Good luck.” He was just 65 years old.īut here, even at the end of his tether, brought in for marquee value and little else, Sanders still gives the role everything he has left.
I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. During this Sanders barely avoided serving jail time (though he was an innocent dupe in the affair) and he was also coping with the death of his wife, Benita Hume (widow of the late British actor Ronald Colman) in 1967.Īfter that, Sanders really didn’t seem to care what happened to him perhaps he felt an affinity to the film because he, too, was one of the “living dead.” Sanders committed suicide shortly after Psychomania’s completion, famously leaving a note that read “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. Sanders’ role was finished in a mere six days, and he seems alternately baffled and grimly amused by the proceedings, painfully aware that the film is yet another in a long line of low-budget films the actor was obliged to appear in after the collapse of his Cadco Developments Ltd. Nevertheless, Sharp attacks the project with energy and splatterific panache, if only because the production schedule was so short, and the budget barely sufficient to cover the cost of shooting. Psychomania was an attempt to break away from the Hammer Gothic formula and embrace an entirely new approach to horror that was far more graphic and violent, but one senses that Sharp felt somewhat out of his depth in this new territory. Psychomania was a distinctly down-market affair from such Hammer classics as Kiss of The Vampire (1963), one of the most lavish films the company ever produced to say nothing of Sharp’s underappreciated work on Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), starring Christopher Lee in the title role, shot back-to-back with Terence Fisher’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) on hastily re-propped sets with only a few days of preparation.īut like so many Hammer directors, Sharp failed to adapt to changing times, and while he gives his all to Psychomania, he was more at home at in his last years doing remakes of The Four Feathers and The Thirty-Nine Steps (both 1978). Sharp’s career as a director was long and distinguished. At this juncture, Tom’s mother and Shadwell intervene to put a halt to Tom’s grandiose scheme, in a manner that’s both bizarre and apparently quite effective. Like so many motion picture motorcycle gangs before them, Tom has bigger plans, and wants to embark upon a campaign of wholesale violence, murdering policemen, judges, teachers, any authority figure that might hamper the gang’s activities.
With that accomplished, the rest of the film is a series of violent action set pieces, involving the ritualistic suicide of the gang members and their almost immediate resurrection, in which supermarkets are ransacked, innocent pedestrians are mowed down, and general mayhem ensues.īut that’s just for openers. “Why do you never get any older? And what is the secret of the living dead?” Soon enough, Tom’s mother – a curiously distant maternal figure if ever there was one – inducts Tom into the cult. “Why did my father die in that locked room?” he asks Shadwell petulantly. Tom is an impetuous fellow, and he’s suspicious (with good reason) about his parentage and his home life in general. Suffice it to say that business transactions with Satan are a decidedly risky business, for as we all know, the Devil is in the details. However, as with all such arrangements, things don’t go precisely as planned. Soon the gang members are deliberately killing themselves in a variety of grotesque and spectacular fashions, secure in the knowledge that they will soon be immortal. Sharp’s Psychomania concerns Tom Latham (Henson), the leader of a teenage motorcycle gang, The Living Dead, who with the aid of his devil-worshipping mother (Reid) and her obedient butler Shadwell (Sanders) makes a deal with the Devil for his gang’s literal immortality. Hilliard and Tenney’s film is an excellent and underrated thriller, but that’s not what we’re considering here. Sharp’s film should not be confused, as it often is, with Richard Hilliard and Del Tenney’s 1963 brutal, black and white psycho killer film entitled Psychomania (aka Violent Midnight) starring Lee Philips, Shepperd Strudwick and Dick Van Patten.
BFI’s Flipside series continues with another excellent release, a completely restored version of Don Sharp’s “zombie biker” film Psychomania (1973), starring George Sanders in his last role, with capable assists from Beryl Reid and Nicky Henson.