Schizo (1976)/The Comeback (1978)

Director: Pete Walker

Screenplay: David McGillivray [Schizo] / Michael Sloan and Murray Smith [The Comeback]

Cast:

Schizo: Lynne Frederick as Samantha Gray, John Leyton as Alan Falconer, Stephanie Beacham as Beth, John Fraser as Leonard Hawthorne, Jack Watson as William Haskin, Queenie Watts as Mrs Wallace, Trisha Mortimer as Joy, Paul Alexander as Peter McAllister

The Comeback: Jack Jones as Nick Cooper, Pamela Stephenson as Linda Everett, David Doyle as Webster Jones, Bill Owen as Albert B., Sheila Keith as Doris B., Richard Johnson as Macauley, Patrick Brock as Dr. Paulsen, Holly Palance as Gail Cooper

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Never mind symbolic sunshine...it was fucking here!

Immediately from the opening images, Schizo will not be a sensitive take on mental health, not just by the title but even in the opening narration, where even I without a psychology degree am aware schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders are separate concepts. It sets up a lurid thriller bordering on the horror genre, a snapshot not only of this era and how mental illness was depicted in cinema, but a snapshot of old England including the old Co-Op logo on a milk delivery float, or a supermarket with discounted baked beans. It sets up a distinct tone to this premise even if it is indebted to its American or Italian brethren, as we start with an older man incensed about a newspaper about a young "ice princess", ice skater Samantha Gray (Lynne Frederick), about to marry, taking a knife the size of a machete covered in dried blood and bloody pieces of broken glass in his travel case on a mission, to see her in London. One of the clear selling points behind Schizo, central to this, is Lynne Frederick herself. Her career has probably been shadowed by Peter Sellers, the legendary comedian she was married to until his 1980 death, and his own complicated career, whilst her filmography is full of cult films like this or Phase IV (1974).

She does okay in what is a film where the plot twists are obvious, but the lurid spectacle is emphasised, as this is from Pete Walker, a British filmmaker known for being one of the genre filmmakers of the era who made more edgier productions, infamous for films like House of Whipcord (1974) and Frightmare (1974), films which ramped up the gore and sexual content of old pulp genre tropes. He is merely adding to a story which is timeless, as premise wise this story is one you would have gotten in a thirties/forties production from Hollywood or an earlier British shocker. This belongs in the tradition of gristly thrillers which has been updated to the newer decades even if the seventies aesthetic here is charmingly quaint. The film leans into horror genre in terms of the more overt gruesomeness of the murders which begin as Samantha is being stalked, arguably in debt to the Italian giallo, even in terms of the black gloved killer. A subplot about the maid's psychic sessions with her daughter being telepathic feels like a British take on a scene from Deep Red (1975), where a psychic catches wind of the killer telepathically. Admittedly, Dario Argento would have not had a moment talking about the free tea and biscuits for four pence as found in this meeting.

Even when Samantha is stalked, it is obvious what the final twist is, its mental health plot set up with the factors of her family ties being very vague with no one at her wedding reception on her side of the family tree, or how the stalker is set up blatantly from the get-go as a prominent character. Instead, this becomes the tropes shot through its British personality, an intercontinental exchange of plot tropes found in similar films from others countries at the time if with pithier one-liners from characters. Some of the more rewarding scenes are with characters casually having extra marital affairs and even leaving plastic spiders in the soap dish to scare the newlyweds for a joke. The laxness of security for the wedding reception, comical in the modern day for a thriller as someone can casually get away with slipping a bloodied knife by the wedding cake, actually becomes one of the best scenes for casually touching on this sense of personality you only get in British films, less logical but in terms of morbid humour nestled against the ordinary locales. By the time someone can manage surviving being impaled on a bed of spikes, to the point an eyeball is hanging out from a spike going into the head, we are not dealing with a film to take seriously, but charming in its own perverse way as a film from my home country.

The Comeback opens up, coming after Schizo, with a nods to the slasher films whose tropes would be fully codified into the eighties, with a murder scene in the opening that certainly would have been censored for British VHS with a hand graphically lopped off with a scythe, followed by that person's death with the weapon by someone wearing an old woman costume. The film itself, whilst the plot is conventional in set up, is a lot more idiosyncratic than this though. The premise is that of an older American pop star, a former teen idol Nick Cooper (Jack Jones), returning to Britain to record his comeback album, and finding himself staying at a traditional British manor house whilst he is recording the album. Jack Jones himself is an American singer, which is a meta moment of casting I do have to appreciate especially as, befitting how lurid the story becomes, his casting is perverse on purpose for sick humour if you learn a little about him. Jack Jones sang songs like Lollipops and Roses, and the opening theme for the Love Boat American TV series, which makes his casting here, eventually dropping f-bombs and having a sex scene, adding a much more perverse touch to the film knowing that this man with a two time Grammy winner of wholesome music. This was naturally at a time in his recording career where he was doing renditions Little Feat's Dixie Chicken, and a tribute album to the band Bread, so this feels close to the bone of a man who could be like the Nick Cooper character as a star trying for one last grab at success after his sixties pop success.

The grotesqueness of the ex-wife's corpse being left in the old crib after the murder feels apt to the perverse melodrama this turns into, with not as constant need for such shocks as a giallo or a slasher, but with those moments coming when need be. Pete Walker clearly also had access to all the live maggots he could get to depict decay of gruesome corpses just to emphasise that fact. At its heart, this is the updated form of the gothic creepers of yore, where an older singer is effectively being tormented psychologically. It is not just creepy Harry (Peter Turner) who sets the tone, a minor character obsessed with getting Nick's items out of the penthouse, or women's breasts, which he will talk about at length menacingly to a potential love interest of Nick's, a man who makes woollen hats creepy due to osmosis to his personality. No, it is the gothic horror trope of the voices and horrible sights only Nick sees whilst at the manor, the crying and screams from a phantom woman at night, or the current occupants looking after him, "Missus B" (Sheila Keith), an older woman with ominous gravitas to her voice, or her husband who talks of the ancient tree in the garden he tends to screaming due to the carving of a couple's love for each other into the bark, or reading a book on Chinese mythology and Buddhist Hell because he cannot find his tree surgery book.

The plot twist is obvious in hindsight in The Comeback too, but this is a delightfully weird amalgamation of tones. This is a film where the potent red flag of this film having aged like one of the corpses, when a key character is revealed to dress as a woman in the privacy of his own home, is not a red herring even or proof of anything suspicious, but a character beat abruptly placed in the middle of this simple minded shocker of more going on in his mind, the weird sense this genre film with a few more of these turns could have become something even cooler if it had been more unconventional. Both The Comeback and Schizo are conventional, in pace and plotting, which are really the biggest issues with both, but like the best of cases, even weaker genre films as here can have these unexpected turns and delights in them worthy of praise.