Schizoid (1980): Piece 1 of 3

 

I don't even know where to begin with this film. What a fascinating mess of a movie. The characters are a mess. The music score is a mess. The photography is a mess. The performances are a mess. There is as much a manic personality in the film's structure and outcome as there is in the main killer and some of its principles. I found the casting fascinating, too, with Kinski completely cast against type...the same with Wilkes as Kinski's troubled daughter. Wasson, as the obsessive husband editor of a paper his (soon-to-be ex) wife, Marianna Hill, is manic and clearly capable of wild outbursts and questionable behavior, has one of those performances that many (including myself) will wonder is either awful or extraordinary. I'm sure Wasson considered his Doug volatile and unpredictable...he sure as hell portrayed him that way!

So the slasher plot of the film has this killer -- ridiculously obvious considering the director shoots the forehead and hair of him while in the car driving after the first victim, who is on a bicycle, eventually pedaling into the dirt road of an abandoned house, for some reason, leaving herself vulnerable -- with an affinity for scissors, wearing black gloves, stabbing the female patients of a psychiatrist, Pieter Fales (Kinski). Why these patients? Well, Doug's wife, Julie (Hill), is also a patient of Fales' and the killer is in the bushes taking pictures with his camera of her and the others in this little group. Christopher Lloyd, of all people, is in Fales' group, as a maintenance man named Gilbert, speaking out in one session about feeling lonely, going out at odd times in the night and early morning just because he needed to see people. Yes, the screenplay pretty much pointed with a bright red light at Gilbert: RED HERRING ALERT!!!

Someone is sending Julie letters with those magazine-cutouts of words spelling out warnings against her. So the film is telling us that it is possible whoever is targeting Julie's friends with scissors could be sending her letters. So, again, the screenplay is noising at us: DIVERSIONARY TACTIC!!!