Schizoid (1980): Piece 2 of 3

Kinski is remarkably sound and kept together all the way to the end. He never, throughout the entire film, appears to be anything but a good guy...except for his multiple relationships with his patients and his very sleazy opening scene, looking incestuously at his naked daughter in the bathroom. Wilkes leaves that door open after a swim, taking off her bikini, getting into the shower, knowing that her father is looking at her. She even showers with that damn door open. I think the film tries to explain that as a daughter wanting to make sure her father pays some attention to her because when her mother was dying of cancer, he was very much involved in his psychiatry work. I am like, "Yeah, there are ways to get that point across without leaving the viewer feeling so icky!"

This Golan / Globas production has lots of LA urban locations, as well as, that incredible estate of Kinski's, quite a lavish mansion and grounds for a psychiatrist...he must have been doing well for himself! I wonder what he was charging them per hour! 

The camerawork and music is ugly, but I think that fits the overall film, considering how much of a mess it is. There is a chase scene where Julie's stripper friend (Pieter arrives after her dance in her dressing room to fuck her against a hot water heater) flees down an alley where the camera captures her terrified face I thought was a highlight, as the action follow her into a narrow division between two buildings to a fence she can't escape. There is a big blowup at Pieter's dining room where Wilkes' Alison rejects Julie (also Pieter's lover, never knowing he was also fucking her friend and fellow patient of group sessions), in this explosive outburst as the camera seems to really viscerally capture the theatricality of such an out-of-control scene. The editing and photography seem to work in this anarchic tandem, with very little elegance or gloss...but I don't think a film like this really should be aesthetically attractive. If anything, the unstable direction, story, and characters needed to look out of sorts, chaotic, and all over the place.