This Sweet Cesspool: PSYCHOMANIA (1971)

This month Severin releases the seminal entry in the once ubiquitous zombie biker genre, PSYCHOMANIA (1971) a British production in which Hammer's sometime director/writer Don Sharp made sure the cuts matched and the pacing didn't lag. Alas, somewhere along the line the negative of this amazing film was lost, so we'll never get to see this in super duper high... def. On the other hand, who needs it? The story of bikers who commit suicide and return as zombies who look and act exactly like they did when they were alive, PSYCHOMANIA is a film best seen with your glasses off, the image refracted through rows of empty bottles, and one eye covered so you don't see double. I mean that in the best of all possible ways. Apparently this film scored a cult following in spots where it played a lot on late night TV. I can imagine stumbling on this at three AM and getting that super giddy Columbus kinda feeling.

What strikes me as super strange about this film first off is the notion that a bunch of birds and laddies on motorbikes can ride through workaday British shoppers and harass the locals and only one bobby e'er shows up to stop 'em. Special note to bakery delivery guys: don't try to walk across the lane with a stack of freshly baked bread while bikers are roaring their engines around, terrorizing the populace right outside your shop. And if you're up on a ladder in the middle of the lane, get down! Then again, reality is not high on the menu in PSYCHOMANIA. Instead it flatters the palate of the sugar-addicted adolescent, making up in vandalism and chipper death cult romance what it lacks in meat, fiber, and coherence.

And it still begs the question: if our pale redheaded heroine Abby is so worried about her leader of the pack late boyfriend being back from the grave and urging the gang to kill themselves so they can come back immortal and indestructible and all, why does she too participate in all the hooligan destruction? She's a 'good' girl! Aye... And since when do hippies terrorize locals and/or punk rockers sing like Donovan at the Renaissance Faire? What is wrong with these kids today? Only the toad in the mirror knows..."ribbit."

"Lick me and see the world."

Through the unholy power of said 100-year old graveyard toad--plucked at the gang's Stonehenge-ish graveyard hang-out spot--and the tutelage of his family's Satanic butler (a post-stroke George Sanders), Tom is able to rise up from his grave on his motorcycle and run down a passing pedestrian on his way to bigger slaughters, all beautifully rendered in bloodless offscreen violence. You would think being covered in dirt and decaying for awhile, possibly even filled with formaldehyde (aye, there's many a hundred-year old froggy's suffered that fate more'n once) his white scarf might at least be weensy bit dirty. Or, were the make-up man to e'er stir from his slumbers, Tom's face might evince a ghastly pallor. But this isn't that kind of zombie movie. In fact, without everybody saying so, you'd have no idea Tom has been dead at all or anywhere but to his tailors to get his leather pants tightened.

Not only in this but countless other areas does Sharp's vision betray a semi-refreshing lack of familiarity with actual bikers, mods/rockers rivalry, Satanists, zombies, or hippies, whether in films, books, or real life. He does know solid British TV detective thriller pacing, so there's competent camera, interesting plot twists, and quite a bit of panning over craftily posed but decidedly unmangled or overly bloody corpses, making PSYCHOMANIA kid-friendly, at least in this lone surviving print, if you don't mind your kids beholding super fake deaths, and you shouldn't.

That's another thing: a motorcycle, a relatively small one especially, is not a particularly good murder device. I doubt that baby in the carriage about to get run into in the grocery store invasion (above) will do anything but scream in delight over being slammed against the meat and dairy aisle. Any idiot with a little toreador experience can just step to the side, hold out the arm and smack these upstarts right in the helmeted kisser and send them cartwheeling into the frozen foods. Instead they cower and scream; then again, realism has no place in the world of PSYCHOMANIA. It rides to its own destination. No... wait, now it wants to go somewhere else. Brummm BrumMM!

The whole biker film genre has always ranked fairly low in my esteem, just above the bottom rung of WIP (Women in Prison) films and 1980s sex comedies. I never understood the appeal of watching a bunch of motorcycles ride this way and that, hearing them make loud nosies as their riders set about harassing innocent beachgoers, sexually assaulting housewives and driving Cameron Mitchell to retaliatory violence (I'm referring naturally to 1970's THE REBEL ROUSERS). I got nothing against motorcycles other than they're too loud and if I'm riding on one I can't stop thinking about what would happen to my lovely skin if I crashed. The bike culture is too metallic for my morbid acuteness of the senses, smells too much like leather and axle grease, reminds me of my brother, Fred, who has two, plus a jeep, and three other cars. That's his world, and I leave it alone; he's got it covered. I mean it would be different if these Living Dead lads were realistic bikers. Real bikers work on their bikes, like all the time, covered in motor oil stains and signs of hard living. These Living Dead yobs all have clean fingernails, maybe even manicures. They don't get soot on their white scarves from riding around without a windshield. Their little skull eye visors (at right) are cool but clearly a detriment to peripheral vision, something usually all important for any self-preserving motorist, or if they're already dead they might at least select better targets for their rampage if they were able to see...

And where you gonna go with it? Most biker films end when the bikers all go 'too far' and someone is dead, and it's your fault, Society! The friend of the leader is usually shot by the cops or killed by the leader himself in a heroic last-minute rejection of his gang's sadistic credo. Well, PSYCHOMANIA decides to go way past that marker, crashing through the black magic looking glass windshield into places only Jimmy Page, Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Anger know of, and since none of these guys are in, or were involved with, the film, you could say that yes, it doesn't know where it's going. The body count is probably around 60 by the end of the film, but we don't see a single death, or moment of Zen maintenance.

Luckily there are more than a few saving grace elements at work here: Sanders' old butler makes the youth-age divide less a factor in who's cool vs. uncool, since even at 64--slurring from his debilitating stroke and deeply depressed--he's still twice the badass of any of these young 'Living Dead' louts. Sanders was so badass in fact he actually committed suicide a year after finishing the film. That's meta, baby, meta. And he left the second best note in all of Hollywood:

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

Thanks George, we'll need it. And your last film seems to prefigure your sad end as it is all about suicide being painless, and considerable celluloid is unspooled happily detailing the methods of each member: One jumps out of a high rise window; another fails to link up his parachute; the annoying red-haired stepkid jumps off a bridge into oncoming highway traffic; Abby uses pills, and has the most psychedelic and scary of interludes after she's overdosed and suddenly can't tell if she's dead, dreaming, or has come back from the dead, is awake or asleep, and meanwhile George raiseth a sacrificial knife over her heart, while she stands to the side, two places at once! She's being replaced, or will being killed while undead return her to the living? Or was it all a scam cooperated by the devil to steal her soul? Is she going to be buried alive with only a smiling George Sanders to know the undead Abby is not the real undead one? Dude, that is so Salvia!

So there is  some great druggy subtextual stuff at work here, including a nice if derivative rock score (70's cop show funk rumbling in the garage with sitar-tinged fairy folk revivalism) and interesting, almost Buffy-esque, twists that tie the horror in with social anxiety, i.e. what if your suicide doesn't work and you get left behind by your gang of undead biker friends?

Tied to Kenneth Anger by Hollywood Babylon suicide, biker subculture, and black magic, PSYCHOMANIA would be good on a bill with both LUCIFER and SCORPIO RISING. In its alchemical melting pot a triple feature like that might get the mods, rockers, spacers, heads, kids, wankers, punters and snottabies together like only Cyrus (the one and only) could have in the Bronx in 1979, if goddamned David Patrick Kelly hadn't shot him, and then blamed it on another cross-pollinated sub-cultural outfit, THE WARRIORS.  

The 'Living Dead' gang beats out the Warriors however as the most glaringly guilty of voting 'undecided' on its sub-cult policy, especially during Tom's wake, presided over by barefoot hippies and a barefoot minstrel warbling a little tune about a mighty hero who went too fast too soon for this uncaring world. Hippie-o, you freak, Tom was, on every level, a grade-A dickaholic, and now you sing his praises like he was James Muthufuggin' Dean?  Put down that guitar and pick up a meat cleaver! Kill some random pedestrians like a real zombie biker, instead of just kind of brushing by the cliche'd establishment signifiers with your scooter and hoping they'll kindly pretend to fall over dead. What do I pay you kids for? Most of these actors aren't going to kill themselves! Chop! Chop!