Psycho Girls

Murder, torture, cannibalism, sweaty sex… All of this can be pretty traumatizing, but when one man survives all of this, what does he do? What else?... He writes his story…

As an aficionado of all things ‘b’, you go out of your way to research and discover titles to add to your collection. But it is always the ones that come out of left field, the ones you’re not looking for, that really surprise you. Take Psycho Girls for example: I’ve never even heard of this film, yet one day after leaving the TV on, this little craptacular gem started playing. And if I didn’t change the channel sooner like I should have, I wouldn’t have wasted two hours with this amazing piece of trash.

Some people have described Psycho Girls as a tongue-in-cheek horror. Those people are fucking idiots! There is nothing tongue-in-cheek about this; it is just awful, awful, awful! This is amateur filmmaking at its finest, and it is very painful to watch. Take every possible horror cliché you can think of, and I mean the bad ones, and throw them into a script that makes no sense, and this is what you end up with. Man, does this film suck!

So what’s it about? A writer right out of a hardboiled crime film writes a story about a particularily horrific event he was a part of, which turns out to be a useless trope for the plot. It starts out with a little girl who poisons her parents and is sent to the nuthouse for her efforts. Grown up and just as crazy, she then escapes, kills her sister, and takes on her identity to torture and murder some unlucky individuals planning a dinner party, including our fateful narrator. This leads to a very weird sequence where one of the guests discusses brain mechanics while munching on an unusually glutinous piece of steak tartare. The dinner party guests are then tied up and tortured by manical killer and her crew, one that oddly looks like Freddie Mercury. The guest are tortured one by one, leading to a climax that includes a duel with pipes, and ends on a twist so laughable you will resort to torturing your dinner guests.

Despite its unabashed levels of bad horror, Psycho Girls does have one thing going for it: the torture scenes are quire gruesome, so gruesome that it’s actually still banned in some regions. It’s essentially torture horror before torture horror became big. You can almost say that this film was ahead of its time. But even that is too much praise for this heaping pile of flaming garbage.

Psycho Girls is bad, painfully bad. Not one of the worst films out there, but it’s up there. Good gore, some good shock value, but it’s very amateurish. You get the feel that they were trying to make a good movie here, and that usually results in something bad but good; not this time. The fact that they sucked at making it makes it that much more tough to watch. If you think passing a large turd through an extreme case of hemorrhoids is fun, you’ll probably dig Psycho Girls.

Final Mark: 1/5



EXTRA CRAP
The Good: Kim Cayer. This chick is hot! She should have been a scream queen.

The Bad: A six-year-old writing a book report on Where’s Waldo would be better then writing than this cliché-ridden script.

The Ugly: That couple having sex sweats more than two pigs in a sauna… how do they grip anything?

In A Nutshell: Torture can work up an appetite; thank goodness for pizza places that also deliver pretzels and burritos and don’t call the cops when their delivery boy doesn’t return.

Useless Trivia: Director Jerry Ciccoritti had led one of the most successful directing careers in Canada shortly after making this film. If that doesn’t say enough about Canadian cinema I don’t know what does.

Favourite Quote(s):

• Narrator: She wasn't insane, she was beyond insane. She left insanity at the door. She was having a neck and neck race with sanity, and she was about to win.
• Narrator: That's my story. You can use it if you want. It would make for a good case study.