‘Psychomania’: Britain’s weird answer to ‘Easy Rider’
There’s nothing wrong with using an established and influential classic as the springboard to creating a movie that’s very clearly indebted to its spiritual forebear in at least one overt manner. However, in distinctly non-British fashion, Psychomania was a hundred times more outlandish than Easy Rider.
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s motorcycle-riding hippies being caught up in the illicit world of drug-running while seeking out spiritual enlightenment helped usher in the New Hollywood era. The film became a cultural touchstone, explored the socio-political landscape that affected its target audience, and turned an immense profit on its way to awards season glory. On the other hand, Psychomania most certainly did not.
In fact, the 1973 cult curio has just as much in common with The Wicker Man, which coincidentally released the very same year. The associations with Easy Rider are far less obvious, although debate has raged for half a century as to whether that can be interpreted as a positive or a negative.
Nicky Henson stars as Tom Latham, the leader of a youthful motorcycle gang called ‘The Living Dead,’ who spends his spare time on two feet instead of two wheels, either canoodling with his girlfriend Abby or practising sinister magic. Similarly, his mother and her evil butler Shadwell like to hold séances to convene with a deity known as the Frog God, as one does.
On his 18th birthday, Tom finally musters the courage to enter the room in which his father vanished without a trace prior to his birth, where he ends up encountering said Frog God for himself. Unfortunately, their encounter drives him to commit suicide, only for his mother to assist in bringing him back from the dead.
Of course, that means he’s now been imbued with supernatural powers and can’t be killed for a second time, with his gang’s name taking on a new meaning when he starts slaughtering those who wrong him. Upon witnessing Tom’s newfound powers, the rest of ‘The Living Dead’ begin offering themselves up as sacrifices to the Frog God in the hope of coming back as powerful zombies, with Abby the only one who refuses.
Much like Easy Rider, Psychomania focuses on the trials and tribulations of characters growing up disillusioned by the environment that produced them. Of course, it goes without saying that not even the drug-addled minds of Fonda, Hopper, and Jack Nicholson could have come up with something quite so brazenly bizarre as what screenwriter Arnaud d’Usseau concocted. However, there may have been some chemical assistance on his part, considering how crazy the film is from start to finish.
It sounds like a nightmarish fever dream, but there really is a leather-clad British B-movie that features mystical ceremonies and amphibian figures of myth and legend. It contains zombified teenagers running amok, and motorcycles of a significantly less-vaunted variety than the Harley-Davidsons that helped define Easy Rider.
As Henson recalled to Rue Morgue, despite the script listing the iconic brand, that wasn’t quite the case when he got to set: “There were eight mechanics working the whole time to keep the bikes fanning because they got them in some second-hand shop somewhere and they were falling to bits.” On the plus side, the only three of his stunts that he didn’t do himself caused injuries to the performers, so at least there’s that.
If anybody ever sat through Easy Rider and was left wishing there was more of the dark arts, mass murder, and family secrets shrouded in the lore of the Frog God, then suffice it to say Psychomania scratches that itch and then some. It was hardly well-received at the time, but as tends to be the case for productions so preposterous they beggar belief, cult classic status has been secured.
