Psychomania (1973): or, Do You Wanna Be in My Gang, My Gang, My Gang?

I admit I did a double-take upon pulling up the imdb entry for today's movie, Don Sharp's 1973 British living-dead bikers flick Psychomania (aka The Death Wheelers). It was that "1973" that pulled me up short--by its style, tone, and decor, I'd have guessed the movie was at least 4-5 years older than that, certainly older than George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) or the Hell's Angels incident at Altamont, factors which it seems to me would have had to inform any movie made after them that dealt with a) rampaging motorcycle gangs or b) zombies. Incredibly, Psychomania wraps both these things into one movie--it's about a living dead motorcycle gang, for Pete's sake!--and yet seems strangely uninformed by either of those seminal events.

As a result, for me the movie has a sort of antiquated, frankly naive charm about the way it presents its ne'er-do-well gang of rebellious youth, a motorcycle gang more in the mold of 1953's The Wild One than more modern, super-violent movie bikers (though to be fair, Brando's crew would still kick these guys' asses) , and the rather blase, un-zombified, un-gut-munching take on what it means to come back from the dead. Unfortunately, as it is in life so it is in movies: charm will only take you so far, and eventually you have to make with the goods.

"I iz a Zombi! Vroom-vroom! Raaaarrr!"

The movie starts out very promisingly, with a series of credits-sequence shots showing a group of leather-clad bikers around a fog-shrouded circle of stones. We learn later that this Stonehenge-like ancient monument is known as "The Seven Witches," and legend has it that these are the remains of a coven who broke their deal with the Devil and were punished by being turned to stone. The moody cinematography and slow-motion riders deliciously called to my mind the Blind Dead's famous riding technique from Armando D'Ossorio's famous series, but with iron horses instead of fleshy ones.

We soon learn that our bikers are part of the tantalizingly named gang "The Living Dead," a group of mod-era miscreants who stalk the motorways with their skeletal-font jackets and wonderfully designed skull-face helmet visors, searching for any excuse to run squares off the road and cause whatever havoc they may. The group is led by stoical thrill-seeker Tom Latham (Nicky Henson), whose Mother (Beryl Reid) is a rich widow and a dabbler in the occult. Tom is a spoiled, amoral brat, whose lack of compassion for anybody or anything distresses his good-girl biker mama Abby (Mary Larkin). After Tom interrupts a graveside make-out session with Abby in order to capture a Satanic toad, his flustered girlfriend admits, "Sometimes you scare me, Tom!" The stone-faced Wild One spits back, "It's not me that scares you--it's the world!" No, I'm pretty sure it's just you, frog-licker.

Having got all the kicks he can from a life of privelige and random acts of vehicular homicide, Tom is now bored to the point of suicidal thoughts. Abby is afraid to "cross over" with him, despite his seemingly nonsensical assurances that "We'll come back!" Turns out Tom has an inside line on immortality thanks to his parents' occult interests--his father apparently had discovered the secret to returning from the dead, though the old man bungled his sole attempt years ago, thus leaving Tom without a strong male role model and precipitating him into a life of bike-riding and peace-breaching. Anxious to shuffle off his mortal coil to ride for kicks through the Undiscovered Country, Tom grills his indulgent Mum for Dad's secret.

Some families tiptoe around the Elephant in the room. Tom's prefer to lounge around the Decapitated Spaceman.

After discussing the matter with her suspiciously occult-savvy manservant Shadwell (George Sanders in his last film role), Mum gives Tom a key to the room where Daddy died, which has been shut for 18 years. Once inside Tom finds himself face-to-face with a full-length mirror that shows him visions from the past, as he sees his mother, dressed as if she's on her way down the shops for the day, standing in the center of the Seven Witches and summoning The Devil, then cheerfully signing away her first-born son (who is nearby in a cute little bassinet) to his Diabolic Majesty in exchange for...something. That part isn't clear. At any rate, horror of it all causes Tom to faint dead away, but when he awakens and hears Mum and Shadwell talking about the secret of living death, he quickly jumps up and heads out to have a go.

The secret, as it turns out, is elegant in its simplicity: in order to return from the dead, you simply have to BELIEVE that you will--but really, really believe, without a shred of doubt in your skull. (Apparently Tom's dad hesitated at the moment of death and so was lost.) With the courage that can only be gained through intense boredom and pants-stretching arrogance, Tom summons his gang for another rampage, this one through a shopping center downtown, where the Living Dead crash through vendor stalls, knock over bread sellers, joust with stolen umbrellas, and generally run the gauntlet of street-chase slapstick gags until the cops show up--check that, the COP (the constabulary could apparently only spare the one)--to chase them off. The Living Dead lead the copper on a lively hunt until, on a long bridge crossing the Thames, Tom screams toodle-oo at life and crashes over the side to his watery grave.

Tappin' that ass like aquarium glass

Sobered by the death of her morose sweety, Abby goes to the Latham estate to ask Mum if the Living Dead can bury Tom "in our own way." Surprisingly--and hilariously--the gang's "way" is to bury their leader on his bike in a grave that's clearly a few inches too shallow. While Tom's corpse sits bolt upright and holds onto the handlebars like...well, Grim Death (what did they do, nail him there?), the rest of the gang don Hippie Clothes and throw flower wreaths into his grave, while one of them sings a plaintive and earnest folk song that producers were doubtless hoping would be a hit single, "Riding Free." With lyrics like "They tried to clip his wings just like a fly...so instead of standing still, he chose to DIE!", I don't see why it didn't burn up the charts!

So why would the Living Dead fish Tom's bike out of the river, presumably restoring it to working order and filling the tank with gas, then just bury the mean machine with him? If you guessed "So that he can come bursting out of the grave with tires squealing to wreak his vengeance upon the living!" then give yourself a biscuit! Because of course that's exactly what happens. Trailing grave dust, ZomTom starts living his death to the fullest by running down a pedestrian, killing a gas station attendant, and then staging a massacre at his local pub--but not before telephoning his Mum and Shadwell with the good news. Neither seems at all surprised that he's made it back, and are quite excited to hear he's coming home dead--it's like The Monkey's Paw in Bizarro World.

"How do you birds feel about...necrophilia?"

Once ZomTom reveals himself to the rest of the gang and further informs them that once you're dead you can't be hurt, the bikers can't fling themselves off bridges fast enough--all except Abby, who is still reluctant to cross over, despite her boyfriend's proof of concept. The scenes with the other bikers doing themsevles in for immortality are some of the more entertaining ones in the movie, as one leaps into the river bearing Jacob Marley-style chains, another drops off an overpass into oncoming traffic, and another decides to go out from 15,000 feet via a purposefully thwarted skydiving attempt! I guess it's a good thing coming back from the dead reconstitutes your bones from powder and slaps your brain back inside your skull for you, what?

So what do you do once you're immortal and invulnerable? Well...pretty much the same things you did before, only MUCH HARDER. The gang goes on another shopping centre rampage, this time killing pedestrians and destroying an entire Sainsbury's Grocery Store (in the most vicious scene, red-jacketed femme fatale Jane [Ann Michelle] lines up and revs through a baby stroller, to the mellifluous wails of the occupant). Later Tom lays out his plans to his Mother and Shadwell--he plans to kill judges, teachers, policemen, anyone in authority, forever and ever. Shadwell gasps incredulously, "You mean the entire Establishment?!" Sure, if that's all you got.

It's the "Don't Go Out Like a Punk" death montage!

He's no dummy

Unchain My Heart
"I regret nothing!"
World's Cutest Speed Bump

Like I say, Psychomania is not without its charms. For one thing, it's a very groovy movie, with all the mini-miniskirts, mod fashions and psychedelic furniture you could want. (The opening shots of Mrs. Latham's parlor are particularly envy-inducing for anyone with a taste for the groovy.) The version of the motorcycle gang mystique here is, as I say, kind of old fashioned even for 1973, but kind of charming for all that.

The acting is fairly good--standouts are Larkin as the confused Abby, Henson as bored and amoral Tom (I was detecting notes of Malcom McDowell in A Clockwork Orange), and Michelle as the wildcat Jane. Pug-nosed, baby-faced Denis Gilmore is the best of the bikers as the psychopathically vicious Hatchet. And of course George Sanders is excellent as Shadwell, who clearly is more than just the butler at the Latham estate.

"Whattaya fancy tonight, Viv?"

The main problem I have with Psychomania is that, given its subject matter and ESPECIALLY given its production year, I'd have expected a little more in terms of horror-y goodness, and it's just not there. Most scenes take place in broad daylight--even the graveyard resurrection--and would have benefited from a darker, more gothic atmosphere. The zombie bikers suffer absolutely no ill-effects from dying--no rotting, no loss of memory or personality, not even a lowering in body temperature. (In fact, the only side-effect seems to be increased arrogance and insufferableness.) The murders, what few of them there are, are mostly bloodless, and there's no sex or nudity to speak of, just TV-style British innuendo. Worst, a good portion of the movie is made up of long riding/chase scenes, which are exciting and well staged the first time you see them, but quickly wear out their welcome.

I began to wonder at one point whether the flick might have been intended as a kind of campy farce--the point exactly was when the last 4 bikers get put in glass sideways-oriented morgue drawers that look more like refrigerator salad crispers and all wake up at the same time to surprise the coroner. But if there were supposed to be laughs here, they're underplayed as much as the horror and violence elements, which results in a rather boring last half-hour. The ending, when one might have expected a little dust-crumbling or flesh-rotting for one's money, is a severe anticlimax.

Femme Fatality

Psychomania is fun in its way, but really could have been a lot more. It's worth seeing at least once, but no more than that. 1.75 thumbs, or 2 if you really like the mod era.

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The Pink Angels (1971): or, The Beautiful Freaks

Every now and then I almost forget just how different the world of 70s filmmaking was from the world we now live in. Especially with so many recent films striving to emulate the look and feel of movies from the "grindhouse" era, it's easy for someone who watches a lot of these films to succumb to the fallacy that these stories are just older, worse-looking, sometimes even slightly quaint versions of the movies littering our multiplexes in the present day. Perhaps this isn't true of some of the grittier horror or most insane sci-fi of the 70s, but when it's a screwball road movie or a fluffy little comedy, it's easy to imagine that the movie, even if not inhabiting the same neighborhood as the gag-a-minute taste-free comedies that the Farrelly Brothers or even National Lampoon make their livings on, it nonetheless lives in the same filmic zip-code, just a few decades down the block.

Then something like Larry G. Brown's 1971 biker "comedy" Pink Angels finds its way into my DVD player, and I'm suddenly reminded that not only are we not on the same street, we might very well be on different planets.

For literally 98% of its 81 minute running time, Pink Angels plays like a zany spoof of the biker movie subgenre, whose formula had already been set in stone by such classics as The Wild Ones and Easy Rider. The 70s are littered with imitations and re-imaginings of those movies--some featuring girl gangs, some undead ne'er-do-wells, some even freakin' werewolves--so it makes sense that some enterprising soul would plumb the comedic depths of such a popular and lucrative type of movie. Hell, the poster even features madcap art in the style of Mad Magazine, possibly by one of Mad's famous artists. (I can't tell for sure--my expertise and google-fu fail me here, and there seems to be a dearth of information on the internets about this flick.) And it's funny--not often in the laugh-out-loud way, but at least in the smirk-and-mild-chuckle way.

But then--at least for this viewer--that last 2% takes SUCH a hard left-hand turn, it threw me COMPLETELY off-balance and made me question whether I and the filmmaker were laughing at the same things, and if so, whether that says something very unflattering about me as a person. I DEFINITELY wasn't in Kansas anymore.

I've been lucky lately in my ongoing quest to watch movies with hilariously overblown songs over the opening credits, and Pink Angels is no exception. After an enigmatic but soon-to-be-explained opening scene, we get a patriotic travelin' song that sounds like it was performed by Don McLean's less talented but much more earnest and taking-himself-seriously brother. "I see America, she's just around the bend! The Star-Spangled Banner...just lookin' for a friend!" It's striving SO hard to be inspiring and moving, you kind of have to go along with it and be inspired and moved...TO LAUGHTER.

As the song plays, a group of bikers gather in a field of gigantic concrete culverts, rallying around a flag and getting ready to start their picaresque journey. Each biker seems rougher and more intimidatingly attired than the last--we're talking rebel flag patches, skulls and crossbones, and even some prominently displayed swastikas for good measure--until finally the group of six clamber onto their 3 bikes and sidecars and hit the highway, leading to more travelin' tunes and some already by this time cliched shots of the wild men on the road.

"Hotsy-totsy, I'm a Nazi!"

True to formula, the bikers soon pick up a lonesome hitchhiker, who is obviously intimidated by their virile and threatening masculinity. With the naive hitchhiker hanging on for dear life, the gang rolls into an A&W cafe and intimidates the staff into giving them mass quantities of cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and root beer. The boys talk gruffly about their mean machines for a while, until there's an argument between two of them that looks like it'll turn ugly--when suddenly a FOOD FIGHT breaks out! It only takes a few flying frankfurters and some girly screams from the combatants as they spray suggestive jets of mustard and ketchup on one another before the hitchhiker tumbles to what's going on:

"Jesus Christ!" he yells. "You're all FAGGOTS!"

Yes, there you have our set-up, ladies and gents. This is a rough, tough biker gang, made up entirely of homosexuals and cross-dressers! After the hitcher runs away (in considerably more terror than you suspect he would have had the guys JUST been white supremacists or Nazis), the homo-bros shrug it off and get back on the road to more groovin' 70s tunes, but now with a knowing wink to an audience that's in on the joke.

And actually, as spoof premises go, it's not that bad. Consider the gang's first formulaic encounter with the podunk fuzz in one of the small towns they rumble through. The cops come out of their car with more firepower than Rambo, after radio-ing to HQ an inflated number of "long-haired freaks" they've pulled over. Brandishing a shotgun in the most phallic way imaginable, one cop asks the leader Mike (John Alderman) why they're headed down the coast.

Cop: "What are you gonna do in LA?"
Mike: "BALL."
Cop: "What?"
Mike: "A BALL."
Cop: "What kind of a ball?"
Mike (in Clint Eastwood "Make My Day" inflection): "A COTILLION. A LADIES' cotillion. You understand?"

"I know what you're thinking: did he have three canisters of lipstick, or only two?"

The cops have to release them when their licenses come up clean, but the basic modus operandi is now set--the boys travel across country on their way to a drag show in L.A., in which their beauty boy Ronnie (Maurice Warfield, the only black guy in the gang) is set to compete wearing a gown designed by the extremely fey, wiry little troublemaker of the group, Henri (the hilarious Robert Biheller)--presumably their tough-guy biker outfits are a disguise designed to keep the squares off their backs. Along the way they have various adventures according to the standard biker movie formula, only with the twist that they're all "cupcakes."

Also along for the ride: portly, fake-bearded muscle Arnold (Bruce Kimball), who nonetheless has perfect diction and a giant vocabulary; Arnold's lover Eddie (Henry Olek), a poet sporting John Lennon glasses and a terrible Liverpudlian accent, and David (Tom Basham), the best-looking guy in the group who is always putting off the advances of the opposite sex, often unsuccessfully. (A scene where he tells of having to satisfy the desires of a female benefactor in order to get new spark plugs for his bike is fairly amusing and typical.)

Running parallel to this narrative thread are the adventures of The General (George T. Marshall), a crazy militia man with a Patton complex who spends his days listening to what we'd now call ultra-conservative talk radio, preaching about the un-American evils of "freaks" and "long-haired bastards!" (Marshall looks exactly like an American version of Graham Chapman's General in the Monty Python "Precision Drilling" sketch, and seemingly not for nothing--like Chapman's character, the general is unknowingly surrounded by flaming gays.) The General has some men guarding his compound--obviously a suburban home--and a longsuffering secretary named Hildegard (Karen Bouchard) with one of the most amazing 70s water-buffalo hairdos it's been my pleasure to witness.

The Flying Nun 2: Out of the Habit

The scenes with the General are entirely random (him listening to his biker-hating broadcasts, planning what to do should the Commies attack his compound, having Hildegard time him while he comically takes apart and reassembles his pistol blindfolded), and his story line doesn't cross paths with the Pink Angels' until the very, very end.

As I said before, the jokes here are more smirk-inducing than gut-busting, but I still found myself pleasantly entertained by all the broadly comedic shenanigans the boys get up to. It helps that all the actors have good-natured, "Isn't this a gas?" charisma to spare, particularly Alderman and Basham; and Biheller's over-the-top flaming fashion designer turn is funny because it completely lacks any of the mean-spirited ridicule that so often ruins such characterizations. Everybody's having a good time and nobody's hating, so it works--or so it seems, at least.

Something interesting about Pink Angels is the way that large sections of the film seem to be entirely ad-libbed, or if not, at least Brown was willing to let the cameras roll and catch all the flubs and recoveries his actors put out there. Several scenes with obvious non-actors are rather strange and interesting to me too, usually when the boys are vamping it up in a grocery, a dress shop, or a shoe store. Brown even takes a few seconds in the grocery store to interview a bystander about what she's seen, with obviously unscripted results. Not exactly gonzo, but still, I was digging it.

David entertains his comrades with the tale of The One That Got Away.

The boys' adventures along the road are hit and miss, but the ones that hit work well enough to keep you going. Standouts include an encounter with a group of well-aged call girls at one roadside attraction, Arnold and Eddie's amazing exchange with a gum-chewing topless waitress at their LA hotel (I don't know *where* she was holding all the drugs she offers them) that contains one of the most stupidly hilarious foley inserts I've heard in a while, and a scene near the end where all the guys shed their biker skins and slip into something more comfortable and comical for a night on the town.

But the movie's best episode is the most narratively significant as well: again taking a page from the Biker Movie 101 playbook, Brown has his effeminate bikers meet up with a rival biker gang, who despite the tell-tale signs (a picnic table with candelabras and full formal place settings at their camp, for instance) have NO IDEA that the Pink Angels are gayer than your average leather-clad bikers. The Rival Gang leader (Michael Pataki) is a real hoot, the sort of guy who'll look at a lineup of call girls and pick the senior citizen hooker just for kicks--exactly the kind of grizzly, truculent bastard you'd want leading your gang, despite his unfashionable sock cap. But children of the 70s will be most interested in the fact that his right-hand man is none other than a very young, extremely buff Dan "Grizzly Adams" Haggerty! I guess you could say this was the beginning of his fascination with "bears," IYKWIM...

"As he growed up, that little drag queen became the best friend Adams ever had...and together, they became a LEGEND!"

Things start out sociably enough when the two gangs come together, but they go south quickly when, after an evening of hard partying, the rivals awaken to find the Pink Angels gone and themselves in garish whore makeup with ribbons in their hair! Not at all down with homoerotic humor, the Rival Gang Leader vows that when he catches up with them again, "I'll KILL those bananas!"

Well, the rival gang does catch up with "those cupcakes!" again late in the movie, but the expected gang fight doesn't happen, exactly. Completely fooled by the boys' drag disguises--which is part of the joke, as only David could really pass, and then only if you were cross-eyed and retarded--they all saddle up and head to a party somewhere else; though due to bad directions, they somehow end up at the compound of The General, whose existence by this point most viewers will nearly have forgotten. Again, the fascist soldier and his minions are played for broad yuks, as when the gatekeeper reports the approach of the bikers via a rotary telephone secreted inside the General's mailbox!

The General is also fooled by the Angels' get-up, leading to a funny exchange between him and Henri, and then a reveal that shocks the General into even greater lunacy. Staring with crazy-eyes at the now de-wigged biker in an evening dress, the General recalls via voice-over a threat he made earlier in the movie, now given a new context: "I'd love to get my hands on some of those long-haired freaks!" The General smiles, smacks his riding crop into his hand, then breaks the fourth wall and stares straight at the camera, almost but not quite winking...

"And now for something completely different!"

I hesitate to go too far into the realm of hyperbole here, but I was honestly shocked, startled, and more than a little disturbed at the direction the movie takes here, literally in the last 2 minutes. I thought I knew what kind of movie I was watching--I was familiar with its conventions, I had an idea what to expect, I even felt I could picture the very next scene after the General's smile. My ending was consistent with the lighthearted, easy-going humor of the whole thing, completely cliched, the kind of denouement that would not be out of place on a Saturday night sketch show. But hey, that's the way the whole movie had been up to that point, minus some off-putting, leathery nudity and a little drug use. My ending fit in perfectly with my idea of the film.

Suffice to say, my punchline was NOT the punchline that the filmmakers went with here. This movie is available as part of the BCI/Eclipse "Drive-In Cult Classics Vol. 3" set, and as a result I'm not going to spoil it with a detailed description of the Big Joke here. I will say, though, that it nearly knocked me over, and made me wonder, had I known the way *this* joke turned out when I first started watching the flick, whether I would have been able to watch the previous 79 minutes in the same way. Somehow, I don't think so. In the same way that the sweetness of the first half hour of Audition is altered irrevocably by everything that comes after, I'm thinking the first 98% of Pink Angels could not be experienced the same way twice. At least not for me.

It could very well be that I'm overstating things here. I may be the one person on the planet who would react this way to a silly, slight movie from the 70s and its beyond-tasteless-in-hindsight final gag. After all, part of the wonder of 70s trash cinema is its gleeful pre-PC, anything-goes and damn-the-offended attitude. But every viewer has his buttons, and I guess Pink Angels managed to lull me into a very unguarded place before taking the hammer to mine.

"You know how to whistle, don't you, Duke? You just put your lips together...and blow."

Your mileage will definitely vary, but I'm going to go ahead and give Pink Angels a 2 Thumb, see-it-at-least-once rating. It's mildly amusing, engaging enough to keep you checking in until the end, and then that final shot--well, watch it and then tell me whether I'm getting too old and touchy. There are definitely worse ways you could spend your 81 minutes, and really, I want to know.

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