Victor Luminera
As a teenager back in the mid / late 90s I began obsessively collecting any horror or exploitation movie I could find on VHS. I'd get them at flea markets, video rental places or any store that stocked em, and when the internet became more commonplace I was an eBay junkie for years and would spend upwards of 100 bucks a week on used tapes. I had filled up numerous bookshelves and boxes. I had so many I had to put them all in alphabetical order or else I could never find what I was wanting to see. So we all know what happened when VHS fell out of favor. I, like many other people, started buying DVDs instead and taking advantage of things like streaming sites and Netflix. For years I had a job where I was relocated quite frequently up and down the East Coast. I clung to the 1700+ tapes for awhile. When I arrived at my new home, wherever it happened to be, I'd unload the twenty or so heavy boxes time and time again and stick them somewhere in the back of a closet. I noticed that the boxes remained sealed throughout many of my moves. In other words, I just wasn't watching these things anymore. In what will probably make most VHS collectors gasp and shake their heads in disbelief, before my last big move as I was loading up a U-Haul, I took one look down at the boxes and finally said "Fuck it." I had all of the movies I wanted to keep or still hadn't seen transferred over onto DVD-R's and left all of the tapes behind like one would an old stained mattress.
Then I noticed a peculiar change in myself... As much as I loved movies, I was now officially sick of collecting them. I grew tired of having to find a place to put them, tired of hauling them around and tired of the clutter. I was especially tired of watching a movie one time, hating it, never watching it again and still feeling some need to keep it for my collection. Over the years, I've found that when I buy a new movie, I don't even want to keep the cases for them any longer; the same cases I used to so proudly display back in the day. So in the trash they go. Right now, I have a dozen black binders which hold about 100 discs apiece. They're convenient, zip up, have a handle and are easy to take with me wherever I go. Between those dozen binders I have thousands of movies; ones I've purchased, ones I had transferred from my former VHS collection and others I've acquired via trade or other means. I watch hundreds of movies a year, and guess what? I still haven't made it all the way through my collection yet. Not even close.
This long and completely unnecessary tale does tie into tonight's feature. Sometimes when I'm indecisive about what to watch from all of my options, I'll close my eyes, flip through one of my binders and just pop in whatever DVD I happen to point at. Tonight my finger happened to land on the Something Weird double feature DVD of MONSTER A GO-GO (1965) and Psyched by the 4D Witch. Fuck! I already suffered through the incredibly boring Monster and even watched the bonus featurette DRIVING MISS DAISY CRAZY (1969), which really isn't too bad. All that was left was Psyched, which I'd already tried watching three different times before and kept turning off in the first ten minutes because it managed to annoy me that badly in that shot a period of time. I took a deep breath, tried to clear my head and looked at the bright side of things: Once I was done, this DVD could officially be retired over to one of my "already watched" folders in my closet where it can stay for the rest of eternity for all I care.
If I'm being generous, Psyched has perhaps three things going in its favor. 1: A pretty cool title. 2: A pretty cool opening theme song ("Beware of the 4-D Witch!"). 3. Tits. The credits reveal that what we're about to see is in "Transetheric Vision" and will be co-starring "a host of astral demons." Translation: It's shot on grainy 16mm with no sound and some people wear plastic fright masks. We meet our annoyingly perky virginal junior college student heroine Cindy (played by Margo), who narrates because they couldn't afford to do sound. Bewigged in a curly blonde mop, Cindy tells us a little about her spooky house, how she's the descendant of a Colonial witch named Abigail and how her exploration into the occult is meant as a warning to us all. So remember, when it comes to the practice of "sexual witchcraft," just say no, kids! Cindy takes off her top, lights candles and waves the candles around, then lounges in bed in only her saggy panties and decides to "bone up on witchcraft" by reading a book entitled "Rituals of Sexual Witchcraft." Visions of skulls, snakes, smoke, flashing lights, people in masks and a topless woman dance through her head.
The voice of Abigail calls out to her from the darkness. She offers Cindy the chance to live an adventurous astral sex life while keeping her virtue intact. All she has to do is drink from a special cup and wait for the words "Let's fantasy fuck now." A week later, Cindy is visited by her Aunt's spirit, kaleidoscopic lights flash and she has "the world's greatest climax" complete with the "Mountain of Venus afterglow effect." Now she's ready to take on the real thing and decides on her new neighbor Mr. Jones (Kelly Guthrie). She comes on to him, he informs her "I'm a homo!" and she uses her powers to make him comply. To what, I have no clue since this film has the bad habit of filming the top half of people's faces while the "action" is going on. Cindy goes over to her best friend Jan's home to study but passes out and has another sex fantasy about Mr. Jones. She then has an "exhausting three-way lesbian climax" with her large-breasted Aunt Fanny (Annette "Williams" / Michael) and her witch ancestor. While some of this may sound enticing, trust me when I say that this is about as far removed from erotic or entertaining as it could be possibly be thanks to the irritating narration, awful camerawork and lighting and the habit of cutting away from the sex every few seconds.
Cindy wonders "Did someone spike my orange juice with LSD or is this Abigail's idea of a joke?" as her witchy ancestor turns her fantasies a little darker. In one, Jan drinks a concoction of "spider broth" and menstrual blood and apparently has a snake inserted into her vagina and rectum before she's forced to bite its head off. Just like most other things in this film, we don't actually get to see any of that, the narrator just tells us. The "Salem witch bitch" puts Jan ("Sandra Lane" / Tracy Handfuss) into a coma and then puts Cindy into a deep sleep. Narration then kicks in from Cindy's older brother Mark (Tom Yerian), a parapsychology student. Abigail uses an evil eye to transform him into the "king of the sex vampires." He goes to Chinatown for dinner, eats a heart, runs around outside that night, does some things you can't see because it's too dark and finally chases a woman for several minutes in slow motion. When he finally catches her, he rips her top open and bites her and some guy shoots him. Cindy wakes up and wonders if what happened to Mark is reality or just a projection. She goes to Dr. Ambrose Kleinmetz ("Don Markos" / Keith Erickson) for hypnotic therapy and instead gets a "flesh and blood climax" as the good doctor decides to finally pop her cherry.
Whoever was responsible for this seems to have taken a dozen silent experimental / student short films and edited them all into one headache-inducing mess while bullshitting their way through an amazingly stupid "story" told exclusively through voice-over. The storyline seems made up as they went along and is padded out with tons of unnecessary shots. Of what, you ask? Well, pretty much everything that will fill time. There are long, boring and sometimes slowed-down shots of people walking around, people doing lawn work, buildings, the beach, trees, mountains, ducks, dogs, a lake, whatever. Much of this is tinted red or green or distorted (scenes overlapping, shown upside down, etc.). Many shots of the same things are reused over and over and over again. Despite full nudity and lots of vulgar, perverted lines, the words "fuck" and "pussy" have been removed for some reason.
The soundtrack is all classical music (including "Night on Bald Mountain") and some stolen snippets from Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful of Secrets." I cannot adequately put into words just how tedious thing whole thing is to sit through but I can say that I don't think I've ever wanted to turn off a movie so badly in my life.
NO STARS!
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