Motor Psychos: (from left to right) Hatchet (Denis Gilmore), Chopped Meat (Miles Greenwood), Jane Pettibone (Ann Michelle), Shadwell (George Sanders) and Abby Holman (Mary Larkin) look at a sinister amulet, and (right) the gang’s trademark half-skull helmet.
Directed by veteran British horror director Don Sharp (The Kiss of the Vam-
pire) and written by Julian Zimet and Arnaud d’Usseau (Horror Express), Psychomania (released in the US as The Death Wheelers) shares more than a few story el- ements with its more famous kissing cousin. In one of the film’s opening scenes, a gang of bikers, known af- fectionately as “The Living Dead,” force a motorist off the road, echoing the “hogs of the road” Durango 95 sequence in Kubrick’s classic. The film even sports a charming, young sociopath in the form of gang leader Tom Latham (Nicky Henson: Witchfinder General), who recalls Clockwork’s protagonist, Alex DeLarge. But the similarities end there as Psychomania proceeds to manifest one of the most berserk plots of any British horror movie of the 1970s. “At that time, I thought if you do dodgy films, nobody
pays to see dodgy films. Of course, you’re not realizing that years later they come out on DVD and become ‘cults,’” says Henson with a laugh, still very much in possession of the cheeky charm of the character he played nearly 40 years ago. “Also, I was a mad motorcyclist,” he adds. “I never
had a car. So this script comes through the door and I open it up and it says, ‘Eight Chopped Hog Harley Davidsons crest the brow of a hill.’ I rang my agent and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t read any further than the ‘Eight Chopped Hog Harley Davidsons.’ Anyway, I arrived on set the first day and there’s eight clapped-out 350 AJS’ and Matchless BSAs. I said, ‘Where’s the Harley David- sons?’ They said, ‘You gotta be kidding?’ It’s the only show I’ve ever been on where there were eight me- chanics working the whole time to keep the bikes run- ning because they got ’em in some second-hand shop somewhere and they were falling to bits.” Had he read the script further before signing on,
Henson would’ve learned that his character was a rich, bored young man living in an opulent mansion with his clairvoyant mother, who would eventually be played by veteran British actress Beryl Reid (Dr. Phibes Rises Again, The Doctor and the Devils) and a mysterious butler named Shadwell who never seems to age, a role ultimately taken on by legendary British actor George Sanders (Village of the Damned, Rebecca). When Tom demands to know the identity of his deceased father, his mother allows him entry into one of the mansion’s perpetually locked rooms. Here he encounters a mag- ical mirror that reveals to him a terrible secret: he is the son of Satan himself! While recovering from the shock, Tom overhears his
mother accidentally reveal to Shadwell the secret of everlasting life: kill yourself with the firm belief that you will return from the dead as an indestructible, un-
dead fiend. Wasting little time, Tom initiates one of the gang’s mad motorbike rampages – which mostly con- sists of driving around the town square knocking things over – and when the “fuzz” come to bust up the fun, he careens off the side of a bridge hurtling himself into the waters below and to an untimely demise. After one of the most bizarre funerals in the history of cinema, during which he’s buried sitting upright on his motor- bike in an open grave whilst a hippie plays a ballad for him on an acoustic guitar, Tom returns from the dead as an immortal zombie biker, thus prompting the rest of the gang to follow suit and take their own lives in increasingly strange and hilarious ways. It’s a mental mix of black magic, black leather, black humour and toad worship! “Toad worship really is
not your everyday thing,” jokes actress Mary Larkin (The Razor’s Edge), who plays Abby Holman, Tom’s love interest in the film. “And of course the actu- ally spooky bit to me is that people think if they die they’ll come back. That’s the bit in the film that would scare me, that people would ever think anything like that.” Beyond its incompre-
hensible plot, one of the film’s most famous attrib- utes is the copious num- ber of mad motorcycle stunts that see riders careen though bridges, brick walls and baby carriages. “It’s such an appalling concept, isn’t it?” says
Larkin. “You nearly can’t take it seriously. I remember that scene and I think that my character actually did have some qualms about it I’m glad to say.” Henson recalls, “I had a stunt double whose name I
won’t say, ’cause he might still be alive, but he did three stunts for me in the movie and ended up in the hospital after each one. When I drive off the bridge to commit suicide, he managed to hit the water before the bike and the bike landed on top of him. But the weirdest one is when I drive through the wall. It was a polystyrene wall and they painted it to look like bricks but we didn’t shoot it for two or three weeks. And of course the paint kept on fading so they kept painting it over. When he came to do the stunt, the bike went through the wall and he didn’t. He was stuck on the
other side. It was like a cartoon.” Also notable is the film’s hypnotic, experimental
score courtesy of veteran British composer John Cameron (The Ruling Class, Night Watch), which from the opening shots of the bikers driving though a fog- drenched stone henge delivers some instantly memo- rable progressive rock hooks accompanied by an array of unusual organic sounds. “I knew we needed a score that was spooky and dif-
ferent but had kind of a rock feeling to it and it was kind of pre-synthesizer,” explains the composer. “I mean, you could get Mr. Moog and his synthesizer but you needed a room about the size of Abbey Road Num- ber 1 to get the bloody thing in. So you had to be a bit ingenious. By that time, we’d been working in really quite high-tech studios. For this one, we had to use Shep- perton’s recording studios and it hadn’t been updated since before the war. The hilarious thing is ac- tually having these hooligan mu- sicians all trying to do strange things, scratch inside pianos and turn sounds inside out, but the recording engineer still had a suit and tie on. It was so anachronis- tic.” The film would also feature
Sanders’ in his final role. Legend has it that Psychomania inspired the actor to take his own life. “The story goes that George
Sanders saw an answer print of Psychomania in Madrid,” ex-
plains Henson. “Then he went back to his hotel room, killed himself, and left a note saying, ‘I’m so bored.’ In other words saying, ‘What the hell’s happened to my career? What am I doing? I’m old. I might as well go now.’ “He was great fun on the movie,” Henson adds. “We
laughed and laughed and laughed and spoiled an awful lot of takes. I mean, it must have been a nightmare for the director because we were all so young and behav- ing so badly and realized that we were all working on something that was kind of peripheral, that would just disappear. But of course it hasn’t. That’s the weird and wonderful thing about it. People come up to me in the street and quote lines from it now.”
A new DVD Special Edition of Psychomania that in-
cludes a new transfer from the only uncut 35mm print in existence is out now from Severin Films.
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