Psycho Girls

I watched what I believe to be the MGM video version of Psycho Girls, with additional scenes of violence spliced in from an Italian language source. The inclusion of the gory moments made this otherwise atrocious movie marginally more bearable, but the dull plot and several bizarre drawn-out scenes still had me dozing off at regular intervals.

The film concerns a young girl, Sarah Tusk (Darlene Mignacco), who is sent to an asylum after lacing her parents' breakfast with rat poison. Years later, the nutty woman escapes, and, with the help of a few other fellow lunatics, sets out to capture and kill anyone who has upset her. This slim plot allows for some reasonably mean-spirited proto-'torture porn', as the crazies mutilate, electrocute and shoot their victims, but the bulk of the film is so mind-bogglingly strange in execution that one spends more time wondering what the hell is happening and why than recoiling in horror.

The story is narrated by a Raymond Chandler-esque crime novelist and comes complete with typewriter interstitials; there is an amazingly offbeat dinner party scene in which the characters have a long and boring philosophical discussion; and we get a very weird moment where the psychos take a rest from torturing their prisoners to perform dialogue from their favourite classic movies. Sarah adds to the eccentricity by taking make-up tips from Frank N. Furter and acting totally cuckoo. All of this unorthodox behaviour proves irritating in the extreme.

The 'good stuff' includes a man having his faced slashed with a razor and his ear cut off (could QT be a fan?), a woman stripped and placed in a bath of water where she is given a few hundred volts, and someone having their toenails extracted, plus a 'twist' finalé which involves bloody meat-cleaver action. All of this might be fairly harrowing if it wasn't for the abject strangeness (I hesitate to call it comedy, even though IMDb classes it as such).

1.5/10, generously rounded up to 2 for the really sweaty sex scene.

Crazy… random… smutty… daft. All of this rolls up one in this creaky oddball bargain-basement Canadian comedy horror shocker. It's a hard one to grasp, as sometimes you're not quite sure if this is suppose to be a comedy due to its over-the-top nature. Be it, it does have some witty remarks and tongue-in-cheek comic inclusions. But the problem here is that some sequences can be somewhat of a chore to sit through. Especially the long-winded dinner scene (the usual chat about psychology and the condition of the human brain) and drawn-out acts between the torture sequences.

The plot is just as makeshift as its production. A women who was committed for the horrific crime of her parents over two decades ago escapes from a mental hospital along with two other runaways to hunt down her sister. In what seems like revenge for keeping her committed, as she is her guardian. There she finds her sister working as a cook for a well-off, cynical pulp writer.

For me to go on would be only spoiling the story, but when she finds her sister. Then everything kind of goes pear shape. Making such little sense. Don't try to understand. As then it comes to its torture ceremony and this is where the story loses shape and becomes utter, unhinged hysteria. The director throws around cheap thrills, spotty decors and tacky blood splatter (although sometimes things do happen off-screen), only to heighten the nightmarish atmosphere and threatening anxiety the further along it transcends. The script is low brow, but there are some amusingly smarting remarks (John Haslett Cuff's writer character) and the human mind discussion (curing a diseased mind) feels like it's there to justify its twisted ending. The acting is on the raw side, but Darlene Mignacco's morbidly mania performance is downright uneasy… especially in appearance.

A wickedly trashy low-rent psychotic horror comedy.

"You simply turned me into you".

This is quite equivalent an 1980's Canadian lower budget film and it has the elements of those older, campy horror slasher films from that time period. The film starts with an apparent flashback scene but it's not evident until later, with a teenage girl killer her parents by poisoning their food. Nothing is explained why she did this. Then the film fast forwards to about twenty minutes later.

The film has a very slow build and is quite boring to start, including a bizarre overly long dinner scene with the lead couple and four of their friends.

The first half isn't great but we continue watching. The main central plot revolving around the escapee "Pyscho Girl" sister from the asylum poisoning these six people at their dinner house. The woman mentions being the sister of the maid so that's how she's able to get in the couples house.

From there, it really starts at the empty facility with each member being tied up and the three convicts committing different types of deaths kills to them. One involves slashing of a character's throat, another is an electrocuting in a bathtub, another a simple gun shot to the head. Eventually the lead man of the couple escape from being tied up and starts attacking them.

The final twenty minutes were easily the highlight as there were some gory kills and it becomes more interesting. A lot if silly decisions by the villains. But overall, nothing is really noteworthy or that memorable.

There is also narration throughout which completely takes away from the film.

My review was written in June 1987 after watching the movie on MGM/UA video cassette.

"Psycho Girls" is a Toronto-made horror thriller that self-destructs. Shot at the end of 1984, it was released marginally last summer by Cannon and is now a home video title.

Pic begins quite promisingly with pulp detective story writer Richard Fotr (John Haslett Cuff) pounding away at his typewriter and narrating a tale with colorful quips like "What is money anyway, but paper with germs on it?". Unfortunately, the tall tale he relates soon switches from suspense to sadistic Grand Guignol horror of little interest.

Tale begins in 1966 when young parents are murdered by their daughter Sarah with a poisoned meal on their anniversary. Fifteen years later Sarah's an inmate of Lakeview Asylum who escapes to revenge herself on older sister Victoria, who predictably was the real murderer though Sarah took the rap.

Victoria is working as Foster's cook, and Sarah shows up as her replacement after offing her sister. She drugs the food at an anniversary dinner party thrown by Foster and his wife Diana, and then, aided by two crazy henchmen, proceeds to torture and murder them one by one. Punchline of how the humble narrator/writer is mixed up in this mayhem is lifted from Billy Wilder's "Sunset Blvd.".

With the promised gore mainly occurring off-screen, the resulting film is neither fish nor fowl, with little to recommend it to that target gross-out audience. Pity that filmmaker Gerard Ciccoritti (who shows up on screen in a cameo looking a lot like Judd Nelson as a pizza delivery boy) couldn't have stuck to hard-boiled fiction with dialog to match.

Cast is weak, hampered by very artificial post-synched dialog (with other folks' voices in some cases, per the end credits).

Long-suppressed in the United States, PSYCHO GIRLS deserves some recognition as one of the more brutal films I've seen. In 1966, a young girl poisons her parents after giving them a greeting card covered with happy valentine's hearts. Years later, Victoria (Agi Gallus), works as a housekeeper and cook for the Fosters, (John Haslett Cutt and Rose Graham), a wealthy city couple. Her sister, Sarah (Darlene Mignacco), phones to tell her she has been released from the Lakeview mental hospital. Even though Victoria was the one who killed the parents, Sarah was incarcerated.

Victoria agrees to meet Sarah at the long-shuttered sanitarium. However, Sarah, now completely insane and vengeful, kills her sister and journeys to the Fosters home, where she assumes the role of cook. The Fosters are thrilled -- to them, Victoria deserted them on the eve of a big dinner party. Sarah cooks and serves her sister as the main course, drugs the Fosters and their bourgeois guests (which includes a pompous psychologist), ties them up and takes them to Lakeview hospital, where she plans to murder them. Sarah joins with two henchmen, who crack jokes as they stab, impale, electrocute, slice, and pull out the toenails of their victims.

PSYCHO GIRLS is leaden at first, with campy scenes that tease the viewer about where the story is going. For example, there's a slapstick sex scene that turns incredibly violent, and the opening murder scene provides a bit of "arsenic and old lace"-style humor. The black humor extends into the concluding massacre sequence, but the film works better as an attack on Reagan-era affluence and questions the usefulness of psychology to cure maniacs.

A systematic put-down of the latter subject forms the movie's main theme -- in the opening sequence (Victoria convinces Sarah's doctor to keep her in the hospital indefinitely); the Foster's dinner scene, which features an extended philosophical debate on science versus the soul; and the massacre sequence, in which Sarah sarcastically interviews and then murders the psychologist. In Ciccoritti's vision, it doesn't pay to be a mental health professional (two of them are killed here).

Despite some disturbing violence, PSYCHO GIRLS pulls some punches. As we learn of the injustices heaped upon Sarah, we are expected to side with her because the Fosters are pompous and vain. Yet, when Sarah kicks off her gory retribution, she becomes a wide-eyed monstrosity. Ciccoritti apparently doesn't want us to identify with any of the characters, and puts us off by having them recite lengthy diatribes that inexorably lead back to Freud, the nature of the human brain, or mental health.

Ciccoritti employs numerous Brechtian devices to keep us emotionally distant. For instance, every so often a narrator intrudes on the action; and the actors playing Sarah's henchmen are instructed to act giggly-mad, their wacky behavior adding a cartoonish spin on the death scenes. The Grand Guignol finale, presided over by Sarah in a fright wig and carried out in front of a shrine containing a large photo of Freud, documents the characters' protracted death throes through further Brechtian applications, such as a distorted lens, whirling camera angles, and staging that approximates a theatrical play. Although these scenes are pushed at us as The Ultimate Horror, we aren't allowed to identify with the characters enough so as to care.

The Multivision release of PSYCHO GIRLS reviewed here, an Italian-language video, is probably the most complete version around. The MGM video release is missing almost all of the violent scenes and seriously hurting the film's impact.