What's PSYCHOTRONIC???
A Call to Disorder
"I suppose this is as good a time as any to state that I am a movie fan. I like movies, all kinds of movies. The big ones, the little ones, the westerns, love stories, tragedies, spectacles, all of them. I like movies in Cinemascope, Todd-AO, 16mm, 8mm, and in 3-D. I like the successes, the stinkers, and the in-betweens. Of course, I am unhappy when a movie is lousy, and I am glad when a movie is good. But I like movies."
- Charles Willeford, The Woman Chaser
That statement by Willeford's doomed antihero illustrates my attitude just as well. And of all the movies in the world, I like psychotronic movies best. But that doesn't mean that every movie I like is psychotronic, or vice-versa. There's been growing confusion of late as to what we mean when we say "psychotronic" - see Mike's December 1997 Rant for more. In my old Blechbusters column in the old paper version of It's Only A Movie!, I typically covered whatever movie I'd seen since writing the previous column, but I began to get feedback that some of the features I'd covered were outside the boundaries of "psychotronic".
Everyone pretty much agrees that psychotronic encompasses the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres, what Forrest J Ackerman called "SFantasy" or "Imagimovies". But even those genres are indistinct and hard to define. Fans of science fiction used to say that SF was "what I point to when I say it". And psychotronic goes well beyond those boundaries - for example, no one questions our devotion to Bettie Page as a psychotronic star, but she only came close to pure fantasy elements once or twice in her career (although she illustrated my fantasies all the time).
Well what do my fellow self-appointed experts have to say? Michael Weldon didn't invent the word "psychotronic", but first used it around 1980 (as title to a weekly NYC area unofficial TV Guide supplement) to describe something that didn't yet have a label, like "punk". Unconsciously swiped from the (Chicago-made) trash sci-fi film The Psychotronic Man, the word was "originally meant to suggest a combination of weird horror films and electronic gadget-filled science fiction movies... After a while, I began to use the term "psychotronic" as an adjective, to describe all the different kinds of movies that interest me.... monster and science-fiction films, of course. But exploitation films of any sort, really: biker movies, rock 'n' roll movies, musclemen movies, 3-D movies, '60s beach movies, Mexican movies with subtitles - you get the idea..."
See what I mean? Psychotronic is "you get the idea". Trouble is, lately it's gotten a lot tougher to "get the idea". Weldon has since tried to convince everyone that the word "psychotronic" (and not just his magazines and books) is a registered trademark for whatever he likes - which is sort of like if Ackerman tried to trademark the word "Sci-fi". I wish Mike no ill will - I've always liked the guy a lot and love his work - but it's too little too late at this point to try to claim ownership to a descriptive term that he half-borrowed in the first place. Unlike us assholes, those that followed in Weldon's literary footsteps have bent over backwards to avoid using his word. Michael Stein's Filmfax is "the magazine of unusual film & television". Charles Kilgore's Ecco covers "the world of bizarre video". Bob Sargent's Videooze is "your guide to horror and exploitation on videotape". Etcetera. "Exploitation" is just as difficult to pin down - almost every film is made with the intention of making money. "Weird", "B", "genre", "trash" and "cult" don't help much either - you almost have to use as many of these terms together as possible in order to get the point across. In Weldon's recent video guide, he tries to narrow the focus to "horror, science fiction, fantasy, and exploitation movies", then widens it again to include films "because of the companies that made or released them, the director, or the casts."
Joe Bob Briggs likes the term "drive-in" movies. When I was a member of his Board of Drive-In Experts, I was expected to judge films by the Three B's: Blood, Breasts, and Beasts. Imagine trying to count the breasts in a Dave Friedman trailer comp tape.
My editor at VideoHound Books did a pretty decent job of nailing it in our Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (which originally used a title I like better, Mongrel Video): " -- the masterpieces, the misfits, and the misunderstood.... cult movies, trash film, underground flicks, alternative cinema, and camp outings -- movies so bad they're good, as well as movies so bad we don't want you to think they might have some camp value, and movies so good the truly cool people watch them over and over again." Similarly loose, but as good a description as I've heard.
So what isn't psychotronic? You might want to include '50s juvenile delinquent movies in your list of psychotronic sub-categories. So how about a '50s flick about New York gangs complete with alley rumbles and murder by switchblade - do you want to let West Side Story in? Probably not. There might be what you'd call a cult surrounding Jackie Chan's favorite movie The Sound of Music, but I wouldn't call it psychotronic beyond the madness of Christopher Plummer having all those kids. Even the Nazis come off like strict schoolmarms in that one. Does that mean all musicals are out? Not if you want to include Rocky Horror Picture Show, Teaserama, The Wizard of Oz, or Phantom of the Paradise. Flores and I have trouble agreeing on a lot of this. He makes the point that film noirs like Out of the Past aren't necessarily psychotronic, despite their definite psychotronic pedigree going back to films like Metropolis and Nosferatu. But then, we've shown film noirs at PFS shows. And we've run features on noir stars like Peter Lorre, who made few appearances in definite horror films. We agree that psychotronic isn't limited to films and should cover psychotronic bands like the Cramps. But Soundgarden? When did they write a song about werewolves?
All this kind of arguing over which film belongs in what category is getting nerdy and tiresome - the utmost in fanboy behavior that threatens to take the fun out of everything. Here's an idea: maybe we shouldn't judge whether or not a movie is psychotronic or not, but how psychotronic it is. I call this accounting of psychotronic elements the p-factor, an accounting of the psychotronic content of each film. If we can agree that deranged killers are a psychotronic element, then the p-factor provides mathematical proof that 2000 Maniacs is more psychotronic than Psycho. Eureka!
And so, every Movie Madness! review will include the p-factor for that film, a rundown of what makes that movie psychotronic. You're all welcome to write in and complain about what should or should not be a psychotronic element. But remember, the p-factor is hereby copyrighted and the exclusive property of me, Brian Thomas. And you're all welcome to use it freely until I say different.
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