PSYCHOMANIA is the greatest film about a gang of British frog-worshipping zombie bikers ever made. Admittedly it’s also the only film about a gang of British frog-worshipping zombie bikers ever made but don’t let that get in the way.
First caught by many, myself included, on a late-night TV screening – when the effects of a few beers often left you wondering the next morning if you’d really seen it at all – Psychomania remains a B-movie masterpiece of oddball British film-making at its finest. The fact that the BFI have seen fit to restore it and unleash it on blu-ray is a cause for serious cult celebration.
Released in 1973, it told the tale of a bunch of polite, middle-class British bikers called The Living Dead. Their leader Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) discovers that if you make a pact with a devilish frog you can return to life after you die. It seems his mother (Beryl Reid) has somehow sussed out this unlikely fact in collaboration with her moody manservant (George Sanders) and Tom decides to make the most of it.
This mostly consists of raking around early-70s shopping centres revving up their mostly clapped-out bikes and blowing raspberries to old ladies in rollers but there’s tons of fun to be had in the detail on show here.
It’s there in the costumes the bikers wear. One minute they’re all togged out in black leather with their cute little name tags shining out colourfully, the next they’re resplendent in knitted waistcoats and hippy garb as they listen to a folk lament for their leader Tom who they, initially, believe is actually dead.
Honestly you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the song Riding Free strummed at the graveside. Watching Tom roar out of the grave fully leathered up on his trusty bike might just be one of the greatest moments in horror movie history, by the way.
TV veteran Don Sharp directs with a spooky, dreamlike quality at times often capturing the bikers and their riders rolling across the English countryside in creepy slow motion and the score from John Cameron is as fresh and wah-wah-pedal funky as anything you’d find Shaft wallowing around in.
There’s even a Pythonesque humour at play as the clueless gang of well-spoken troublemakers kill themselves in increasingly bizarre ways. Tom roars of a motorway bridge into a lake while others jump from tower blocks and even weigh themselves down with heavy chains before chucking themselves in the strangely shallow looking local river.
Only Tom’s mousey girlfriend Abby (Mary Larkin) refuses to cross over to the other side and it’s her reticence that leads to gang’s inevitable downfall.
Through all this madness the great George Sanders looks on balefully wondering how he ever wound up in such swinging nonsense. That he would kill himself a few months after the film wrapped only adds to the pathos in his performance.
Roundly rubbished by contemporary critics and, if the entertaining extras here are to be believed, most of the cast, Psychomania stands proud as an odd but genuinely charming artefact of more innocent times.
