The Psychotronic Man

I actually know something about this film because the producer of the movie was my landlord at one point. The Psychotronic Man is a grade B movie that's true, but it is actually an important and noteworthy piece mostly because of its relationship to film history and several other oddities that surround it.

It was the first feature film made entirely in Chicago since the Essanay era before WW1. It was only able to be made after the death of Chicago's longest reigning mayor, who would not allow movies to be made anywhere in Chicago. It was also an independent feature film, made entirely outside any of the existing studio systems. It was shot completely on location and it used only local talent. Many of the centrally located automobile chase scenes and running gun battles were shot on the sly without the permission of any authorities because no film commission existed. Part of the movie featured a car chase in Lower Wacker Drive which is an odd funky piece of roadway under downtown Chicago. In the next year the Blues Brothers came out and featured a car chase in the exact same place.

It was produced, written, and starred in by an out of work actor named Peter Spelson who decided the best way to get into the movies was to go out and make one himself.

It is however probably most noted for its name. The term "Psychotronic" has come to be an almost generic term for grade B cult films. Google turns up 88,600 different references for the word, all of which come as a result of this movie.

It did well in Europe under various names but it played only once in Chicago where it was made on April, 23, 1980 at 7:00 P.M. in the now demolished Carnegie Theater.

Like many first efforts it is crude by comparison to the things that follow it, but it is truly one the beginnings the of modern American independent movie trend. In truth even Ed Wood had more help.

This movie is so bad in every way, it's not even worth going into. Although I'm a bad movie aficionado, I'd never make it through this one without RiffTrax's comedic commentary. With their riffs, it's worth watching once, but I won't be returning to this one.

The main reason I wanted to review the film was to let people know that there's a scene in a med school where a roomful of students dissect what appear to be real human corpses! (Flayed and contorted into disturbing poses, no less, apparently to make dissection access easier and/or to dehumanize them.)

There's no way this no-budget '70s turkey had the makeup / props budget for those to not have been real. I'm surprised none of the other reviews mentioned this, and I was surprised the RiffTrax guys didn't give their audience a trigger warning beforehand, and instead merely said stuff like "Wow!" during the scene. Since I don't watch snuff films, this is the most disturbing thing I've ever seen in a movie.

Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy, (aka: Mike, Crow T Robot, and Tom Servo from MST3K) have done justice to this gem. Just released today (22-Sep-2017), and available at www.rifftrax.com.

It's nice to have people vocalizing all the inappropriate things that go through your mind while watching this train wreck!

It is so padded that if you cut all the padding out and just left the "plot"/"story," the "movie" would be about 20 minutes. And the non-filler is so incompetent in every way as to almost be offensive.

I watch a lot of bad movies and find some amusement in them, but this is next-level bad. This makes Plan 9 from Outer Space seem taut and sophisticated!

This isn't a movie. This is an endurance test! Zero stars!

P. S. The siren they love to have wail out of nowhere from time to time is one of the most annoying sounds committed to film.

I never expected to see a movie like this. A great "bad" film about a psychotronic barber who has looong drives in his car and kills/hurts people by touching his hair and looking all serious (this is something you do when you have THAT psychotronic disease). This has to be a movie that's better (and worse) than anything Ed Wood did, great "dumb" dialogue and wonderful bad actors. See it and you will have a whole new view on film-making..