It was a while before I decided to pick this movie up from the Vinegar Syndrome collection, but I think I'm glad I did. It's a weird, punk, low budget psychotic movie that is exemplary of its period in time; this kind of movie could only exist in the unique conflux of attitudes and ideas in the seventies and eighties, with twisted and weird takes on sanity and psychotherapy. Watching the extras on the making of this movie was possibly more interesting than the movie itself, but the movie did manage to deliver on its incredibly nutty low-budget "horror comedy" vibe. Also, its a canuxploitation film, another are gem from Canada.
Directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, who has a great interview on the making of this film worth watching, did it in his early punk days on zero budget with some film they had available, in abandoned properties they had access to. It's a great story. The movie itself is a mix of wannabe actors and friends of the director, none of them especially "good" but all of them doing a fine job of hamming it up for the camera.
The plot is about two sisters, one of whom (Sarah) kills her parents one day with rat poison and ends up committed for the next twenty years...or so it seems. The other sister Victoria lives her life and seeks to make sure her sister never leaves the asylum. One day, her sister kills an orderly and escapes. First her psychiatrist (the amusingly named Doctor Hippocampus) ends up murdered and skinned, then she seeks out Victoria, and the two of them have a confrontation from which Sarah walks away the lone survivor, Sarah then travels to the house of a writer and his wife where Victoria had been a housekeeper and offers her services as cook while her sister is "away." They accept, and that night at the dinner party things go very, very south.
Sarah, it turns out, escaped the asylum with a gang of fellow inmates, who conspire with her to drug the guests of the evening party after feeding them her sister, literally. They then tie up and proceed to inventively murder the guests one by one in the depths of the now shut down asylum (the timing on her escape vs. shut down of the asylum is a bit wiggly here). It is up to our writer, who has been a quasi-film-noir narrator the entire time, to figure out how to escape before he and his wife are the final victims of the evening.
The "villains" of this movie are caricatures more than anything, suitable as Batman villains more than they would be a representation of real madness. The movie does a surprisingly good job of introducing our main characters (the husband and wife) and their later guests during a lengthy dinner conversation, enough so that their deaths have a bit more impact later on. There's a lot of "80's level" talk about psychiatry and therapy in this movie, and the villains are to some level supposed to be reflective of this underlying theme. It is quintessentially 80's in this regard, maybe even a throwback to the 70's, which what can only be described as a contentious and very, very dated take on the entire topic of mental health and psychiatry.
There is one amusing plot hole, not obvious but I do love it: midway in, the psychos order some pizza for delivery seep in the asylum while torturing their "guests." The pizza guy eventually shows up and almost walks in on the entire affair before dropping the pizza off and fleeing. The entire scene is amusing, if only because its so out of left field, and shines a light on the later sequence in the film when our two protagonists finally escape and then get lost in the endless halls of the impossible to navigate asylum....apparently only the pizza guy knew exactly where the entrance and exit was!
One might also wonder about the name Psycho Girls, because strictly speaking only Sarah is here to do the evil deeds (her gang of psychos are all men). According to the director its the two sisters....but alas, we really didn't get to see Victoria shine. I was sort of hoping for a surprise twist at the end (and there is one, a bit) in which Victoria is revealed not to have been dinner but rather it was the psychiatrist, and she returns to end her sister....but nope, the twist went in a slightly different direction.
Some of this movie, including the extended dinner talk scene and certain other moments (the pizza guy, the confrontation between the sisters, even the entire "dinner party turned massacre night" them) reminded me oddly of Quentin Tarantino's films. I wonder if Tarantino saw this, given how much he was influenced by cinema from this period and earlier.
So, this is a movie worth watching if you like this period of cinema and enjoy experimental low-budget weirdness from early aspiring directors. It's also worth a watch if you just like creepy and off-putting horror films. For me, it definitely was worth seeing though I do rank it at a solid C.
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