26th September 2010: Psychomania (1973)

Psychomania

UK 1973 colour

aka The Death Wheelers, Psychlo-Maniacs

Director Don Sharp Writers Julian Zimet, Arnaud d'Usseau

Cast Nicky Henson (Tom Latham), Mary (Abby Holman), Ann Michelle (Jane Pettibone), Roy Holder (Bertram), Robert Hardy (Chief Inspector Hesseltine), Beryl Reid (Mrs Latham), George Sanders (Shadwell)

There's an apocryphal tale of British actor and self-proclaimed Professional Cad George Sanders completing the shoot on his final film and, having witnessed just how low his career had sunk, committing suicide afterwards. Reportedly in poor health, Sanders checked into a hotel in Spain and downed a lethal dose of sleeping pills. His three-sentence suicide note began with “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.”

The film in question is the British zombie biker flick Psychomania, released after Sanders' death in 1972. Now, I'd certainly hate to spoil a great story; after a long and distinguished run in Hollywood, Sanders' career was indeed on somewhat of a downhill slide, and his last few films were hardly earth-shattering. But Psychomania is, in my humble opinion, a superb swansong, and Sanders should be hung for suggesting it, even apocryphally. Combining the JD thrills of British pulp novels like Skinhead, Terrace Terrors and Angel On My Mind, and the early Seventies' pop culture obsession with Dennis Wheatley and Alistair Crowley, it stars Nicky Henson, perfectly cast as the smug, cocky anti-hero Tom. He's the leader of a British biker gang called appropriately enough The Living Dead, well-versed in the Black Arts thanks to the creepy relationship with his spiritualist mother (Beryl Reid) and her mysterious and somewhat ageless butler Shadwell (the aforementioned Sanders), and obsessed with the idea of “crossing over” and returning from the Other Side, a feat attempted by his late father with dire results.

All you have to do, it seems, is believe you're coming back, click your biker boots three times, and bingo! Tom's fresh corpse is buried by his faithful gang near their regular meeting spot, a druidic circle of rocks named the Seven Witches, seated on his bike in full Living Dead regalia; at the witching hour, Tom drives out of the grave at full throttle, stops at the local pub for a quick one, then phones his Mumsy to tell her he's back in one piece. Splendid! He's back alright, and like the angry kid in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, he's obviously seen some unmentionable horrors. And, without the fear of death hanging over him he's utterly fearless, not to mention heartless, ruthless, and cold as the grave. He then invites the rest of the gang to join him: as regular hooligans the Living Dead are strictly second-rate, knocking over traffic cones and bags of groceries for childish kicks, and they're terribly English - you'd never see a Hell's Angel in America stop their bike and comb their hair - but once they've all “crossed over” there seems to be no end to their reign of terror.

There's so much more to recommend about Psychomania than its surface eccentricity. True, the film is more preposterous than genuinely chilling, and at times played for as much gallows humour as can be wrung from the material by one of the strangest casts assembled for a British B film; veteran British actor Robert Hardy plays a Police Inspector investigating the pile of bodies left in the Living Dead's wake, and joins Reid and Sanders in trying to keep a professional mask amidst the bare-faced absurdity. The music has dated gloriously along with the rest of the film: from fuzzed-out bogus psychedelia to the funeral's Satanic hippy dirge, a wondrous pile of muddle-headed plop that equates death with freedom from Squaresville. Thankfully Australian-born director Don Sharp, himself no stranger to ludicrous genre scenarios (The Face Of Fu Manchu and Curse Of The Fly [both 1965] to name just two), keeps the action taut and the visuals intriguing, from the opening shots of riders in skull-like helmets gliding through a mist-shrouded field, to an weirdly effective frog motif which, in occult circles, represents life and rebirth.

Is this the only British zombie biker film you're likely to witness? Sadly the answer is yes, and it's a doozy. So let's warm up the engine, spit the dirt from our mouths, then surge forward at full throttle into the 1972 Psychomania.

16th May 2010: The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant!

The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant

USA 1971 colour

aka The Incredible Transplant

Director Anthony M. Lanza Writers James Gordon White, John Lawrence

Cast Bruce Dern (Roger), Pat Priest ( Linda), Casey Kasem (Ken), Albert Cole (Cass), “Donald Brody”/Gary Kent (Motorcyclist)

Hola, Schlock Fiends, and welcome to Season Four of Schlock Treatment. It's been a few months between drinks owing to a slightly shonky pair of hobbit feet, but I'm now back to dancing on tables and bringing you, our loyal viewers, the weirdest in international cult cinema. Tonight we take up where we left off a few months ago, in the middle of our Seventies Grindhouse season, and for our promised film, the notorious 1971 shocker The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.

Does anyone remember a 1972 blaxploitation horror film in which a racist Ray Milland has his head grafted onto a huge African-American football player's body? That was The Thing With Two Heads, made just twelve months after this picture, and was also released by American International Pictures, who must have smelt a trend in two-headed horrors. Which means The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant kickstarted an entire subgenre of movies, but even in a field of just two, it still comes off as the worst example of its kind.

So is the film really that BAD? Well, compared to other films we've screened on Schlock Treatment, it's positively highbrow... Bruce Dern, respected actor who, like fellow actor Jack Nicholson has run the gamut from biker nonsense to classy A Grade fare, plays Roger, obsessed surgeon in an isolated country house neck-deep in experiments on two-headed snakes and monkeys, while his pretty wife Linda (Pat Priest, the normal looking Munster) feels rightfully neglected. Enter a convicted murderer and rapist just escaped from a sanitorium – Roger, refusing to look a gift rapist in the eye, splices his head onto the body of his groundkeeper's retarded son Danny, an innocent giant who's JUST witnessed his father's death at the hands of his second head! Roger considers both disposable since one's a career criminal and the other is...ahem...retarded...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Roger's school friend Ken, a smarmy nouveau-riche slimeball, turns up unannounced and locks eyes onto the ever-unhappy Linda rather than his buddy's outstretched hand. All is not right chez Roger, Ken suspects, as the lumbering two-headed Man Child, clad in Hootenanny dungarees, kickstarts his own murder spree at the bidding of its second, crazed alpha brain. Linda, we discover, is locked up in Roger's laboratory for safekeeping – but safe from the duo-domed rape-oid, or the claws of the salivating lothario Ken? And I wonder, can we actually pinpoint the exact moment Roger and Linda's marriage officially hits the point of no return? Answer on the back of an empty cigarette packet, kids, and send it to Briz 31.

So is The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant REALLY that bad? It's certainly a career low for both Dern and Pat Priest, and it's hard to fathom why exactly they signed on to such a wretched tinpot production, along with hipster DJ Casey Kasem (also seen opposite Dern in The Cycle Savages), a greasy meatball in real life who proves once again that he had a great face for radio. Maybe the problem is the film's two-headed nature – the ludicrous pseudo-science of a Fifties creature feature, with all the charm and class of one of AIP's lesser biker flicks. The effects are as shoddy as you'd expect, cutting from long shots of a tacked-on dummy head, to closeups of the skinnier actor standing behind the other. Cheerfully offensive to all of the senses , it'll have you grinning from ear to ear – to ear – as we unleash the beast with matching muzzles: The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.

29th February 2008: Drugs and Bikers Counterculture double!

The Rebel Rousers

USA 1967 [released 1970] colour

Director Martin B. Cohen Writers Martin B. Cohen, Michael Kars

Cast Cameron Mitchell (Paul Collier), Bruce Dern (J.J. Weston), Diane Ladd (Karen), Jack Nicholson (Bunny), Harry [Dean] Stanton (Randolph Halverson), John 'Bud' Cardos (Townsfolk)

Welcome to our Counterculture special on Schlock Treatment – hippies, bikers, and surly Mexicans all vie for screen time in a three hour non-stop sticking it to the Man-a-thon.

The Rebel Rousers is a prime example of biker nastiness from 1967. There were biker films before – The Wild One with Marlon Brando, Russ Meyer’s Motorpsycho – but Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels from 1966 cemented the genre, and for the next five or six years there were scores of them, while square audiences got their kicks vicariously. Usually told from the biker’s point of view, it’s about frontier freedom, with all the inbuilt philosophical flaws and inconsistencies, and the genre found its zenith in Easy Rider – Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper representing the Death of the American Dream, and Jack Nicholson as a booze-soaked lawyer providing the running commentary.

The Rebel Rousers is a different breed, told mostly from the point of view of Paul Collier (Cameron Mitchell), a Joe Sixpack architect who chases his pregnant girlfriend to a sleepy coastal town, and runs into former football team member JJ (Bruce Dern), now gone to seed and cracking skulls with his biker gang the Rebel Rousers. JJ says it’s all about doing his own thing, being “where it’s at” and other well-meaning hippie aphorisms, but the other gang members including the stripy-panted Bunny (Jack Nicholson) are after much darker kicks, and drag Paul and his girlfriend Karen (Diane Ladd) from their stalled car for a round of Beach Blanket Bingo. After almost constant bickering, like petulant children with ADHD, JJ agrees to a bike race along the beach to see who scores the pregnant Diane Ladd for the night. Sure, he’s a biker with a conscience, but pragmatism rules their bizarre universe.

Filmed in 1967 but not released until 1970, Rebel Rousers is the Last House On The Left of biker movies, switching between grimness, absurdity and soap operatics with alarming regularity. Without the visual flair of Roger Corman, and minus the fuzztone squall of Davie Allan and the Arrows, it’s a fairly anonymous effort that just happens to have an outstanding cast: Nicholson, of course, perched on cusp of stardom after 10 years of juvenile delinquent and biker films; Harry Dean Stanton, already in his forties, playing an aging delinquent with his usual slurred genius; and Bruce Dern, a staple of the biker genre whose narrow features lend themselves perfectly to his sneaky anti-social weasel characters. The Rebel Rousers also marks the first screen appearance of Laura Dern inside the very pregnant Diane Ladd, Dern’s then-wife, both of whom were obviously shagging like rabbits on the set of The Wild Angels.

As Peter Fonda says in The Wild Angels, “We wanna be free to ride our machines and not get hassled by the Man… and we wanna get loaded!” Amen to that brother, as we fire up the hogs on Fonda’s fussin’, feudin’ cousins The Rebel Rousers.

Acapulco Gold

USA 1973 colour

Director Bob Grosvenor

Our next film was a campus favourite in the Seventies, a pot fetishist’s sticky dream. In the filmmakers’ own words, Acapulco Gold from 1973 is a “modern-day adventure” telling the inside story on the marihuana trade – the growing, harvesting and smuggling of the VERY illegal wacky weed. I still remember posters for this outside the Classic Cinema and the Boomerang right up until the early 90s, proving old hippies never die – they just can’t remember what they’ve watched. Ideal viewing conditions for Acapulco Gold would be in the old Schonell Cinema in the mid 70s, the air sticky with green smoke, listening to the collective roar every time a particularly bushy plant tickles the audience’s fancy.

While the film protests (a little too strongly) that it’s impartial, it quickly turns into a comprehensive how-to manual for budding entrepreneurs; all that’s missing from the picture is Cheech and Chong’s marijuana van from Up In Smoke (now THAT’s how you smuggle pot into the States!). There’s tips on concentrating THC with dry ice and how to swim past the border patrol, and you find the going rate in Acapulco, the “superweed” capital of the world, is just $30 a kilo. “Out of sight!” mutters our gringo smuggler from under his headband, and then from out of nowhere a vaguely Robert Crumb-esque cartoon sequence kicks in amidst a sea of animated pot clouds. Crazy. On a brief detour to revisit the hemp trade of the Twenties, grizzled old-timers and oblivious Oakies compete for screen time with hipster doofusses (or is that doofii?), all of whom are decked out in a staggering array of Seventies garb.

Make no mistake, this is pornography for potheads, and if you don’t believe me, check out the opening’s shots of a fresh-faced nature girl wandering through a field of marijuana, picking sticky buds instead of flower buds. By avoiding the hysterical preachy moralizing of drug scare films like Reefer Madness it swings the other way into canonizing its subjects, the seemingly endless talking heads of anonymous stoners. Personally I suspect the filmmakers are a little fond of the “reefer” as interviews go on far longer than a non-THC addled brain can handle. And I swear, if I hear the words “out of sight” one more time there will be hippie blood on my hands.

Technically as raw as a two-day orgy and with a soundtrack by perennial head favourites The Flying Burrito Brothers and a nation of Neil Young pretenders, it’s a trip back to a time no doubt long forgotten by all concerned: the 1973 head film Acapulco Gold.