds to a halt so that the gang, dressed in hippy gear, can make wreaths and other flower-based items of mourning while the song ‘Riding Free’ is mercilessly etched into your subconscious. Tom may indeed have ‘really got it on’ and may well have ‘rode that sweet machine just like a bomb’ but I am going to stop before I tell you the full horror of these lyrics in case there’s any risk of copyright infringement.

            Tom comes back and looks remarkably clean for a man who’s been buried under a grave full of earth. He gets some free petrol and then proceeds to murder a pub full of people. Police inspector Robert Hardy, looking unsure as to how he’s meant to be playing this, keeps a straight face as the bodies start to pile up, especially when the gang cotton on and proceed to kill themselves in a montage of suicides so ridiculously over the top that the comic moments of the film so far are in serious danger of being topped by this single three minute sequence.

            Scarcely has the pathologist time to answer a call from his wife than the gang are up and about again, including Abby, who’s not actually dead as her overdose failed, but not before giving her a slightly trippy dream sequence where her nightmare becomes so extreme and unpleasant that she envisions herself wearing something approaching a gaily coloured African tablecloth.

            Beryl finds out from the police that Tom’s told his gang the Family Secret and tell Shadwell she wishes to break her bargain. “And you know what you will be become for all eternity?” he says and she nods, figuring she might always be able to get a job presenting The Muppet Show in a couple of years.

            Tom finds out Abby is still living and in a showdown with the gang back at the stone circle attempts to kill her. Fortunately Beryl has completed the ritual, acquiring a distinctly croaky voice and a Kermit-like appearance in the process, and as a result Tom and his gang turn to stone. The End. Apart from black-cloaked Shadwell approaching distraught Abby in the stone circle as John Cameron’s music plays us out in another haunting moment that almost makes up for what’s gone before.

            There is nothing quite like PSYCHOMANIA and there never will be again. The film could not have been made at any other time or in any other country, and it still manages to achieve an open-mouthed response of ‘what on earth were they thinking when they made this?’ on viewing that, coupled with some memorable scenes and a haunting score, means it shouldn’t be allowed to fade into obscurity.