Snake House

Bloody Psycho (1989)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Low rent Italian horror film has Dr. Vogler (Peter Hintz) going to a castle to treat a wheelchair bound woman with some sort of psychic therapy. It doesn't take long for a mysterious zombie in a wheelchair to show up with plenty of dead bodies left behind.

BLOODY PSYCHO was one of the films that got released with the tagline "Presented by Lucio Fulci." The Italian horror market was clearly dried up during the late 80s but I guess producers thought they could milk whatever they could by throwing Fulci's name on the pictures. This film here could have been so much better had it been made with a budget a few years earlier but as it stands there's just not enough good things to be found.

The biggest problem is that there's so many dialogue scenes that really go nowhere. Yes, we understand the castle the haunted and we understand the doctor doesn't believe it. Hell, he doesn't even believe it when he sees the zombie figure. These dialogue scenes just aren't all that interesting and the lack of any real story doesn't help. The film does benefit from a semi-effective score as well as some nice cinematography by Silvano Tessicini.

The gore effects are minor but they include a tongue being pulled out and a rather stupid death by wheelchair. Some of these effects would later be seen in Fulci's A CAT IN THE BRAIN. Hintz is rather boring in his part but Louise Karnsteeg, Brigitte Christensen and Paul Muller add a little entertainment.

Reportedly, scenes from this film were incorporated into Lucio Fulci's CAT IN THE BRAIN (1990) - along with snippets from his own TOUCH OF DEATH (1988; which I watched only last week) and GHOSTS OF SODOM (1988; which I missed out on recently due to a power cut!); incidentally, Fulci himself was the 'Presenter' of BLOODY PSYCHO - as well as RED MONKS (1988), another title I should get to pretty soon. While certainly better than TOUCH OF DEATH, it's still a film that perfectly evokes the rut into which low-grade European horror had fallen by the late 1980s (having preceded this by a superior giallo from the "Euro-Cult" heyday - Duccio Tessari's THE BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY [1971] - the gap in quality is all the more evident!).

The plot is a mish-mash of tried-and-true elements: there's the doppelganger theme, a remote castle as the setting of an old crime (with all the mystery and secrecy that it entails) - and to which an innocent is invited by way of a ruse, but whose presence is necessary so that a prophecy could be fulfilled (he is himself a spiritualist but doesn't realize that the murderous vision he keeps having is of his own death - shades of both DON'T LOOK NOW [1973] and Fulci's own THE PSYCHIC [1977] - until it is too late, that is!), etc. The film's tone is rather campy, what with the presence of the young, long-haired priest (who eventually emerges to be the leader of a community of diabolists!) and especially that of an alcoholic doctor - whose over-the-top performance, resorting to unintelligible raspy-voiced ranting and face-twitching in close-up, has to be seen to be disbelieved!

Still, the hero is a blank-faced youth and the major female characters all look alarmingly alike (but only one of them actually doubles as the ancient murderess - now reduced to a pile of goo and bones riding a wheelchair!); from the latter, I'm sure one can deduce that the film is basically just an excuse for a parade of slimy (yet risible) effects. Apart from featuring Jess Franco favorite Paul Muller in a small but pivotal role, the film benefits - if so it can be said - from a tolerable electronic score (though its sudden shift to a honky-tonk sound during a stint in the country provokes unintentional hilarity)...and there's even an unusual element of sexual tension present: a lesbian relationship between the 'paralyzed' mistress of the castle and her sluttish maid (which, alas, is barely touched upon) and also some highly unlikely sexcapades (one of them being an unorthodox milk-drinking session) between the hero and the murderess' grand-daughter that would be more appropriate in something like 9½ WEEKS (1986) - and which are even more incongruous when pitted against the wave of violent deaths surrounding them!! The rushed attempt at a multiple-twist ending, then, is utter nonsense - effectively delivering the well-deserved death knell to an already tired genre outing.

BLOODY PSYCHO (1989) is another late-stage Italian horror movie made for television and with little to recommend it. The protagonist is a doctor who comes to stay with a disabled lady at her familial castle in order to practise some alternative therapy in the form of laying-on-of-hands treatment. While there he is tormented by the usual nightmarish visions and ghoulish apparitions.

Strangely this reminded me a lot of the Pete Walker film I saw at the weekend, THE COMEBACK, but it's not in the same class. The budget is low and the acting typically bad by late '80s standards. The real-life locations are okay and there's some gruesomeness in the form of a rotting corpse which keeps popping up to menace our hero, but it's all quite lacklustre. A lot of those Italian gothics from the 1960s had people prowling around cobwebby castles too, but the difference is that they were loaded with atmosphere while this isn't.

This is one of the five films legendary director Lucio Fulci supervised in 1989 to re-use some of the gory bits for his 1990 gorefest "A Cat in the Brain". "Bloody Psycho" features a haunted castle plus wimpy doctor Vogler,who is performing some sort of a psychic therapy on lesbian owner of the place.The insanely boring story features also a vengeful spirit of a wheelchair-bound rotting corpse.The bloody murder scenes are great with splattery tongue tearing and running over the neck with a wheel-chair.Unfortunately the pace is slower than slug and the story lacks suspense and surprises.Some scenes are downright stupid and annoying in its supposedly erotic manner for example the milk feeding.The use of a shattered television and a broken toilet is a nice touch,though.5 out of 10 mostly for grueling gore.

This atmospheric ghost film was chopped up to appear in bits in Lucio Fulci's patchwork film Cat in the Brain (aka Nightmare Concert), however, Fulci didn't direct it. Only available in Italian language to the best of my knowledge, though some grey marketers have a subtitled print.