Wigging out to a Sixties hipster sleaze classic.
Trailed as Lux Interior’s favourite film, this surely has all the trappings you’d expect to live up to that ambitious accolade. With a plot of doped up, done down Sixties unhappy mondos blowing their lives away waiting for ‘the man’, Psycho Cat features utterly cardboard performances all round from a bunch of brain-dead turkeys all feigning drug pangs and inflamed urban ennui. Nope, it’s not an old Jesus and Mary Chain video, but it’s certainly close enough to warrant a championing in the present climate of ossified pop culture.
Most notable of its many set-ups are the constant random scenes of boss chicks at writhing house parties, taking their sexuality into their own hands and living dangerously. Woooahh! There’s also a very peculiar human bullfight on a rooftop, this latter scene involving the spearing of some loser in what seems to be a whirling, wiggy prototype for a future Kate Bush video – all fierce, staring female eyes and witchy woman body language! Alongside this, there are some exceptional wide-angle extravaganzas, particularly the murder in Central Park where someone is cross-bowed to death.
Director ‘Eve’ (actually Herb Stanley, who made nothing beyond this) makes a meal of ‘her’ entourage – a wild bunch of would-be Warholites all looking for a kiss and certainly prepared to sell their souls for one. With its unflagging emphasis on gritty nudity, preposterous period fashions, flailing promiscuity, mad filmic gimmicks and ear-crunching hep talk, Psycho Cat is a sleazeball ultra-B movie that’s mad, bad and dangerous to know.
SAL VOLATILE
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