Help Me... I'm Possessed

Help Me... I'm Possessed (1974)

** (out of 4)

After a couple bodies are discovered the local sheriff goes to visit Dr. Blackwood (Bill Greer) who is running a sanitarium with his wife (Deedy Peters). Even though the doctor is acting suspicious there's nothing the sheriff can do. However, what the doctor is really up to includes a basement full of torture devices as well as woman chained up.

HELP ME... I'M POSSESSED is a film that not too many have heard of and that's somewhat too bad because this is certainly a bizarre little film that is worth watching if you're a fan of those no-budget drive-in films that are sadly no longer made. If you're looking for some sort of art film or Oscar-winner then you can obviously skip this.

What makes the film work is the fact that it is campy in all the right spots and that includes the lead performance from Greer. He plays the type of mad scientist that we've seen countless times over the years and he so fun doing it that you can't help but enjoy the character. It certainly doesn't hurt that you've got some really nutty scenes in the basement where a lot of the fun comes from.

This fun includes a lot of ladies either chained to the wall or stuck in cages. You've got some very silly and over-the-top scenes where the women are being tortured and in a lot of ways this reminded me of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS, which was released a few years after this and pushed the subject matter to the extreme. The ending is also pretty wild in its own way.

With all of that being said, there's no doubt that there are plenty of flaws including the pacing of the picture but at the same time it does well enough for what it was trying to accomplish.

This is what Manos, The Hands of Fate would have looked like if they had an extra $100 for set construction. Don't get me wrong, I really like bad movies.... But I didn't like this one. This is one of those films that makes you wonder how the cast kept from laughing long enough to get any scenes shot at all...

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.

"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.

"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.