Halloween Movie Special: Psychomania

Back in the early 1970s, I remember seeing cinema ads in newspapers for Psychomania and thinking it just had to be amazing. That name alone. This was something I had to see.

Problem. I was still in primary school and Psychomania was an X and I wouldn’t even have been admitted into an AA film at the time so it joined a long list of films I desperately wanted to see but couldn’t.

Instead I had to make do with STV’s Friday night horror slot Don’t Watch Alone for any potential horror thrills. Which meant classic oldies like Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy along with more recent Hammer Horrors.

I kept missing out too when Psychomania started being screened on late night TV. Then, back in the summer of 1994, I finally caught it on Moviedrome, the BBC 2 strand that covered cult cinema. Introduced by Alex Cox, my hopes deflated slightly when Cox let it be known he didn’t really rate it that highly himself, noting that it was ‘nowhere near as good as Girl on a Motorcycle.’

Critics, it would have to be admitted, have generally despised Psychomania over the years and even the cast have been known to put the boot in. Asked in the documentary British B Movies; Truly, Madly, Cheaply how he felt about watching the film nowadays, Nicky Henson offered a one word response: ‘Ashamed.’

For a man who has recently plied his trade on EastEnders and Downton Abbey that truly is a harsh judgement albeit I will admit that the film is absolutely absurd. Especially the hokum involving frogs.

Frogs are a big part of Psychomania although even after watching several times now I’m still unsure of their exact significance. They do though seem to play a vital part in the process in bringing back the dead. ‘Anyone taking a Maximus Leopardus from a graveyard is either foolhardy or ignorant,’ we’re informed. So be warned, folks!

Motorbikes are an even bigger part of the film. As far as I can tell this was the first British motorbike feature since Morrissey favourite The Leather Boys from 1964. This might have told the story of a young ton up boy and his rocker pals but it could be better described as a kitchen sink drama – that just happened to involve motorbikes.

Since that film’s release, Roger Corman’s biker flicks had proved a big box-office hit in America with young people who wanted to be free to do what they wanted to do which included wanting to get loaded (Primal Scream borrowed that dialogue from 1966’s The Wild Angels incidentally).

Inevitably, audience interest in Born Losers, Angels From Hell and Wild Rebels began to wane after a few years of this deluge of exploitation rip-offs. The formula needed perking up. All female biker gangs appeared in Sisters in Leather (1969). The Pink Angels (1971) featured an all gay gang while The Black Angels (1970) mixed the biker subgenre with blaxploitation. Then there was the truly dreadful horror/biker hybrid Werewolves on Wheels from 1971.

I’m guessing that the makers of Psychomania thought they could do better with this kind of thing, replacing werewolves with zombies – albeit zombies that looked as they did in life and who didn’t feel the need to constantly gorge on human flesh. Night of the Living Dead was still something of a drive-in hit and midnight movie favourite in the States at the time and the biker gang here are even named the Living Dead.

And as A Clockwork Orange was at the time attracting a broad spectrum of eager movie-goers – until Stanley Kubrick made the decision to withdraw the film, I reckon the Psychomania scriptwriters (Arnaud d’Usseau & Julian Zimet) might have been persuaded to include a little ultraviolence – for some curious reason, the Dead have a bit of a thing for ramming their bikes into pram pushing young mums.

While they were at it, with Rosemary’s Baby still fresh in the minds of horror fans, why not include a little Satan worship?

Mix these ingredients together, add some full throttle silliness and away they go!

Tom (Nicky Henson) and Abby (Mary Larkin) are a pair of Home Counties poshos. Tom, the leader of the Living Dead, lives in a huge home with his spiritualist mother (Beryl Reid) and an elderly and mysterious butler named Shadwell. Played by Oscar winner George Sanders, a man who The Kinks once sang about, the role of Shadwell turned out to be this Celluloid Heroe’s last appearance onscreen. It’s been claimed he killed himself after seeing an early print of Psychomania but this sounds rather apocryphal to me.

As biker gangs go, the Living Dead are far from the most frightening. A little delinquent yeah but their idea of devilment is more likely riding into a mini-market and scattering as many tins of beans and packets of cereal as possible than the type of brutal torture, carnage and bloodbaths that were such a regular feature of Sons of Anarchy.

Those outlaw bikers covered in their entire backs with their gang’s Grim Reaper tattoos. The Living Dead wear ludicrous crossbones crash helmets and have their names stitched neatly into their jackets. Abby doesn’t even wear leather. The Sons snorted coke, smoked weed and gulped back Scotch. The Dead, well, Tom does have a pint of bitter at one point while none of the members even smoke a cig (unbelievable in the 1970s). The Sons rode massive Harley Davidson Dynas, the Dead make do with some past their best AJS 350s.

But hey, the SOA never figured out a way to come back from the dead, did they?

To explain briefly, you can commit suicide and come back from the grave if you truly believe you will come back – added to that obscure frog related hokum mentioned earlier. Tom is first to try this out, driving his bike off the motorway into a river.

Buried sitting on his bike around some standing stones known as the Seven Sisters, he’s mourned with a folky song, Riding Free (Born to be Wild it ain’t). As you can see below, the hole hasn’t been dug deeply enough and his head protrudes out of his burial spot, requiring an extra mound of soil to be shovelled over it. Are you allowed to bury someone in this way?

This becomes a moot point as he soon revs back to life, driving his bike straight from his grave back on to grass, knocking down a passer-by on his merry way. I did mention full throttle silliness, didn’t I?

Soon the gang are all topping themselves and, of course, none of them go down the bottle of Scotch and handful of tranquilizers road. Instead they hatch a number of inventive ways of joining Tom.

One wraps himself in heavy industrial metal chains and walks with a great determination into a lake; another leaps from a high-rise while my favourite has to be the one who decides to jump from a plane without the use of a parachute. Even critics would surely have to acknowledge the impressive panache of this scene’s execution.

Other aspects of the film, though, do at least partly explain why it was critically panned on its release.

There are continuity errors. Where did Tom get that half baquette from when he discusses some family mysteries with Shadwell? Some of the dialogue is horribly stilted and the bargain-basement special effects weren’t even very good by the standards of the early seventies, especially during the finale.

I also doubt it has ever scared a single adult. But, but, but. It’s like the person who is maybe a little chubby, maybe has bad skin and dry hair but still has something indefinable about them that somehow makes them majorly attractive despite these flaws.

The British Film Institute’s Vic Pratt has recently praised it as: ‘the greatest, weirdest British post-psychedelic undead-biker horror movie ever made.’ He did, though, also admit it is the only the British post-psychedelic undead-biker horror movie ever made.

Obviously I love it and would have likely have loved it even more as a ten year old. Why the British censors ever slapped an X on it remains a mystery. There’s not a single sweary word used and the nearest thing to a sex scene is when Tom and Abby are about to get it on in a graveyard until Tom is distracted by a frog.

Here’s the strange thing. You could shoot a remake of it on a far bigger budget with better bikes and more spectacular special effects, add more convincing dialogue, include some real scares and even inject it with some sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

And there’s just no chance it would be as good as the original.

Here’s the trailer:

For more on Psychomania click here.