Help Me... I'm Possessed

Set in a tacky faux castle in the middle of the desert, and featuring those mainstays of trashy horror, the mad doctor and his hunchbacked assistant, Help Me...I'm Possessed is a prime slice of '70s drive-in schlock, complete with torture, murder, and a bargain-basement Lovecraftian creature mutilating innocent folk.

Bill Greer plays Dr. Arthur Blackwood, who professes to be attempting to rid the world of the inner evil that lurks in every man and woman, but who isn't above experimenting on his patients, and killing them whenever necessary (his torture dungeon even features a guillotine). Deedy Peters is the doctor's unsuspecting wife Diane, who visits the Blackwood Sanitarium, where she meets her husband's one success story, his sister Melanie (Lynne Marta), once unpredictably violent but now a harmless woman-child.

Unfortunately, the process used to achieve results involves the physical manifestation of the patient's evil, and one such malevolent creature (which looks like strands of spaghetti being dangled over the camera lens) is loose in the desert, killing the locals.

Directed with a ham-fist by Charles Nizet, this gloriously inept piece of z-grade horror delivers just enough deviancy to make it a fun time for fans of grindhouse garbage: a victim has her legs cut off so that she will fit in a crate, a sadistic redheaded nurse is stripped and sealed in a box with a venomous snake, and a man is decapitated on the guillotine. Another nurse is pursued through the woods by the 'evil tentacles' in a scene reminiscent of The Evil Dead (the woman even ends up in a wooden cabin - is Sam Raimi a fan by any chance?). None of this is in the least bit scary, the minimal gore is unconvincing, the acting is atrocious, and the film does drag in places, but it's all so kitsch and campy that it's hard not to like to some degree.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

I don't like to rush to judgment, but sometimes movies make it woefully easy to do so. From the moment this begins its production values are so extraordinarily low that it seems unfair to any other given work to draw comparison. Just as much to the point, it becomes necessary to actively restrain oneself from flying off the handle with effusive, bewildered, profanity-laden criticism of the writing, direction, and acting. I'm not inclined to doubt the earnestness of anyone's effort, mind you, but that just makes it all the more sad that their capabilities are sorely lacking. I plainly recognize how hard some folks are trying, and sometimes their contributions produce reasonably appreciable results. "Sometimes" and "reasonably appreciable" don't get us very far, however, and the simple truth is that "Help me... I'm possessed" is a rough ride from the very start. It's not entirely rotten, but the entertainment to be had here is vanishingly little.

There's no aspect of the film that doesn't suffer from the low skill level of the participants. Some individuals, and some odds and ends, irregularly come off better than others, but that's unfortunately about the best that can be said. Nearer the upper end of the spectrum of quality one might cite actors Dorothy Green and Lynne Marta, the somewhat atmospheric music and sound effects (even though they are sometimes misused), the chief filming location, and the production design and art direction. Commonly inhabiting the lower end of that spectrum, there's not only Charles Nizet's direction and all facets of Bill Greer and Deedy Peters' writing, but also much of the rest of the acting, including that of Greer and Jim Dean; the editing, and the cinematography; and even the lighting. Even making allowances for a low budget quite insults amateur filmmakers of subsequent years, who have sometimes achieved great things with even less resources at their disposal.

There are workable ideas here, perhaps, but they are mostly treated poorly in the screenplay, and maybe even more poorly in execution. In a diminutive runtime we're more than halfway through before we're greeted with one sequence - only one - that comes off fairly well in its entirety. In the last twenty minutes or so it seems that the picture is building toward a sinister reveal, but the payoff only feels like half a thought, and is far less than fully convincing. In fact, the last stretch including the climax might be the sloppiest portion of all, in every regard, and to be frank I'm just not sure what Nizet, Greer, or Peters thought they were doing. From top to bottom 'Help me... I'm possessed' is a mess, and that some scattered tidbits find more success than others seems like a stroke of pure luck more than the result of the effort anyone applied. I guess I'm glad for those who get more out of this than I did, but I'm not sure how they manage to do so.

My recommendation is to just not ever bother with this in the first place. Only those with inexhaustible curiosity could have any motivation to watch, and for as floundering as the whole is with scant, minor exception, the feature just isn't worth anyone's time.

"I have to admit, when I saw Mr Solov's body, I felt a definite sexual thrill." Dr Blackwood So here's an odd one...

A doctor has an asylum (not a castle) out in the desert somewhere, with a hunchback servant, mute chauffeur and a take Cat & mouse pair who live in harmony together.

It's reminiscent in its basic premise of the old Universal horrors of the 30's and Hammer Horrors. The 'castle' looks like it came flat packed from Ikea and the effects are just bizarre : bloody spaghetti wiggling in front of black screen?!

The patients are little more than medieval dungeon-dwellers and seem to be kept, tormented and tortured at the whim of the doctor and Igor.

Doctor Blackwood's theory is that he can latent extract evil from things and destroy it (as the Cat & mouse prove) ... so can "cure" his patients.

From there on in any semblance of proper plot or ideas behind it all seem to sort of, well, go mad.

Watchable but ridiculous.

"Help Me...I'm Possessed" stars Bill Greer (who also wrote the story & screenplay) as the mad Dr. Arthur Blackwood, who presides over a bevy of mental patients in a sanitarium / castle located way out in the desert. This mad doctor has an unusual idea of what to do with mental illness; meanwhile, his wife Diane (Deedy Peters, who wrote the script with Greer) is concerned and does some snooping around.

Basically 77 minutes of hilarious, stupid trash, this amusingly inane, crude movie trots out the expected exploitable elements, including scantily clad ladies, depravity, torture, and gore. The acting is sincere if not terribly competent, although a lot of the characters are pretty insipid. There's also a "monster" which we don't *really* see except for a flurry of incoherent movement, and images of what look like intestines flapping at the screen.

Accompanied by what I have to assume is library music, "Help Me...I'm Possessed" has wallowed in obscurity for a long time; I won't kid people that it's some lost gem in need of re-discovery, but I *will* say that if you dig these little independent horror-exploitation movies, then the movie *is* good for some entertainment.

Co-star Lynne Marta, who plays Blackwoods' disturbed sister, had a pretty good career (she passed away in 2024) that included lots of TV appearances as well as roles in such major motion pictures as "Joe Kidd", the original "Footloose", and "3 Men and a Little Lady". Greer himself later became a supervising producer on many episodes of 'Charles in Charge'.

Five out of 10.

This practically unknown 1970s gore movie was "presented by" Will Zens, the guy who made TO THE SHORES OF HELL (1966), THE STARFIGHTERS (1964), and SPY SQUAD (1961), all memorably daffy Z-movies. HELP ME, I'M POSSESSED, slackly directed by Charles (VOODOO HEARTBEAT) Nizet, has an anything-goes quality that cuts through the subpar acting, dialog, and plot.

Arthur Blackwood is a psychiatrist treating hopelessly crazy patients at his private sanitarium in the Nevada desert. He's a bit hopelessly crazy, too, with his torture chamber basement -- complete with a guillotine -- and a twitchy, hunchbacked assistant, Carl. When a patient dies, Carl hacks her to pieces with a hatchet while, nearby, one of the imprisoned madmen gets very visibly excited. It's that kind of movie.

Blackwood's experiments on his sister have created a barely-seen tentacled creature that lives in caves near the sanitarium. It makes sounds like the inside of a kennel just before the dogs get fed. Blackwood describes her having a "disembodied sense of evil" that lives in all people, which he was able to bring to life. Instead of taking his amazing discovery to the scientific community, Blackwood sends it out to murder local teens and cops.

A rather dim Sheriff shows up a number of times, questioning the increasingly belligerent and paranoid doctor. Bill Greer, who plays Blackwood, also wrote the incredibly lame dialog. For example:

BLACKWOOD: Death is a state of mind.

Later, when Blackwood's sister meets the Sheriff:

WOMAN (to Sheriff): Are you a real sheriff?

SHERIFF: As a far as I know...

When Blackwood's wife Diane (Deedy Peters) shows up, the movie picks up a bit. The doctor's mute chauffeur makes a pass at Diane, so Blackwood puts out one of his eyes with a hot poker -- "If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out," he rants.

When a male patient gets loose and attempts to torture a near-naked woman, Blackwood tosses her into a coffin with a poisonous snake and closes the lid. The patient refuses to repent his sins, so Blackwood decapitates him in the guillotine as he quotes scripture. Later, Diane finds her husband's notes while snooping around his lab, in which he writes, "When I saw his head severed from his body, I felt a definite sexual thrill."

Other riotous elements include the Sheriff's office set, which features a bright green prop phone; the filmmakers' desire to use women with red or silver hair; and a mouse that kills a cat (off-screen).

Also known as THE POSSESSED! And VANGITTU.