when i was a kid there was a pre-runner to hbo called hollywood home theater, to which our family had a brief subscription. it must have been a free trial or something because we were the last people i knew to get a color t.v. and my parents still to this day get basic cable, and only because regular pre-digital air wave reception down in the valley was horrible. the idea of them paying for any subscription movie channel in the mid to late seventies just doesn't compute with my remembrances of childhood. at any rate, there was this movie that we (molly, joe, justin and i) watched many times about this english biker gang who all killed themselves and came back from the dead to wreak havoc and mayhem. it had this super mystical element, as you can no doubt glean from the picture above of the biker riding around the misty, mini-stonehenge. you just had to believe you'd return from the dead as you committed suicide but if you chickened out you were toast, as one member learned the hard way. i was thinking of this movie yesterday, wondering what the hell it was called and if i'd ever manage to track it down again when, lo and behold, i came across it quite by accident on one of the movie channels we get just as it was starting. the stars aligning in this way could not be ignored so drew and i settled in for what was no doubt going to be a really terrible movie, as so many fondly remembered movies from childhood turn out to be.
we were not disappointed. psychomania was silly, terrible and completely fun in a so bad it's good kind of way. made in 1971 it was all tripped out style-wise. the leader of the gang, tom, was not the anti-establishment rebel i remembered but a complete loser thug. he thought he was an anti-establishment rebel but tom, i've got news for you... you were a loser. you do, however, look very, very cool.
tom, like so many troubled children, didn't have a chance. his mom was into some crazy mystical toad shit ...
...and his dad tried to cross over and come back but chickened out at the last second. at the start of the film tom and his crew kill some (no doubt) conformist, establishment dude by causing his car to crash which sends conformist, establishment dude through the windscreen. tom then goes home and tells mystical-toad-loving mummy and her creepy butler (or is he more?) that "we blew a guy's mind today". no one bats an eyelash at murder as a mind-blowing experience. is it any wonder that tom and his gang, the aptly named living dead, come to a bad end?
and what do un-dead biker thugs do to wreak havoc in 1971 england, you ask? they intimidate publicans, murder the cute girl who paid for their drink at the pub as well as those who came to her aid in pub parking lots, kill police at the police station while breaking out their un-dead comrades, and, by far my personal favorite, terrorize shoppers at a grocery store...
psychomania is more fun than a barrel of monkeys and not to be missed, especially if you loved it as a kid. you can still love it, albeit for entirely different reasons, as an adult.
