Hell's Angels

Psychomania Review

Psychomania is a very, very odd 1971 British horror movie. When I first saw it years ago as a teenager, I’ll be honest, I thought it was terrible. Now, I think it may be a work of genius. I was lucky enough to see it in London a couple of years ago as part of a 1970s British horror season. Before it, in a double-bill, they showed one of Hammer’s Dracula movies that elicited a hushed respect. As Psychomania began it was interesting for me to watch the audience, and see fidgeting break out, whispering and early tittering giving way by the mid-point of the film to open giggling. Tom, the suspiciously posh leader of the aptly named Living Dead biker gang, might be very unthreatening, but he’s got two things going for him. A gang of mainly morons who’ll do anything he says-even kill themselves to come back as law breaking zombies, and a mother who made a pact with the Devil so can handily arrange this for him. It’s hard to know where to start with describing the film, it simply emanates strangeness. The opening credits play over what looks like a montage of some drug hazed motorcycle proficiency test video, all the deaths( and there are lots of them) are bloodless, while the suicides come off as unintentionally hilarious. Like most horror movies of this period- see The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw for further proof, there is a folksong sing-along segued in, amusingly to Tom being buried upright on his motorbike. Beryl Reed, (who seems far too Cockney to be Tom’s mother, unless she bundled him off to a public school at a very early age- “allo, darling”), George Sanders(who killed himself after making this), and Robert Hardy, trying out a very odd Northern accent help proceedings along. There’s a strange emphasis on words, and fake gravitas applied to questions-“you’ve been in the locked room again.” The soundtrack is gothic religious synthesizers predating Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom by a good fifteen years, and the end, although signposted is still a great-‘what the hell just happened ’ moment. I also like to think that James Cameron got his police station invasion scene in The Terminator from this, even if he didn’t. All in all, this needs to be experienced( and I do mean experienced rather than just seen). Personally, I get fonder of it every time I see it. 7/10