Though the title gives you no indication, PSYCHOMANIA, also known as THE DEATH WHEELERS, also known as THE LIVING DEAD, also known as THE FROG is a great high concept ugly movie. In a nutshell, it’s about a broodish British biker gang appropriately named The Living Dead, who die, and come back to life as unkillable public nuisances. In the right hands, this concept could probably be gritty and quite scary, but in Don Sharp’s hands, its a whole lot of goofy hog-riding fun.

The extremely flimsy premise behind reincarnation here is that if you kill yourself and really, and I mean really, believe you can come back to life, you come back to life. Simple as that! And here’s the kicker: once you’ve been dead once, you can’t die again, and then you can really have a lot of fun. Or so The Living Dead gang, lead by Tom (Nicky Henson), imagine. His mother and her butler (???) dabble in the black arts, premonitions, John Edwards tomfoolery, things of that nature, and they enable Tom to live out his suicide fantasies in grand style, driving his bike off a bridge into the water below. His biker buddies, including girlfriend Abby (Mary Larkin), decide the only proper way to bury Tom is to sit him up on his motorcycle (hands on the handlebars no less!) then cover him over with dirt. This precipitates one of the funniest shots in the picture, Tom literally blasting his motorcycle out of his grave.

Eventually, the rest of the biker gang learns that Tom is alive, or at least a very good kind of dead, and one by one they join him in the surprisingly groovy oblivion of the afterlife. Now if this sounds really creepy and cool (and given my audience it likely does), I need to clarify some of the specifics regarding these bikers and the film’s concept of the undead. When I imagine leather-wearing bikers I think the Hell’s Angels, gruff bad ass dudes with tattoos and beards and huge forearms and mean attitudes. The Living Dead, while still reasonably surly, are extremely British, with very proper accents and haircuts. Leader Tom even waltzes with his mother! What’s worse, when these guys come back to life, they look exactly the same as when they were alive. No groovy zombie makeup, no scars or wounds from leaping off of buildings or bridges, or jumping in front of trucks. So, when you think about it, not only can one survive death, death can actually be a very physically therapeutic process. It’s all about your state of mind people, really. Once again, The Partridge Family was right.