I watched what I believe to be the MGM video version of Psycho Girls, with additional scenes of violence spliced in from an Italian language source. The inclusion of the gory moments made this otherwise atrocious movie marginally more bearable, but the dull plot and several bizarre drawn-out scenes still had me dozing off at regular intervals.
The film concerns a young girl, Sarah Tusk (Darlene Mignacco), who is sent to an asylum after lacing her parents' breakfast with rat poison. Years later, the nutty woman escapes, and, with the help of a few other fellow lunatics, sets out to capture and kill anyone who has upset her. This slim plot allows for some reasonably mean-spirited proto-'torture porn', as the crazies mutilate, electrocute and shoot their victims, but the bulk of the film is so mind-bogglingly strange in execution that one spends more time wondering what the hell is happening and why than recoiling in horror.
The story is narrated by a Raymond Chandler-esque crime novelist and comes complete with typewriter interstitials; there is an amazingly offbeat dinner party scene in which the characters have a long and boring philosophical discussion; and we get a very weird moment where the psychos take a rest from torturing their prisoners to perform dialogue from their favourite classic movies. Sarah adds to the eccentricity by taking make-up tips from Frank N. Furter and acting totally cuckoo. All of this unorthodox behaviour proves irritating in the extreme.
The 'good stuff' includes a man having his faced slashed with a razor and his ear cut off (could QT be a fan?), a woman stripped and placed in a bath of water where she is given a few hundred volts, and someone having their toenails extracted, plus a 'twist' finalé which involves bloody meat-cleaver action. All of this might be fairly harrowing if it wasn't for the abject strangeness (I hesitate to call it comedy, even though IMDb classes it as such).
1.5/10, generously rounded up to 2 for the really sweaty sex scene.
