The 26th Day of Horror: Psycho Girls (1985)

 

Psycho Girls (1985)

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, with what can only be described as a contentious and very, very dated take on the entire topic of mental health and psychiatry, through the lens of some aspiring early guerilla punk filmmakers.

There is one amusing plot hole, not obvious but I do love it: midway in, the psychos order some pizza for delivery deep 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.

The 1st Day of Horror: The Mansion of Madness (1972)

The Mansion of Madness (1972) 

To kick off our first day of 31 Days of Horror, we have a Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray restoration: The Mansion of Madness from 1972! Known as La Mansion De La Locura, directed by Mexican director Juan Lopez Moctzeuma, and based loosely on the Edgar Allen Poe tale "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," this is less of a horror film and more of a sort of weird, 70's style surreal satire, the kind that could only have been produced in that era of film making. 

The story focuses on our protagonist, Gaston LeBlanc, a reporter for an inquiring newspaper sometime in the 19th century as he seeks to investigate the nature of a series of innovative treatments at a remote sanitarium run by the enigmatic Dr. Maillard. As Dr. Maillard takes him on a tour of the maddening facility it becomes apparent that the inmates are running the asylum, and Maillard is the maddest of them all, perhaps. Other characters are woven in, including the woman Eugenie, who is the daughter of the man who previously ran the sanitarium, as well as some hapless allies of LeBlanc who are unable to escape the clutches of the madmen.    

The movie has a number of elements typical of the more experimental (and often foreign) films of the late 60's and 1970s. The perspective of the mad, the nature of madness, the relationship of the insane to those who try to cure them. The further back you go, the more exotic and strange perceptions on psychiatric treatment tended to be, although this movie hardly tries to portend to such matters; the Dr. Maillard of the film is a doctor in name only, and his bizarre method of treatment for his patients is basically to let them do as they will, and to indulge in his own control fantasies in the process. 

One side effect of being a film of its time is that the orchestration for the movie is completely batty. For the time this movie came out one must be mindful that we were still a few years away from John Williams redefining film scores with Jaws and Star Wars, and I imagine that contemporary viewers of the day would be more in tune with the tonal incoherence of the film as dictated by the disjointed choice of music from scene to scene. Some of the music sets a disturbing and menacing mood; other pieces emphasize a unique early seventies take on "the sound of madness" which to today's viewer makes the pieces sound absurdist (and maybe they did then, too). I have to admit, I feel like someone could completely redo the music in this film and get a shockingly different feel out of it as a result. 

All things considered, this isn't a scary movie by any stretch, though it might be a bit disturbing or even just unsettling, though I think deliberately uncomfortable portrayals of madness have been outdone by subsequent films over the decades, making this one feel a bit quaint. At one point I sort of felt like, "This is what the crowd at a free love Ren fair in 1972 looked like if you got them to work as extras on a film set for a couple days," and that's probably not far off the mark.

Choice bits:

Apparently, the director was friends with and influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky, which explains a bit. 

Ellen Sherman, who played Eugenie, was the only American actor in the film.

Check out the third act sequence as the Godiva-like woman on horseback is led through the vast chamber of glass coffins...would love to find out where this was filmed, as it is an excellent visual to steal for a future horror game!

The main protagonists of this film are almost amusingly incompetent in their fighting skills, though they do at some point rally a bit. The basic, almost mundane nature of physical conflict portrayed within the film is oddly refreshing in how "normal" it is, contrasted by the aberrant behavior on parade.

Who Should See This: I would suggest this film is best enjoyed by film viewers into studying that era of film-making from the 70's in particular, and I also think anyone into surrealism in films might enjoy it a bit. I wondered to myself if this was a film a very young David Lynch might have seen early in his budding film career, as certain moments felt like they might have been influential.

Available in restored 35mm from Vinegar Syndrome here. The restoration is actually quite striking, and gives the film an interesting vibrancy that makes it stand out. The greenery of the filmed outdoor locations are especially striking, and many of the set locations are fascinating and suitable locations for depicting the labyrinthine sanitarium.

All in all, a solid C, but with the caveat that this film is meant to be an interesting (albeit not at all contemporary) experience...and may not always feel entertaining so much as perplexing to younger film goers. 

Vintage Film Restorations - the Allure of Vinegar Syndrome and Others

The Rabbit Hole of Collecting Vintage Film Restorations

In 2023 I discovered Vinegar Syndrome at a local ComicCon (the first I had ever been to!) and was exposed to the world of vintage film restoration focused on all of the weird, schlocky, forgotten films of the 90's and earlier. At the time I snagged a nice remaster of Beastmaster (a film I loved back when it came out, even as cheesy as it was compared to Conan the Barbarian) and a nice retro-themed print of Censor, one of my favorite horror movies of the last decade, which focuses on the late 70's and 80's era of "video nasties" in which the story essentially turns in to one--great movie, and its focus is why I think Vinegar Syndrome sponsored a special edition. 

I have since ordered quite a few weird vintage movies from Vinegar Syndrome, and also discovered Arrow Video, Severin Films and of course we have the ubiquitous Criterion Collection where you can find high priced but (for the most part) extremely worth it re-releases on blu-ray and UHD. I've managed to snag several of my favorite japanese films from Criterion, including some of the best of Akira Kurosawa.

The interesting thing about this corner of physical media collecting is that it's potentially successful only because the current market is trying so hard to shift away from physical media entirely. Streamers want to stream, and "sellers" like Vudu want to sell, even as Sony removes content from purchasers as a reminder that a "buy to watch" option online is never the same as ownership. In the midst of this, specialist retailers who focus on re-releasing videos (Gruv, for example) may find they are the best and only source of physical media over time. 

But this is not quite what Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow Video and Severin are doing. They aren't producing (mostly) mass market appeal films and rereleasing them for people still into physical copies of content. No, what they are doing is finding the weird, obscure, unusual and most importantly "not popular" in any conventional sense and restoring them, sometimes for posterity (to keep the movie from disappearing) and sometimes because the film either has or deserves a cult following, and this is the only way its going to happen is if the film remains available. Sometimes these aren't really good films by any stretch (not even in a so bad its good way), they're just films of note that help catalog the history of film in general. In fact, many of the actual publishers of these films are smaller groups who are then represented on Vinegar Syndrome's site, and the actual content is often incredibly obscure, films which no one likely has ever heard of, often done on zero budget, by film makers who may or may not have gone on to build bigger and better careers. 

The reason I got sucked in to it was initially just the novelty of high quality restorations of some films I loved, but I rapidly descended into a rabbit hole of fascinating and obscure filmes, many foreign, which I had never heard of before. For example: Alexandr Ptushko's films (such as Sampo and the Tale of Tsar Tsaltan) are works I have never even heard of before featuring Finnish and Russian epics from the late fifties of incredible production value for the time. Piotr Szulkin's Apocalypse Tetralogy is a masterpiece in weird cold war era scifi from behind the Iron Curtain. Other remasters are more down to home, representing unusual films such as Through the Fire, a low budget first film that manages to come just short of being a genuinely good spooky detective horror story, or Creature, an obscure Alien knock-off I remember seeing in the 80's on HBO, featuring Klaus Kinski in one of those roles where he chews the scenery with his trademark weirdness. More familiar films can be found as well, such as Road House, From Beyond, and if you go over to Arrow Films you can see bigger films get special re-treatments. Conan the Barbarian and its sequel are getting a very nice UHD collector's set I'm not crazy enough to buy for the price, but it's cool that such a thing can exist.

Anyway, this is a corner of my interests I have not written about much, but which has consumed a bit of my time. I might consider a regular blog series on this, with a twist. One of the movies I picked up was The Incredible Melting Man (which was much scarier when I was 8 years old, and much less so at 52) and my son and I both concocted a much better plot using this movie as the springboard for a scenario for Call of Cthulhu or Mothership. This could be done with quite a few other movies, and leans in to a scenario technique I experimented with a few years ago when I took the core conceits of Conan the Barbarian and turned it in to a Starfinder campaign. So...I might watch and discuss some of these movies from a gamer's context, identifying what sort of fun ideas and scenario content (and for what games) might be derived from some of these movies. We will see!