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Bloch's other 'Psycho'-film, The Psychopath (1966)

posted 6 years ago by swanstep (2615)
5 replies | jump to latest

It's well-known that Robert Bloch was irked both by his not sharing financially in Psycho's success beyond his original $9K rights to the story, and by Stefano's screenplay getting a lot of the reflected glory and career push from the success.

This led directly to Bloch concentrating on screenwriting, notably for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Hour, Star Trek, and quite a few movies. Two of the films in particular are pretty naked attempts to re-capture Psycho's magic. The first, William Castle's Strait-jacket (1964), has been discussed a number of times on this board and its IMDb ancestor, but the second, Freddie Francis's The Psychopath (1966), hereafter P-66, hasn't been discussed that I can recall. Presumably this is largely because P-66, never much of a hit, has always been quite hard to see. While it was around on vhs (vastly cropped from its wide-screen), P-66 never got a dvd release. The film's fortunes have greatly improved in 2018, however, since P-66 has been released on a high-quality blu-ray. The picture is widescreen, has been restored as far as possible. Quite a few vertical lines mar the image especially near the beginning of the film - I suspect that they've had to stitch together and restore in part from widescreen prints for which there was no negative - but otherwise this is a pretty jolly good image. A commentary track is provided that explores the connections between P-66 and early Giallo, e.g., Bava's Blood and Black Lace. P-66 did its strongest business in Italy where they were alive to all these knowing references.

[–] swanstep (2615) 6 years ago

In my view, however, while it's good for reference purposes that relatively pristine versions of P-66 are now available, the film itself - the script, performances, direction etc. - remains quite disappointing. The whodunnit aspects of the plot are perfunctory and the suspense sequences aren't anything very special with one possible exception near the end. Without wanting to get into spoilers, the big twist/surprise here is the same as in Strait-jacket, and I've always thought that that is not much of a twist or is rather Scooby Doo-ish. Note that posters for P-66 manufacture a complete, rather more Psycho-ish lie about what's going on in the film:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060866/mediaviewer/rm2353521664
I'm afraid that Bloch's variants on Psycho always predictably revert to something less interesting, and rather more plot-hole-laden (super-clever schemes call such attention to themselves that we're perhaps less forgiving of plot shortcuts and implausibilities than we otherwise would be).

The best stuff in the film occurs in the last twenty minutes or so, and maybe that's enough to recommend watching the film once. The film has that Giallo-thing of fetishizing fashionable young women and its women-in-peril sequences are its best i think notwithstanding their tangential-ness to the main plot (indeed, there's no conceivable way for the killer to jeopardize these women without directly implicating him- or her-self so the scenes are fundamentally daft but set that aside). Francis has turned up a stunner, Judy Huxtable, for the main woman-in-peril. She has a doll-like, Beatles-girlfriend-that-time-forgot beauty that's unconnected to the main story but feels like it should be! It's very odd. Huxtable is pretty wooden but with that face and hair we'll forgive her anything. Apparently she married Peter Cook (Dudley Moore's comedy other half). Figures.

[–] swanstep (2615) 6 years ago

Blu-ray is best, but as I've tried to get across, the film's marginal, crumby pleasures surprisingly survive in rougher forms, e.g., here on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOIS6fhhu6k

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

swanstep, thanks for putting together the "total package" on The Psychopath, which really does need to be at least a minor point of everyone's "post-Psycho education."

I move first to the poster you linked to. I REMEMBER that poster in my local LA paper; as an impressionable lad, that kind of specificity about the murders in a movie -- and the murderer(?) -- well, it didn't give me nightmares but it introduced me to a darker world.

It was such a child development thing, I think: 1965 had brought me my first knowledge of PSYCHO, and a struggle to pronounce that title, now in 1966 came reviews linking The Psychopath TO Psycho, and I came to understand that a special type of horror film(the psycho film) was part of 1960's movie making. Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte and Strait-Jacket had scary posters and trailers too.

It took perhaps another year -- to 1967 -- to solidfy knowledge of Psycho itself -- the shower, the house, a scary man called Anthony Perkins(he was presented to me as sick and scary from the get go; I never knew him as an innocent.)

Anyway, The Psychopath emerges from this period as one of the first British entries in the field(Peeping Tom was made w/o Psycho as a forbear) and, from my glimpses at the film it doesn't seem very Psycho-ish. More Frenzy-ish -- for obvious reasons(and perhaps Hitchcock in making Frenzy was nodding towards these British horror films as he had towards William Castle with Psycho?)

We're reminded, time and again, of classic elements that neither Bloch nor Hitchcock nor Stefano could really duplicate: the shower scene. the motel. The House. Anthony Perkins. All these later entries couldn't compare.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

As for Robert Bloch, yep he got stiffed bad on money from Psycho(it seems insane versus the deals that later writers like Blatty and Benchley would get for The Exorcist and Jaws.) But he DID get a marketable NAME --"From the Author of Psycho," and he DID work, albeit mainly in TV and Bs and unfortunately, the big reveal on Robert Bloch is that all by himself alone, he was a rather pulpy writer of rather pedestrian material. His novel Psycho had great elements, but a bad movie COULD have been made from that novel.

Anyway, I'll try to take a fuller look at The Psychopath-- it looks like the murders are telegraphed ON the poster...

PS. I watched Blood and Black Lace last year on TCM and I was struck by two things: (1)Its great color scheme and (2) the lingering and bare-knuckled brutality against women on a rather continual basis. Against this both Psycho AND Frenzy seemed, if not quite tame, at least stylized away from such gratuitious overkill. Blood and Black Lace seemed to revel in the beating and strangling and stabbing of women for lingering sequences that turned me right off.

I'm a Psycho fan who doesn't much like psycho movies.

[–] swanstep (2615) 6 years ago

The Psychopath emerges from this period as one of the first British entries in the field(Peeping Tom was made w/o Psycho as a forbear)

P-66 feels a little indebted to Peeping Tom but it's far less interesting.

Reading around about P-66, it's clear that it flailed a bit in production and in post. There were reshoots to heighten the various kills and the killer (i.e., of the two main suspects) was changed in the edit! The commentary track on the blu-ray covers this too but I didn't have the patience to sit through the whole film a second time right away to hear all that. The upshot, however, is that it's probably inappropriate to credit/blame Bloch for many of P-66's details. The final version we have is the product of a lot of hands at the end trying to stitch something presentable together - classic slightly chaotic B-movie in other words - not the execution of a detailed master-plan a la A-movie lifers like Hitchcock and Powell.

More evidence of chaos: as I mentioned earlier, we keep expecting some connection to be made between Judy Huxtable's doll-like-ness and the killer's dolls, but none ever is. We keep expecting some twist with the horrifying mother (who's obsessed with dolls). She's supposed to have been the wife of a bigshot German industrialist during WW2, who was stripped of assets after the war after being framed for using slave (presumably concentration camp inmate) labor. Since the mother in fact acts like some sort of crazed Nazi we expect it to be revealed that, yes, her husband was framed but, ha-ha, he did have slaves on the side somewhere to make her damned dolls or she did. But this shoe never drops either. There's business with Huxtable's fiance that never pays off either.