While my Evil Dead Bride and I were attending a work seminar in Burlington Vermont (home of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and... nothing else), we spent part of our time enjoying the cable in our free hotel room, having sex in the hotel pool at 2am, and cruising the generic strip mall up the road. Having harvested a number of money saving coupons from a couple of Broke-Ass DVDs I'd purchased from the Coconuts store ($5 DVDs for movies so bad they had to promise $50 in coupons to get people to buy them... and I did!), I frequented that sizable store for much of the 5 days we were in town. Psychomania isn't one of the movie purchased with the coupons though, it's one of the movie you had to buy to get the coupons... as such, you can pretty much expect where this is going.

A UK production about a gang of undead bikers (and their puffy hairdos) who call themselves The Living Dead, at it's core Psychomania is the tragic love story of the gang's obnoxious little yuppie leader Tom and his chickie-babe Abby. She's the kind of gal who just wants to love and be loved (and assault the occasional motorist), while he's the kind of trust fund brat who tries to be all cool, yet retain his “stick up his ass” rich kid mannerisms. Perfect example: in an early scene we have Tom and his mom having a leisurely discussion about the delinquent activities of Tom and his friends. When she refers to the police, he corrects her and calls them "the fuzz". When she refers to being arrested, he corrects her and calls it "getting busted". What she would call vehicular assault, he refers to as "blowing a fellow's mind". It's priceless because stuffed shirt Tom and leather pants Tom co-exist in this bizarre amalgamation of humanity that acts all prim and proper and refers to his mom as "mother", but in the same breath will whip out counter culture slang and hippie existentialism crap, all in the same haughty tone. Badly written or badly acted? You say tomato I say ketchup.

While trapped between his proper upbringing and his desire to "blow fellows' minds", Tom's also become obsessed with the possibility of raising the dead. Well, you're never too young, old, rich, or poor to dabble in necromancy, I always say! Tom's acting out isn't just your average teen rebellion though (which would be really pathetic since the guy looks like he's at least 30), because he's actually just trying to upset his dear old mum. By doing so, he promises to stop all his unlawful antics provided that she'll give him the key to unlock his dad's study, which has been locked up since the old man's death 18 years earlier. For some reason Tommy's convinced that the room holds the secret of ressurecting the dead, but I'm pretty sure it just holds the secret of his dad's unsettling frog fetish. Mom gives in and hands her boy the key though, and their butler gives him some weird frog pendant to protect him from whatever's inside, but when Tommy lets himself into the room, he gets a magic mirror matinee that shows his mom selling his baby soul to a cloaked figure amidst a circle of druidic standing stones... and there are more frog references... I'm telling you, dear old dad had warts on his pecker when they found him for a reason!

This revelation just pushes Tommy's taste for death to new heights as he leads his pack of "devil may care" douche bags into a suicidal drag race down the highway... after bullying (I'm sorry, "blowing the minds of") local squares in the village. You know, cuz nothing says "Hi, My Name Is Tough Biker Guy" like pushing around women with baby carriages and playing keep away with a guy's ice cream cart. As much as I hate street gangs, at least the Crips and Bloods do their communities a favor and kill each other off from time to time; instead of just puttering around dress like shitheads in biker helmets that even the most pathetic five year old wouldn't be caught dead wearing.

Tom can no longer resist the urge to kill himself (and if I sucked as much boiled anus as that guy I couldn't blame him), so he gets into a chase with the po-po and drives head first off of a bridge, dying almost instantly and washing up on shore next to a couple of kids later. Abby gets permission from Tom's mom to have her boy's body buried at the gang's hang out, "the Seven Witches", which also happens to be that druidic standing stone circle from Tom's mirror vision. Legend has it that the seven stones are actually the petrified remains of a gaggle of broom riders who broke a pact with Big Poppa Lucifer and were thus punished. In a hilarious but still very unsettling scene, the gang digs Tom's grave and puts his body in, decked out in full biker togs and sitting on his motorcycle... so he's just sitting there, in this hole, on his bike, while his friends throws flowers on him... and they didn't even bother to dig the hole dead enough! His head's sill sticking out above the top of the hole! And don't they have burial laws and regulations in the United Kingdom!? Since when can people just bury their own corpses wherever they please without any prep other than propping it up on a motorcycle?!

Before the dirt can be shoveled on, Tom's loyal butler tosses his frog pendant in with him for obvious reasons. Sure enough, when a stranded traveler passes through the Seven Witches on his way to a gas station, Zombie Tommy explodes from the mound of dirt like the opening title sequence of Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter! Being undead just makes the douche a bigger douche now that he doesn't have to fear death, and no sooner does he come back to the land of living than he's beating gas station attendants to death and driving off without paying for petrol, and killing horny sluts who pay for his drinks. When he leaves an entire pub's worth of people dead though, the rest of the Living Dead wants to know who's dragging their leather clad name through the mud. Of course Tom confronts them to show off his cool new immortality and offers to share it with the rest of them. All they have to do is want to die and believe that they'll come back to life when they do. Once that little thing is taken care of, they can rise from the grave none the worse for wear and immune to any and all pain till the end of time. Huh, so all you've gotta do is believe eh? Jeez, between this and Peter Pan it's a surprise everyone in the UK hasn't offed themselves by jumping our of windows or riding head first through rush hour traffic. Then again, I guess kids across the pond aren't as stupid as impressionable as the little turds over here.

While the still living of the Living Dead are being charged for the murders Tom and the growing number of unliving members are committing, Tommy's mommy isn't bothered by her son's randomly homicidal tendencies so much as she is that Tom's spreading his so-called wealth with his buddies. You know how tight-assed rich folk are with sharing anything. When the rest of the gang finally agrees to go through with this "live forever free of pain" thing, they all opt for different death sentences as one drowns himself in a river, one leaps from a 7th story window, one goes sky diving without a 'chute, one jumps from an overpass into oncoming traffic, and Abby opts to go the sissy route and poisons herself, only to wake up in the hospital with her stomach pumped after someone finds her. Women, always choosing a method of suicide that leaves a back door open in case they change their mind. And they say that men are the ones afraid of commitment!

Tom's master plan is to kill off every man and woman in the legal system, starting with beat cops and working their way through every detective, lawyer, judge, and stenographer until there's no one left in "the establishment" to harsh their buzz! Abby and Mother aren't big on the idea of a mass judicial genocide, but how can they hope to stop the seemingly unkillable!?... well, besides burning them (dead) alive or encasing them in cement for the rest of eternity... And what the fuck is going on with all the damn frogs?!

The look and feel of the movie are very much like a Hammer flick, which is no surprise considering it was directed by Don Sharp, who's put a few projects from the House of Horrors under his belt (and you thought that was just his penis). As such, Psychomania focuses not on gore or sleaze like the Italians and Americans did with their horror flicks in the '70s, but on maintaining the general style of British flicks through suspense and atmosphere, ignoring the popularity of the exploitation dollar at the time. It works well in this sense and has the feel of an actually somewhat quality production. It's a strange day when I watch a movie and I'm not pissed off that I don't get to see any decapitations or geysers of viscera. Even stranger still is when I'm not irritated with a movie where we get a death toll of something like 15 people, but any and all violence occurs off-screen, leaving us with little more than motionless bodies to look at and nothing else. See, proof that there really is some kind of underlying magic at work here! It really is a very clean looking, very suave little flick!

Beyond all that though, Psychomania starts to falter through unintentionally silly moments and nonsensical shit that plants it's boot square in your common sense's ass. The concept of bikers coming back from the dead is fine, but it's the execution (or lack thereof) that puts this one through the pyre. All you need to come back from the dead is to believe you'll come back from the dead?! No matter what method of suicide you opt for, whether it be being mangled in a car wreck or splattering on the landscape from a height of 10,000 meters (remember, we're doing a British movie here, so metric systems everyone!), not only will your body be whole and invincible upon your "resurrection", but apparently the actual act of the suicide won't cause your body to be marred in any way?! And why be so obtuse with the rules of reanimation? Couldn't the writers have done something a little more believable but no less difficult and just slipped in a rule or two, like you can only return if you're buried at the site of The Seven Witches, or you can only come back if your body is buried with one of those frog pendants? Come on! If you hadn't been such a wanker and you'd put just five more minutes of effort into the script instead of just rushing it so you wouldn't be late with packing your colon with the worst cuisine in the world, maybe your movie wouldn't be condemned to an eternity of being bargain bin fodder! Well, that, and you'd have to get rid of those insipid "skull" helmets. Skull helmets in and of themselves have the potential to be unbearably awesome, but the helmets given to us here were too busy making me laugh to care about much else. It's enough to make you chunder! Wait, I think that's an Aussie term... bollocks!