Psycho a Go Go (1965)

Psycho a Go Go is a 1965 exploitation film written and directed by Al Adamson.
Al Adamson is one of those filmmakers who divide the masses. In this case he divides not the masses of main stream movie goers from the purveyors of b-movies and fringe indie-films, but divides the very schlock movie crowd itself. Even lovers of “bad cinema” find Adamson’s work to be intolerable. Now before I continue I should make clear, as I have done before, that I put this film into my bad movies to avoid category. I am speaking here of course to the bulk of mankind. There are of course those of the cognoscenti who spend a lot of time searching for these oddities in the back of small video/DVD stores or online in eclectic BT sites. I have to admit that I fall into this category of masochistic film viewers who wants to not avoid the works of people like Al Adamson but wants to see as many as I can. That being said, if you do not fall into this category you are well advised to steer clear of Psycho A Go-Go, and most certainly clear of this double feature’s second feature, Manos: The Hands of Fate.


Al Adamson is one of those filmmakers who divide the masses. In this case he divides not the masses of main stream movie goers from the purveyors of b-movies and fringe indie-films, but divides the very schlock movie crowd itself. Even lovers of “bad cinema” find Adamson’s work to be intolerable. Now before I continue I should make clear, as I have done before, that I put this film into my bad movies to avoid category. I am speaking here of course to the bulk of mankind. There are of course those of the cognoscenti who spend a lot of time searching for these oddities in the back of small video/DVD stores or online in eclectic BT sites. I have to admit that I fall into this category of masochistic film viewers who wants to not avoid the works of people like Al Adamson but wants to see as many as I can. That being said, if you do not fall into this category you are well advised to steer clear of Psycho A Go-Go, and most certainly clear of this double feature’s second feature, Manos: The Hands of Fate.

There is actually a long and convoluted history surrounding Psycho A Go-Go and I am not sure I have all my facts straight and if I make a scholarly blunders I defer to the authorities in on this filmmaker to set the record straight. The film was originally released in 1965 by Admason and life long friend and partner Sam Sherman as Echo of Terror (with “cinematography” by Vilmos Zsigmond who would later go on to shoot The Deer Hunter) but it totally bombed and was quickly reedited with shots of plump go-go dancers in a club dancing and was re-released as Psycho A Go-Go. The film has an interesting movie score really that is the subject of some armchair research by sites that focus on soundtracks such as the people over at Monster Movie Music (http://monstermoviemusic.blogspot.com/). But the scenes with singer and star Tacey Robbins sound more like a poor man’s Patsy Cline than a typical 60’s go-go style singer but the scenes are interesting and she is not a bad singer. Well the added clips of a go-go bar did not help the film much and it vanished in obscurity until Sherman and Adamson brought it back form the dead in the form of 1971’s The Fiend with the Electronic Brain and footage now was put in featuring Tommy Kirk and John Carradine. Extra footage also was added to explain that the original bad guy in Psycho A G-Go (Roy Morton) was actually some sort of Vietnam War zombie controlled by evil scientist Carradine. The movie was still to be re-re-released as Blood of Ghastly Horror (cool title) and this time some added footage of Adamson’s wife Regina Carroll playing Carradine’s daughter. Now is was this the final version of the film? I don’t really know. It was also released under the title The Man With The Synthetic Brain but I do not know if this included extra footage of, lets say, Adamson’s dog in the background, or if it was just a ploy distributors and film makers often used in the 60’s and 70’s to get people to pay for the same film twice. In any case, the money continued to bomb and Adamson must be given his due credit for really trying to sell this film over and over despite the public refusal to want to see it.
I have not seen Blood of Ghastly Horror though I have it somewhere on my 500 gig hard drive (which desperately needs backing up) and will check it out eventually. So, I cannot compare the two films. I have read Ghastly Horror is a real mess and only Adamson devotees can endure it from start to finish in a single setting. How can anyone pass up seeing something with a reputation like that? However, I will be honest, Psycho A Go-Go is not a totally horrible film in that utterly outside Hollywood-film maverick sort of way. Of course some things are outside Hollywood for various reasons. Sometimes the filmmakers follow their own vision and passion refusing to be stifled by big studio politics. Other times they could never really belong inside Hollywood due to their basic lack of filmmaking skill. Which category Adamson fell in seems to be a topic for debate online.

The story starts off in an almost Tarantinoesque fashion with a group of rough looking jewel thieves on their way to make the perfect score that always hits a snag. Among the group is bad guy Joe Corey (Roy Morton) who we can assume is the psycho of the film’s title. We are introduced as well to boss man Vito (Lyle Felice) who sports a creepy John Water’s style mustache and a goatee. Obviously the condescending mastermind of the operation he is one too happy later when he finds things have gone awry after the female they tied up managed to set off the alarm causing the gang to panic. In the confusion Roy kills one of the gang, Travis, who was wounded by a cop and had who just tossed the case of jewels over the roof and into the back of a pickup truck owned by David Clark (Kirk Duncan) who I gather is a cop. I am not sure really. Or he has a cop friend. Well, it does not matter really. Vito’s girlfriend Vicky was in charge of the getaway car and sees David drive off with the case of jewels and gets his license plate number. The crooks decide to pay the oblivious David a visit later and beat the truth out of him, but unbeknownst to all David daughter Linda had earlier found the jewels (now her “treasure”) and hid them all inside her little negro doll. Well, that’s what it was. I have no clue why this white 60’s suburbanites would buy their daughter a little negro girl doll for her birthday but the little girl seemed to loved it Was this some fad in 1965? Anyway, Linda leaves with her go-go bar singing mom Nancy leave for a vacation at Lake Tahoe and dad is left home to be kicked around by Vito and his gang and has no idea what the hell is going on.  Psycho Joe and punch drunk gang member Curtis intercept Linda and Nancy at the Lake Tahoe bus station and take them off to some cabin in the woods to terrorize them into telling them where the gems are. Back at the Clark house a love triangle has managed to surface between Vito, Vicky and handsome gang member Nick. The cops show up for some reason I can’t recall, but it had something to do with David not returning a call to his police buddy, and Nick and Vito are shot.

I have read Adamson hated making the films he made and if this is true I wonder why he made so many. He was supposed to be a kind man and easy going to work with on the set. I do not think he meant this film (or his others) to be taken too seriously. I am almost certain all of this is done tongue in cheek and considering the almost zero budgets he was given to work with by producer Sherman (who admits he is more to blame for Adamson’s films than Al himself) it is a wonder anything was produced at all. Really one of Adamson’s more watchable products. But then again, when you are talking about films like Satan Sadists and Horror of the Blood Monsters the competition is slim.

There is actually a long and convoluted history surrounding Psycho A Go-Go and I am not sure I have all my facts straight and if I make a scholarly blunders I defer to the authorities in on this filmmaker to set the record straight. The film was originally released in 1965 by Admason and life long friend and partner Sam Sherman as Echo of Terror (with “cinematography” by Vilmos Zsigmond who would later go on to shoot The Deer Hunter) but it totally bombed and was quickly reedited with shots of plump go-go dancers in a club dancing and was re-released as Psycho A Go-Go. The film has an interesting movie score really that is the subject of some armchair research by sites that focus on soundtracks such as the people over at Monster Movie Music (http://monstermoviemusic.blogspot.com/). But the scenes with singer and star Tacey Robbins sound more like a poor man’s Patsy Cline than a typical 60’s go-go style singer but the scenes are interesting and she is not a bad singer. Well the added clips of a go-go bar did not help the film much and it vanished in obscurity until Sherman and Adamson brought it back form the dead in the form of 1971’s The Fiend with the Electronic Brain and footage now was put in featuring Tommy Kirk and John Carradine. Extra footage also was added to explain that the original bad guy in Psycho A G-Go (Roy Morton) was actually some sort of Vietnam War zombie controlled by evil scientist Carradine. The movie was still to be re-re-released as Blood of Ghastly Horror (cool title) and this time some added footage of Adamson’s wife Regina Carroll playing Carradine’s daughter. Now is was this the final version of the film? I don’t really know. It was also released under the title The Man With The Synthetic Brain but I do not know if this included extra footage of, lets say, Adamson’s dog in the background, or if it was just a ploy distributors and film makers often used in the 60’s and 70’s to get people to pay for the same film twice. In any case, the money continued to bomb and Adamson must be given his due credit for really trying to sell this film over and over despite the public refusal to want to see it.

I have not seen Blood of Ghastly Horror though I have it somewhere on my 500 gig hard drive (which desperately needs backing up) and will check it out eventually. So, I cannot compare the two films. I have read Ghastly Horror is a real mess and only Adamson devotees can endure it from start to finish in a single setting. How can anyone pass up seeing something with a reputation like that? However, I will be honest, Psycho A Go-Go is not a totally horrible film in that utterly outside Hollywood-film maverick sort of way. Of course some things are outside Hollywood for various reasons. Sometimes the filmmakers follow their own vision and passion refusing to be stifled by big studio politics. Other times they could never really belong inside Hollywood due to their basic lack of filmmaking skill. Which category Adamson fell in seems to be a topic for debate online.

The story starts off in an almost Tarantinoesque fashion with a group of rough looking jewel thieves on their way to make the perfect score that always hits a snag. Among the group is bad guy Joe Corey (Roy Morton) who we can assume is the psycho of the film’s title. We are introduced as well to boss man Vito (Lyle Felice) who sports a creepy John Water’s style mustache and a goatee. Obviously the condescending mastermind of the operation he is one too happy later when he finds things have gone awry after the female they tied up managed to set off the alarm causing the gang to panic. In the confusion Roy kills one of the gang, Travis, who was wounded by a cop and had who just tossed the case of jewels over the roof and into the back of a pickup truck owned by David Clark (Kirk Duncan) who I gather is a cop. I am not sure really. Or he has a cop friend. Well, it does not matter really. Vito’s girlfriend Vicky was in charge of the getaway car and sees David drive off with the case of jewels and gets his license plate number. The crooks decide to pay the oblivious David a visit later and beat the truth out of him, but unbeknownst to all David daughter Linda had earlier found the jewels (now her “treasure”) and hid them all inside her little negro doll. Well, that’s what it was. I have no clue why this white 60’s suburbanites would buy their daughter a little negro girl doll for her birthday but the little girl seemed to loved it Was this some fad in 1965? Anyway, Linda leaves with her go-go bar singing mom Nancy leave for a vacation at Lake Tahoe and dad is left home to be kicked around by Vito and his gang and has no idea what the hell is going on.

Psycho Joe and punch drunk gang member Curtis intercept Linda and Nancy at the Lake Tahoe bus station and take them off to some cabin in the woods to terrorize them into telling them where the gems are. Back at the Clark house a love triangle has managed to surface between Vito, Vicky and handsome gang member Nick. The cops show up for some reason I can’t recall, but it had something to do with David not returning a call to his police buddy, and Nick and Vito are shot.- From Uranium Cafe

PSYCHO A GO GO
AL ADAMSON  (1965)
IDEPENDENT INTERNATIONAL PICTURES
83 MIN
USA

Brain of Blood (1971)

Traditionally, when Hollywood enters into collaboration with production companies from other lands, considerable effort is expended to disguise the foreign origins of the resulting films. Witness, for example, all those American guest stars imported to play the leads in the movies Toho produced in conjunction with Henry G. Saperstein or Rankin-Bass. But in the case of Brain of Blood, the only one of Hemisphere Pictures’ drive-in-era horror films to be shot in the United States by an American director, the usual practice was stood on its head. Hemisphere had been doing well for itself ever since the 1964 reissue of Terror Is a Man, and by the middle of 1971, it had all the movies under production that its studio infrastructure could comfortably handle. The company’s American partners at Independent-International were of the opinion that the market could absorb even more Hemisphere product, however, and after a bit of discussion, Eddie Romero and Sam Sherman, the respective head honchos at Hemisphere and I-I, settled upon an unusual experiment to meet the perceived demand. Sherman would turn loose Al Adamson to make a picture which could be passed off as a Filipino import, even though no one involved in its creation would ever set foot outside the Los Angeles hinterland during the course of production. Even the title— Brain of Blood— would toe the established Eddie Romero line. I’ve heard stranger ideas in my time, but not very many.

Abdul Amir (Reed Hadley), beloved ruler of the imaginary Middle Eastern nation of Kahlid, is dying of cancer, but as yet, only his most intimate circle of advisors has any inkling of that fact. It is the considered opinion of all concerned that if word got out that the amir was really lying at death’s door, and not taking a holiday in seclusion from the pressures of rule, the people of Kahlid would so rapidly lose faith in their government that virtually all of the progress the country has made during Abdul’s reign would be undone immediately. There might seem to be nothing for it, but the amir’s personal physician, the half-British Robert Nigserian (Grant Williams, of The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Leech Woman), thinks he knows of a way out of Kahlid’s bind. A mostly discredited colleague of his by the name of Lloyd Trenton (Kent Taylor, from Brides of Blood and Blood of Ghastly Horror) claims to have perfected a technique for the transplantation of the human brain, and Abdul’s number-one secret agent (Regina Carrol, of Angels’ Wild Women and Satan’s Sadists) has known Trenton for long enough that she believes he knows what he’s talking about, even if the rest of the world medical establishment considers him a crank and a crackpot. If the amir will allow it, Nigserian wants to fly his body to the United States the moment he dies; it should be possible to make the trip to Trenton’s lab in just enough time for the renegade doctor to install Abdul’s brain in a new body before the fifteen-hour window of opportunity identified by Trenton closes. Abdul’s aide, Mohammed (Zandor Vorkov, from Dracula vs. Frankenstein), may not like the idea much, but the amir goes for it, and even Mohammed is willing to concede that Nigserian’s plan seems to offer the only real hope for the country’s future.

You might think it would bother Nigserian a bit to discover that Trenton has no host body on hand when he, Mohammed, and the dead amir arrive at the lab. However, Trenton assures his visitors both that a body will be coming along very shortly, and that recent advances in his research have obviated the need for an immediate transplant. All Trenton, Nigserian, and Trenton’s assistant, Dorro (Angelo Rossitto, from The Corpse Vanishes and Mesa of Lost Women), will need to do before the fifteen hours are up is pop the amir’s brain out of his skull and transfer it to the special life-support machine which Trenton has developed specifically for that purpose. (Incidentally, it occurs to me that a man who is too short even to see the top of the operating table is exactly what every doctor wants in a surgical assistant…) What Trenton is taking pains to avoid saying, of course, is that the reason he has no body ready is that his transplant technique requires a host body so fresh that it must be killed more or less immediately before the operation. Even now, his other assistant, Gor (what do you know— it’s John Bloom, from The Dark and The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant, playing yet another gigantic, disfigured retard!), is prowling the city in pursuit of a burglar with approximately the amir’s build and facial physiognomy. As soon as Gor has “recruited” the unfortunate body-donor, the second phase of the operation can begin.

Something very strange happens while Mohammed and Nigserian are on the way to the hotel where they will await news of the second surgery, though. A shaggy-haired man (Richard Smedley, from The Abductors and Naughty Stewardesses) in a colossally befinned Cadillac chases them down and runs them off the road. Only Nigserian himself survives the automotive assassination. As soon as possible, he gets in touch with Secret Agent Tracy, who flies out to the US to help him get to the bottom of it all. Nigserian’s best guess is that somebody wants to make sure the amir remains peacefully dead— either that, or someone is after Dr. Trenton for one reason or another. But if you’re asking me, I think there’s much more going on here than either Tracy or the doctor suspect. After all, it must surely be significant that the assassin is later blown up in his car (or a car, anyway— the exploding Caddy is not the same one we see the man climb into an instant before) by Dorro mere moments after escaping capture by Nigserian.

Meanwhile, back at the lab, there has been an unforeseen complication. Gor did such a thorough job of killing the burglar that his body is now entirely useless for the operation. Nigserian will be coming back in less than 48 hours, so there’s really no time to procure another donor, and beyond that, the teenage girl chained up in the cellar (Margo Hope) who has been providing Abdul’s brain with its blood supply is just about out of plasma herself. The transplant has to be performed at once, and the only remotely suitable body available belongs to Gor. Now mind you, Trenton is going to have some explaining to do when Abdul Amir wakes up in the body of a seven-foot freak whose head looks like a badly decayed cantaloupe, but at this point, the doctor really doesn’t see that he has any choice in the matter. And as we shall see, it may be that temporarily monsterizing the amir will simplify matters a bit when Trenton is finally ready to begin the open pursuit of his own hitherto secret agenda. Brain of Blood is nearly unique within the Al Adamson filmography, in that it was shot entirely in one go, and does not use even a single second of footage recycled from some earlier, stillborn Adamson production. Consequently, it’s a good deal less loopy than most of the director’s output, and far more closely resembles a movie as most of us understand the term. In fact, were it not for the presence of nearly the complete Dracula vs. Frankenstein cast, one really might almost mistake it for an Eddie Romero picture. Certainly the Romero illusion is fostered by the reuse of the entire score from The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, the presence in the cast of a very familiar face from Brides of Blood, and a brand of mad science that I can easily imagine Dr. Lorca being comfortable with.

Unfortunately, in this particular case, I score that lack of the usual Adamsonalia as something of a weakness. Brain of Blood really ought to be a lot more screwed up than it is in order to get the most out of its defiantly outrageous premise. I mean, look at this mess. A dying “Arab” tyrant tries to hang onto his throne by having his brain transplanted into a new body? The new body ends up being that of a freakishly huge, acid-scarred mental defective? It’s all part of some bizarre plot to establish the world’s first scientific dictatorship? Regina Carrol is a secret agent?! This movie was just crying out for some of Adamson’s signature foibles— some brain-damaging dialogue, some sudden and inexplicable detours through what looks for all the world like an entirely different movie, the unexpected appearance of a coked-up Russ Tamblyn at the head of a shabby and unconvincing motorcycle gang. As it is, Brain of Blood is just too damn close to making sense, you know? Now I’m not saying it wasn’t 87 minutes well-spent in spite of all that, mind you, but with a little less discipline and a funding crisis or two, it could have been ever so much more.

from 1000 Misspent Hours

BRAIN OF BLOOD
AL ADAMSON  (1971)
INDEPENDENT INTERNATIONAL PICTURES

86 MIN

USA

Blood of Dracula's Castle (1968)

Blood of Dracula's Castle is a 1969 horror cult B-movie directed by Al Adamson
Count Dracula (Alexander D'Arcy) and his vampire wife (Paula Raymond), hiding behind the pseudonyms of Count and Countess Townsend, lure girls to their castle in the Arizona desert to be drained of blood by their butler George (John Carradine), who then mixes real bloody marys for the couple. Then the real owners of the castle show up, along with Johnny, who is a serial killer or a werewolf depending on which version you watch. The owners refuse to sell, so Dracula wants to force them to sell. In a final confrontation, the vampires are forced to stand in the sunlight and dissolve.

This one of my favorites of the Al Adamson films

BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE
AL ADAMSON (1968)
84 MIN
USA