Psychotic Cinema

Genre: Italian Horror 

In Victorian era London, the accomplished Dr Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) excels in his profession where he is developing new medicine and surgical procedures, but he has a dark side – and it is a very dark side - for Dr Hichcock enjoys practicing necrophilia.

At home in his large mansion he creeps down stairs at night and enters a locked room. There, his beautiful wife lies waiting looking weak and frail. He kisses and caresses her body and then injects her with a serum. She reacts badly to it and convulses and dies. Heart-broken, Dr Hichcock leaves his long standing career at the hospital and movies away from London, leaving his house in the hands of his maid.

Ten years pass and Dr Hichcock arrives back in London and returns to his new home. The ten years have been kind to him and he has with him a new wife - the beautiful Cynthia (Barbara Steele). Dr Hichcock returns to his job at the hospital and now you would think everything would be fine again, but that is not so.

Strange things are afoot in the house and Cynthia fears that the ghost of his previous wife walks its corridors. To make matters worse she can not escape her presence because the previous wife's pictures adorn the walls and her pet black cat is never far away, and on top of that, Dr Hichcock has begun to change for the worse.

Cynthia befriends her husband’s colleague, the young Dr. Kurt Lowe (Silvano Tranquilli), and tells him of her concerns. He, too, has noticed a change in Dr Hichcock which is exasperated by Dr Hichcock regularly being caught in the mortuary acting suspiciously with the bodies of newly deceased beautiful girls.


Cynthia’s health begins to deteriorate, and Dr Hichcock attributes it to stress and so prescribes her medication. After she has taken it she ends up in a drugged state and isn’t able to distinguish between reality and hallucinations. At one point she finds herself strapped into a cot with Dr Hichcock approaching from out of the darkness with his face horribly deformed.

Suspecting that her problems are maybe not stress related, but caused by the medication, Cynthia pretends to drink the medication, but instead hides the liquid and is able to pass it on to Dr Lowe, who takes it to the hospital for tests. The test results show that the dosage was more than enough to kill Cynthia. Soon it becomes a race for time for Dr Lowe to save Cynthia’s life as she is taken captive by the mad doctor who is threatening to cut her throat. All the while, the ghost of the dead wife continues to appear.


This is a really good Italin horror movie and is beautifully produced with great camera work. As with many Italian horror movies of this type, it is steeped in atmosphere with dark catacombs leading to crypts full of old dusty coffins.

Barbara Steele is absolutely stunning in this movie and this is one of her best performances. British actor, Robert Flemyng, is excellent as the Dr Hitchock as he successfully presents the air of professionalism to his colleagues in the medical profession while secretly lusting over the corpse of a beautiful young girl.


Director Riccardo Freda has been called a director "who brings some style to exploitation pictures" and he was one of the originators of horror fantasy in Italian cinema beginning with his Lust of the Vampire (1956). This led to a renaissance in Italian horror films which has resulted in them having the cult following that they have today

Riccardo Freda would also dabble in other genres such as peplum, espionage and even a spaghetti western.

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962)

Genre: Horror/Black Comedy

British film director Freddie Francis has been responsible for some of the best British horror movies of the 60’s and 70’s, notably Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Tales from the Crypt (1972) and The Creeping Flesh (1973) as well as an assortment of episodes for cult TV shows.

One lesser known film of his is Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly or the shorter Girly as it is known in US.

The film follows a very British, but very strange family, who are all role-playing at being the perfect family, minus the father. The teenage son and daughter characters, Sonny (Howard Trevor) and Girly (Vanessa Howard), play at being much younger than they really are by singing nursery rhymes, playing games and sleeping in giant baby cots. The mother, known as Mumsy (Ursula Howells), with the help of Nanny (Pat Heywood) mollycoddle these two over-grown infants.

There is also a strange relationship between Mumsy and Nanny as Nanny sleeps at the foot of Mumsy's bed.

Apart from this family being very strange, all should be well except there is a sinister nature to their role-playing. It’s not just that Girly likes to tear the limbs off her baby dolls, but they like to have a “friend” to come and join them in their warped games.

Girly, Sonny and New Friend

So where do they find their new “friends”? …In the local park!

Picking-up homeless down-and-outs, they tempt them back to the family’s stately home with the promise of booze and maybe more from the flirtatious Girly.

Once back at their home these men are made to take part in the family role-plays and even though they protest, they must dress as school boys and act as children. Once their usefulness has ended, they are “sent to the angels”.


Mumsy starts to become bored of using down-and-outs, so advises Sonny and Girly to find someone better. This leads the two demented adolescents to pick-up New Friend (Michael Bryant), but first they must dispose of his wife.

Now you would think that New Friend would be panicking - what with his wife murdered and also the threats and violence from the games, but New Friend has other ideas. He first seduces Mumsy and it isn’t long before he also seduces Girly. This is her first sexual experience with a man and it momentarily distracts her from her role-play and makes her normal for a few minutes.

Tensions rise when Nanny becomes jealous of the other two receiving all the affections of New Friend and isn't long before Sonny discovers his sister’s secret. Sonny then propositions that New Friend must now be “sent to the angels”.

This is a great film. It is so weird. The whole time the family never breakout of their role-play and continually speak in baby talk and rhyme. Only momentarily does Girly become her true age after she looses her virginity to New Friend.

Michael Bryant is great as New Friend. A man of little principle, who even when in a precarious situation as this, thinks only of satisfying his sexual needs. But he is clever because with this, he knows that he has power over the women in the group.

Vanessa Howard is good as Girly – one minute dancing around singing rhymes, the next seductively seducing and teasing their “friend”.

As a side note, Venessa Howard is maybe familiar to those who have seen the excellent Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968) where she played the character Audrey. She cut short a relatively promising acting career sighting one of the reasons being how Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly and What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972) had disappeared without trace. She ended up marrying Hollywood Mogul Robert Chartoff and now lives in Beverly Hills.


The copy I watched was from a bootleg video, so the quality wasn't too good, but I see the film has just been released on DVD.

If you like demented British horror with a twist of back humour, then you will love Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly.

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970)

Genre: Asian 'Flying Head' Horror

Now, if you want to watch one crazy Taiwanese horror, you can’t look much further than The Witch with Flying Head. This one has it all…

As this film was in Mandarin and had no subtitles, this is what I’ve gleaned from the story:

There are three sisters and one day they are visited by an evil wizard, who is in fact a giant snake when he’s not in his human form.

He makes a demand to one of the girls and as punishment puts a curse on her. He does this by shooting some snakes out of his eyes which land on the ground and slither under the girl’s dress. The snakes then enter her you-know-where. Cut to a shot of the snake slithering around in her internal organs next to her beating heart.

Later that evening while the girl is alone, two serpent’s fangs suddenly appear protruding upwards from out of her mouth. Then her head lifts off from her body carrying with it her entrails, including her beating heart. The head then flies through the air and attacks two men out in the street. The head bites into their necks and drinks their blood before returning back to her body.

The sisters call in the help of two monks who perform rituals to remove the girl’s curse. These seem to be succeeding until the evil snake wizard appears and is able to kill the two monks using his magic and the help of the flying head.

The sisters move from their family home to a small shack near the forest. Meanwhile, the girl who is cursed falls in love with a young man and it isn’t long before she gives birth to a baby daughter. All of this happens in between the others having to regularly battle with her flying head when it flies off to drink human blood.

The daughter grows to a young child and is one night nearly killed by her mother’s flying head. She is only saved by one of the sister’s putting herself between the flying head and the girl and in doing so sacrifices her own life.

This all leads to a final showdown in the forest between the flying head, the evil snake wizard, the male lover and a good wizard.

This is a great movie and a great example of a Taiwanese horror. It is completely over the top with the flying head and the beating organs hanging from it, plus lots of real snakes either crawling on bloodied organs or being vomited out alive, lots of gore, and weird Taoist magic with laser beams being fired out of eyes and explosions.

This looks and feels like a Shaw Brother’s production with the story taking place long ago and interspersed with some kung-fu, but in fact it was made by a small production company. Sadly, because of this, all the original prints seem to have been lost and the only one available seems to have been taken from a bad VHS copy.

Although made in 1977, much of the music has been lifted from other more recent movies, notably The Black Hole (1979), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Star Trek 2 (1982).

The lead is played by actress Chan Mei Wa, who has also appeared in other crazy period pieces such as The Magic Blade (1976) and Flying Guillotine 2 (1978). The evil snake wizard is played by Yue Feng, who made his fair share of bizarre martial arts movies including Return of the 18 Bronzemen (1976). You can view the trailer here.

Director Cheung Yan Git had a prolific career making 19 movies from 1971 to 1993.

I don’t know what it is about Taiwanese movies, they always seem a bit more far-out than their Chinese counterparts. If only someone could start hunting for good quality prints and releasing them with subtitles, there would be a crowd of hungry fans eager to see them.

In the meantime, try and find yourself a copy of The Witch with Flying Head. Even though it’s only in Mandarin, it’s easy to follow and very accessible. You’ll definitely be guaranteed an evening’s viewing like you’ve never had before.

The Witch with Flying Head (1977)

Genre: Asian Horror

Yes, that is how they’ve spelt zombie in this movie – no “e”.

This Hong Kong horror movie is set in Thailand where a visiting HK archaeologist (Lau Siu-Gwan) goes on a dig with his sister Ching Ching (Chang Siu-Yin) and her boyfriend Peter.

They drive out to a small village where the archaeologist meets the pretty Anne and her father, who is the village headman. Incidentally, the headman is also an archaeologist and he knows of a nearby site of buried ancient artefacts.

Meanwhile, the local waistcoat wearing bully known as Master Tiger and his two dumb accomplices has his sights set on Anne, but she's not interested in him and rejects his advances. In anger, he declares that if he can’t have her, then no one will and goes to seek help from his father, who just happens to be the local sorcerer. They both get to work on creating a spell to exact revenge.


As part of the ritual, Master Tiger's father asks him to dig up a coffin and to open the lid. Then the sorcerer proceeds to eat a live gheko lizard, after which he opens his mouth and from out which shoots two large blue glowing sperm like shapes which shoot into the coffin and brings the dead body back to life.

Meanwhile, the archaeologist and his group are out in a cave digging for artefacts when they are terrorized by Master Tiger’s dumb accomplices who have dressed themselves as ghosts.

On returning to the village the group discover two of the locals have been murdered, so the village headman goes to visit a sorceress to find out who was responsible.

After going into a possessed trance, she informs him that it was the evil sorcerer behind it. On hearing the news, the villagers capture the evil sorcerer and burn him to death, but not before he has taught Master Tiger his black magic. The movie then becomes a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ magic as the group, with the help of the sorceress, battle Master Tiger and his zombie.


Master Tiger is able to use ‘worm blood magic’ in which the actor stuffs his mouth full of live wiggling large white maggots and proceeds to chew them up. In response, the sorceress is able to summon a number of imps to counter his magic.

When most of the inhabitants of the village are killed, there is a final showdown between the group, with the help of the sorceress and Master Tiger.

The end credits included out-take bloopers.

This is an average Hong Kong horror, but still contains the elements I enjoy such as weird magic rituals, laser beams shooting out of eyes and battling imps, as well as a chase flying through the air in the jungle. But as story goes, it’s nothing special if you’ve seen these types of movies before.

Lau Siu-Gwan, who plays the archeologist, is a prolific actor, producer and director and has performed in a number of HK horrors and Shaw Brothers’ martial arts movies, notably Corpse Mania (1981), Hex after Hex (1982), Secret Service of the Imperial Court (1984) and Disciples of the 36th Chamber (1985).

Chang Siu-Yin, who plays the cute Ching Ching can also be seen in the weird Taoist magic film Witchcraft Vs Curse (1991) and one of my favorite HK sexy ghost movies, Erotic Ghost Story II (1991).

This seems to be the director Lee Ho’s only film.

Curse of the Zombi (1989, or maybe 1991)

Genre: Mexican Horror

In this Mexican horror movie we start with Dr. Satan who is deep down in the caverns of Hell being told by Lucifer that he has one more chance to return to the living and to find the black magician and vampire Yei Lin.

Yei Lin has discovered the “Sorensen Formula” which can transform base metals into gold using a device like a ray gun. He must kill Yei Lin and bring back the formula (you would think the Devil would be powerful enough already to turn base metals into gold). If Dr Satan fails, he will never have eternal peace.

With that unpleasant prospect in mind, Dr Satan returns to the world of the living and is back in his office interviewing young girls. When he finds a suitable one, he injects her with a syringe and turns her into a zombie.

With two girls as zombies, he returns to his laboratory where the girls sleep in open coffins. At night he sends them out to search for Yei Lin.

In the meantime, the police are trying to track down Yei Lin, who is planning to fly to Hong Kong. These policeman don’t seem too bright because Yei Lin continues to experiment with his device in his laboratory while his pretty assistant, Medussa, sit’s on the reception desk.

When one nosey security guard enters she murders him by fireing some guns built into the reception desk.

Soon Dr. Satan’s female zombies discover the whereabouts of Yei Lin and the rest of the movie is a tit-for-tat between these two forces of evil.

With Yei Lin's supernatural powers, he is able to transform himself into a very fake looking bat which can then suck the blood from its victims. Because he can turn into a vampire, he can also be killed with a stake through the heart. Yei Lin also has some henchmen to assist in his evil crimes.

Dr Satan must use his suppeirior cunning and while Dr Satan and Yei Lin battle for the formula, the police are getting ever nearer.

Directed by Rogelio A. González, who has made some pretty strange films in his time including the 1960 sci-fi movie Ship of Monsters (1960), which contains some of the strangest aliens ever put to celluloid

Like many Mexican horror movies, Dr. Satan versus Black Magic can be a bit slow at times. It’s also difficult to root for any of the characters as the two leads are both as evil as each other. The police are secondary and hardly come into the story.

That’s the down side to this movie, but don’t let that deter you because this movie is bizarre. What stood out for me were the sound effects, especially in Dr Satan’s Laboratory and Yei Lin’s ray gun device. These sounds are a psychedelic smorgasboard of freakin' weirdness

Luis Hernández Bretón produced the soundtrack which reuses the avant-garde music he wrote for two earlier vampire movies, El Vampiro Sangriento (The Bloody Vampire) (1962) and La Invasión de los Vampiros (The Invasion of the Vampires) (1963).

Another thing which stands out with this movie is the surrealistic color schemes. This is all thanks to the work of the great cinematographer José Ortíz Ramos.

Joaquín Cordero, who usually played heroic characters rather than villains is Dr. Satan. His rival, Yei Ling, is played by Noé Murayama, a Mexican actor of Japanese descent who spent most of his career in dramas and westerns, although he did appear in another movie concerning Satan, El Látigo contra Satanás (The Whip versus Satan) (1979).


The two buxom zombie girls are great and look more like zombie go-go dancers.

This could only be a product of the 1960’s and is recommended to any fans of Mexican horror movies.

Dr. Satán y la Magia Negra (Dr. Satan versus Black Magic) (1968)

Genre: Drive-in psycho slasher exploitation

In between writing for children’s TV shows, such as Lidsville, New Zoo Revue or The New Mickey Mouse Club, Marc B. Ray wrote, produced and directed something far different. Scream Bloody Murder is a low budget horror slasher movie about a crazed psychopath on the loose.

The film opens in a field with a young blonde haired boy, Matthew, purposely driving a bulldozer over his father. While the vehicle is still moving, the boy jumps off and falls beside the vehicle resulting in one of the caterpillar tracks running over his hand.

We jump ahead in time to the boy, who has now grown up to be a young man (Fred Holbert) with an artificial hook now replacing the hand which was crushed by the caterpillar tracks. Amazingly this fruitcake has just been discharged from the mental hospital and has returned to his farm.

He instantly takes a dislike to his new step-father and kills him with an axe. Comforting his distressed mother, Matthew tells her he did it to save her and in the kerfuffle that follows, throws her to the ground and accidentally kills her - all this in the first eleven minutes of the film.

This sexually impotent psycho then goes on a killing spree across the country, deliriously trying to protect women while killing them and their partners and all the while hallucinating trippy images of his dead mother.
Eventually he meets a kind prostitute (Leigh Mitchell), who paints an horrendously bad painting which a three year old could have done better. Matthew befriends her and she seems very excepting of this creep.
In the meantime to show his love for her he kills one of her johns.

Trying to impress her, he gets into the home of a wealthy old lady, kills the old lady, her black maid and the dog, which for some reason is shown as a freeze frame standing in the middle of the room and then drives back the old lady's vintage luxury car to collect the prostitute.

He takes the prostitute back to the house, telling her that this is where he lives and keeps her tied up as a prisoner.
The second half of this movie has the demented Matthew psycho-babbling to the girl, trying to get her to paint more pictures and coming out with lines like:

“See what I do for you - I get groceries, clothes and art stuff - and I kill people.”

Will she escape the clutches (or hook) of this mad psychopath?

I actually quite enjoyed this movie – yes, it’s corny and low-budget, but Fred Holbert who plays Matthew was quite good and I was surprised he doesn’t seem to have made any other movies. Also, watch out for Angus Scrimm in an early role.

This movie is classic drive-in material where the viewer would either be stoned, drunk, necking with a date or all three.

Scream Bloody Murder (1973)