Like the director's prior "The Pink Angels"--an incongruous, campy gay biker movie made at the height of the conventional biker-movie trend--this is a movie with a small cult following because of its outrageous concept, but hard to actually sit through because it's so poorly executed. A children's TV puppet show host who already seems rather creepily infantile (like Peewee Herman minus the humor) becomes aware that some children in his audience and neighborhood are the subject of abuse from their variably drunken, slovenly or just sadistic parents. So he begins stalking and murdering them, as police investigate the trail of crimes.
It's not at all a bad idea, but "Psychopath" aka "An Eye for an Eye" seems oblivious to how badly its elements match up. The actor who plays "Mr. Rabbey" (the kidshow host) gives one of those bug-eyed, over-the-top performances that at first makes you think "Where's he gonna go with this?!?" Then you realize he's not going anywhere with it--that weird, artificial, simultaneously effeminate and childish affect is all he's got in his bag of tricks. It makes his character silly, rather than frightening, and underlines the absurdity of other, normal-acting figures not discerning that Mr. Rabbey is a mental case from the get-go. The other performances range from shrill caricatures (the bad parents) to routine competence (everyone else).
But given its bad-taste conceit, you'd think "Psychopath" would have some fun with it. Nuh-uh. It's dully earnest, with no flair for suspense or even violence (the latter is generally kept to an on-screen minimum), the utterly middle-of-the-road aesthetic of an early 1970s TV movie, and seemingly no awareness at all that even Mr. Rabbey's TV show comes off as grotesque. (We're told the kids just love him, but that's laughable--Anthony Perkins in "Psycho" would have more juvenile appeal.) You'd think this story could only be played as black comedy, yet the film is as simplistically sincere about saying "child abuse is bad" as a PSA. And that social ill is presented in such crude terms, you can't even accept the sincerity of the message--it's on the level as a warning of "stranger danger" painting that peril as consisting of middle-aged men in trenchcoats skulking behind suburban shrubbery.
As a curio, this might be worth looking at for five minutes, in which span you'll get as much as you're going to get from the whole feature--nothing improves, or surprises, later on. But it's pretty abysmal, and even the elements that are relatively professional (in terms of technical polish and some performances) only serve to blandly take the edge off whatever tension or shock value was intended here.
