Keeping in sync with the Loose Cannons Podcast, I watched David Paulsen’s 1980 slasher Schzoid this week.
As if it’s not bad enough that advice columnist Julie
(Marianna Hill) is receiving threatening letters, someone is also killing off
the members of her therapy group. Will she be next?
I had seen this movie before, but my recollections were very
few and far between, having watched the shaved-down Movie Macabre version some
twenty-five years ago. As a thriller, it’s pretty mediocre with a bait & switch that fools pretty much no one. However, if you can get past the
super gross father-daughter relationship between Klaus Kinski and Donna Wilkes
– I wonder if this is why he took the part – the movie did have its charms.
The cast, which also included Craig Wasson, Richard Herd and
Christopher Lloyd were great and all
given entertaining, if not extraneous, bits to chew on. If seeing Wasson
infatuate over wallpaper and Lloyd drone on about his one love – being a
maintenance man – then boy, are you in for a treat!
The best are the exchanges between the two cops, Herd and
Joe Regalbuto, though. Apart from the usual “man this job is really getting to
me” repartee, there’s this hilarious bit where they decide to show Hill all
their homicide files, just to prove how busy they are. But then, literally the
next scene, they were all “we can’t divulge that info” when Kinski asked for a
victim’s cause of death. That’s a real tight ship you’re running there, guys.
But really, I think the star of this movie is the score by
Craig Huxley. Holy shit, it is bonkers! At times, it sounds like he just let a
bunch of cats loose in a room full of instruments. My favourite was the sting
that accompanied the first reveal of the murder weapon. It sounded like Michael
Jackson’s Thriller!
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BAA-DAAAAAH! |
What I found particularly strange was that the brutality of the murders often didn't match up with the tone of the rest of the picture. The movie also meanders a lot in the middle, which makes me
think it may have been a perfect movie to get the Elvira treatment. Schzoid
lies in that sizable list of B-movies that were populated by slumming
established actors rubbing elbows with others who were on their way to bigger
and better things – Lloyd would become Doc Brown only five years later.
Still, I did have a smile-slash-smirk on my face while
watching a good deal of this, so that’s something. That’s Cannon to a T though,
isn’t it?
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