Psychomania (1973)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

From my favorite movies..

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

A gang of young hippie motorcyclists calls themselves The Living Dead.They terrorize various drivers on the roadways and citizens of British small town.The secret of eternal life is fairly simple:you must kill yourself without hesitation.So our bullying motorcyclists commit suicide one by one and they return literally as the living dead...Extremely cheesy and superbly funny horror/bikersploitation flick made by Don Sharp.There is plenty of violence but no blood and a Black Sabbath-esque proto-doom soundtrack is nicely groovy.The scene of Tom's burial in the ground of the Seven Witches has to be seen to be believed.The stunts are great and the plot is gleefully weird and silly.7 undead bikers out of 10.

It is difficult to classify "Psychomania". It is not a rebellious, in your face, "Easy Rider" type biker film, that glorifies drug use. There are no rival gangs and no gang rapes. In fact "Psychomania" is so bizarre, there are no other films you can compare it to. Basically the premise is if you kill yourself and believe you will come back from the dead, you will. This is not a full blown black comedy, although the nice assortment of suicides are very creative and certainly qualify as dark humor. After an unsuccessful attempt to take her life, one biker girl is questioned by the already deceased leader "What happened, you're not dead?". Recommended for admirers of strange cinema. - MERK

I went back old school and actually rented a VHS copy of this thing to watch after reading about it for years.I'll have fond memories of it cause I watched it about half drunk but actually it wasn't too good.This spoiled rich kid,Tom,in what I took to be London,is the leader of a motorcycle gang.His mum is a well known spiritualist or seer or whatever you call them in town and Tom becomes interested in the occult because of his mum's doings and Tom gets his whole gang interested in this thing called death.Tom and his mum and their creepy butler,Chadwell,somehow figure out that a person can come back from the dead if at the moment of death they truly believe they will come back.There is also something about toads and Tom's dead dad and some secret room in Tom's house but all that is sort of garbled...not sure if that is because of the Dos Equis or just because it was a crappy movie.Anyway Tom and his gang then seek to fulfill their leader's goal...an undead motorcycle gang.This movie had potential with the premise but the way it come out didn't live up to that potential.For one thing the motorcycle gang was a boring dorky bunch--from their goofy helmets with the big plastic bones on them to their criminal acts which consisted of riding through town and knocking guys off ladders,who just happen to be on ladders out in the middle of the sidewalk for some reason,and knocking trays of bread out of guys hands,who just happen to be walking through town with big trays of bread for some reason.The gang also rides into the grocery store and knocks over cans of stuff.Once in a while they'll harass a truck driver and make him wreck but all in all this gang just didn't have enough meanness to make it interesting.Where is all the gang rapes and baseball bat brain explosions that motorcycle gangs are famous for? There are a couple of cool scenes of a motorcycle flying up out of the ground and going through a brick wall but mostly it was a dull uninteresting story.No gore that I remember and certainly no nudity...this movie could be shown on TV without any editing at all I think.I was hoping for a little more from this movie but at least I can say I've saw it and now I can move on and try and find a copy of some other long lost movie that might be a forgotten treasure.

Strangely enough, though I knew of this film, I was under the impression that it was a bottom-of the-barrel horror outing – however, Leonard Maltin shared my eventual rating of it (and even Leslie Halliwell seemed bemused by what it attempted to do)! Anyway, with a memorable title like that and the promise of zombie bikers (not to mention the talents of director Sharp and stars George Sanders and Beryl Reid), the film was irresistible; ultimately, I was genuinely surprised by how enjoyable the thing turned out to be – and, for all its intended grimness, it was often hilarious (whether intentionally so or not).The plot is pure nonsense: it's said that people who have a strong will to live are able to come back from the dead – a frog, then, somehow figures in the resurrection rite (a ring bearing its symbol is even borne by butler/demon Sanders – his reaction to a cross offered in gratitude by a well-meaning group of mourning clients, which causes him to blow his cool, is wonderful: incidentally, Telly Savalas would play a similarly ambiguous figure in Mario Bava's LISA AND THE DEVIL [1972]!). The protagonist is the biker son of medium Reid; he wants to impress his gang (prophetically named "The Living Dead"!) and, fully knowing of his fate (and its aftermath), attempts a death-defying stunt; when he turns up again after being buried mounted atop his motorcycle (his resurrection sequence – with the noise of his unseen machine revving up beneath the earth and then fully emerging witnessed by a man who happens to be passing through the graveyard is priceless), he persuades some of his cohorts to follow suit – a girl manages the trick but one other boy hesitates at the last minute and, consequently, stays dead! Now, all the gang want to join in – leading to an amusing succession of 'fatal' accidents: one jumps from a bridge above a highway into the traffic below, another drowns himself by tying a huge chain around him, one leaps from a plane sans parachute, yet another nonchalantly jumps from the window of a tall building when a Policeman demands a word with him!; however, the anti-hero's girlfriend isn't ready to live in an unnatural state and fakes her own suicide. The Police – clueless as ever – think of using her as bait: the sight of four coppers inhabiting the morgue slabs, lying in wait for the body stealers (curiously enough, the name of an earlier but much less enjoyable George Sanders sci-fi film), is side-splitting! Since the cyclists are now impervious to pain, much less having a conscience, they wreak havoc on the streets and inside a supermarket – again, one of the priceless moments is when a baby carriage is mercilessly mown down in the ensuing fracas. Eventually, deeming the gang to have run way out of control, Reid is willing to relinquish her pact with the other side – which promptly turns her into a frog! – and we then see the gang, about to dispose of the steadfast heroine, converted to shapeless stone figures (upon which Sanders' limousine enigmatically turns up on the scene)… As I said, the film is best described as a horror comic – but its true mainstay is a great rock soundtrack by John Cameron (complete with an acoustic folk-hero-type anthem to the leader of the bikers!). By the way, while the film's length is given as either 91 or 95 minutes, the print I watched ran for just 88: at one point, the image froze in mid-sequence (Sanders having been engaged in conversation with the protagonist now finds himself in the next room assisting Reid with her séance – thankfully, the "British Horror Films" website does supply at least some of the missing dialogue) and resumed some instances later!