Many avid horror fans myself included - worship obscure & gritty exploitation from the flamboyant 70's decade, because you never really know what to expect. These modest and by now largely forgotten productions usually compensated budgetary restrictions through completely unethical story lines, demented character drawings and crude in-your-face shock effects. Logic and coherence were of minor importance, as long as the film contained a handful of memorable shocks and preferably a grotesque and unpredictable climax. From the looks of the VHS-cover I held in my dirty little hands, "Psycho Sisters" looked like a prototypic example of this kind of wondrous cinema. The hellishly red cover image exhibits a young woman (Susan Strasberg) hysterically screaming with, in the background, an ax swinging into
nowhere! It's a flying ax! Awesome!! The back of the cover, containing the synopsis, gloriously speaks about outrageous car crashes, lethally burned yet walking corpses, unstable women newly dismissed from mental institutions and even slavering retards walking around with dangerous gardening tools! How can this possible go wrong? Well, the synopsis doesn't lie
"Psycho Sisters" features all these great elements, and more, but still the wholesome isn't as satisfying as it superficially seems. This is mainly because the tone and atmosphere of the film notably swifts from grainy horror into twisty crime-thriller halfway through the story. Brenda (the lovely as always Susan Strasberg) loses her husband in a horrible car accident and temporarily stays with her sister in a calm house near the beach. Slight problem, however, her sister (Faith Domergue, 50's Sci-Fi heroine of "This Island Earth" and "It Came from Beneath the Sea"!) is a recovering mental patient and feeds Brenda heavy medication as if it were Tic-Tacs and on top of everything she has a mentally unstable handyman with an ax walking around the premises freely. Meanwhile, the police dug up some filth regarding Brenda's deceased husband and sent an undercover officer to the beach house. The plot twists, especially during the second half of the film, are easy to foretell and maybe even dissatisfying, but at least "Psycho Sisters" never turns dull or needlessly stretched. The film is (too) low on gore and sleazy images, but director Reginald LeBorg ("Diary of a Madman") nevertheless maintains a moody ambiance. The absolute highlights involve a few oddball hallucination/nightmare sequences in which the protagonists see the burned face before them. That mask is priceless!
