Just the Ticket #177: The Psychopath & Mr. Robbie

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.

At last, Maniac May has begun, Ticketholders!

I had originally intended to split up today's review over two weeks, but life pressures and a lack of things to say led me to push back the Psychopath review and combine it with my thoughts on the Mr. Robbie short film, as they have basically the same premise.

My recurring premise on Just the Ticket is that you please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't yet, leave a comment at the bottom of this post instead of writing into a children's TV show, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to keep watching low-quality movies for free on YouTube, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my bright, high-definition content.

If you couldn't tell, I found 1973's The Psychopath (a.k.a. An Eye For An Eye, and not to be confused with 1966's The Psychopath) to be difficult to impossible to watch. Not because the kills were too gruesome (they lacked visual and auditory impact for the most part) or because of the overt depictions of child abuse (the opening features a father paddling his four-year-old son twenty-seven times—unfortunately, I felt compelled to go back and count the strokes with my eyes closed for fact-checking purposes —while the mother watches and urges him on) or the suggestions of pedophilia. No, I mean The Psychopath is literally a blurry, badly edited (the scene at the police gym—where actors who can't do martial arts play cops who can do martial arts because karate cops are the moon of 2025, I guess—gave me an "Electric Soldier Porygon" headache from all of the fast cuts...and the double tequila/Mountain Dew combo I drank while watching the movie), often badly lit (either blindingly bright or so dark that it might as well be an audio drama) snail of a thing with few actors worth calling attention to.

Directed by Larry G. Brown (whose other directing credits include a trans biker gang movie and a movie where a DEI president tries to save the world from a fart pandemic), The Psychopath is a story about Hayes (Pete Renoudet, the voice of Master Splinter in the original TMNT cartoon), Graham (Jackson Bostwick, Captain Marvel in the 70s Shazam! series), and Matthews (John Ashton, Marv Dorfler in Midnight Run); three detectives investigating the "disappearance" of the child from the opening and find the over-acted parents (The Piano's Barbara Grover and Flesh Gordon's Lance Larsen—that's a porn parody of Flash Gordon, not a typo) have also been murdered when they go to arrest them.

So now that the movie is past the halfway point, they've stumbled upon a serial murder case that they can't solve even though the victims are abusive parents and they visit a hospital wing for abused children where an eccentric children's show host frequently performs.

Said children's television personality is Tom Rabbey (Tom Basham), a mildly effeminate, developmentally delayed puppeteer (his show is like Punch & Judy, but with more strangling and beheading) with a Lloyd Christmas/Moe Howard haircut who hangs out with children at the local playground and the aforementioned hospital with no concept for the perceived implications of his presence or basic hospital etiquette (an abusive mother all but calls him a pedophile, and he comes in close proximity to a child with breathing problems and asks him to cough repeatedly as a joke), where he learns of their abuse stories and steals their medical records information to vet his victims.

There's also a subplot of the movie where Rabbey has a Norman Bates kind of relationship with one of the producers of his show (stage and TV actress Gretchen Kanne) that gets some screentime in the second act and goes unresolved and unmentioned thereafter, almost as if its only purpose was to make this movie a Psycho knockoff (it is in the title, after all) and it could have been omitted without affecting the plot in the slightest.

When Rabbey later goes after his sixth victim (his spree includes a ridiculous scene where he rattails a woman unconscious with a dry handkerchief before running over her head with a lawnmower offscreen), it ends badly for them both as her daughter shoots them and the credits roll, leaving the audience to sit with one of the only two truly unsettling moments this movie has, because although the villain(?)(s?) have been slain, justice in the eye of the law has gone unserved, the cycle of violence is unbroken, and the aftermath that our trio of well-meaning paragons of deductive ineptitude will find beyond the margins of this movie's poorly utilized runtime is sure to be traumatic for all concerned.

The visual quality of The Psychopath should be given some slack as a relic of its time and not representative of a bad product (the one-note overacting, sluggish pacing, attention deficit editing, underwhelming kills, repetitive soundtrack, and extraneous plot elements serve that purpose just fine on their own), but it did often impact my viewing experience.

Most of the characters were redundant and interchangeable (three cops, multiple abusive parents—usually women—who were written very similar dialogue and deliver it in very similar ways), but the clear standouts were Tom Basham coldly hamming it up as Mr. Rabbey, and Margaret Avery (the original The Color Purple) as a nurse in the abused children's ward, bringing way more class and dramatic heft to this low-budget mess than it deserves.

And as I said, the bleak and cathartic but unsatisfying ending actually made The Psychopath worth the time I invested in it. I'm not going to be one of those, "just skip to the ending; the movie sucks" critics because despite my feelings, I can acknowledge that without the preceding hour-plus, the last five minutes would not hit like they do. I shudder to think what a boring, nonsensical cluster the 1980 re-release looks like, considering all of the kills were edited out of it.

D+

In 1986, Maniac star Joe Spinell got the idea to do a sequel after director William Lustig (Maniac Cop) expressed no interest in the concept. Spinell pitched the sequel as a remake of The Psychopath, and a promotional short was filmed to raise a budget for a feature-length effort with Spinell playing the Tom Basham character and Life Is Hot In Cracktown author/director Buddy Giovinazzo behind the camera. The project was unfortunately canceled due to Spinell's death in 1989, but as you can see above, the short is available to view on YouTube and was bundled with the 30th anniversary edition of Maniac.

Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie, like The Psychopath before it, follows a children's TV show host who becomes disillusioned and broken by the abundance of abused children among his viewing audience, and...decides to do something about it.

Unlike Mr. Rabbey, Mr. Robbie is an emotionally and mentally matured man whose viewers write him letters detailing their abuse. The opening scene where he is distraught over the pile of letters is like something out of an early 21st Century torture porn slasher (dated now, but ahead of its time in the 80s), and the one kill we get (because this is a short film) is appropriately brutal for the era of the big three slashers (Michael, Jason, and Freddy) with some enjoyable but silly-looking gore effects. The short runtime required some contrivance to get the plot moving (the cook at the bar where Mr. Robbie is drowning his sorrows just happens to be an abusive father whose domestic crimes made the paper that morning), but I got the sense that, had the short financed a feature-length Maniac sequel, and had Spinell not contracted a Final Destination curse in the shower three years later, this would have been the superior version.

C

I know it's a little out of order, what with me talking about the "sequel" before the original, but Stay Tuned for next Friday, when I review Maniac and its other "sequel," The Last Horror Film.

Ticketmaster,

Out.