Now available on DVD
Cast:
Charisma Carpenter as Susan
Paul Sculfor as David
Ricci Harnett as Peck
Justin Hawkins as Josh
Ty Glaser as Emily
Directed by Reg Traviss
Review:
Remember when Charisma Carpenter was one of the hottest up-and-coming actresses because of her roles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel? Remember when Carpenter was named one of the hottest chicks in Hollywood?
Yeah, those days are long since over.
While she’s still totally hot, you can tell the last few years with her career floundering [editor’s note: You mean her minimal role in The Expendables?] hasn’t been good on her appearance or her acting abilities. In Psychosis, she’s basically a statue that moves through the motions of someone that is looking for a paycheck in any possible way she can get. In fact, when confronted with wild and wooly visions of all kinds of nastiness, you can almost see the director screaming at her lack of reaction.
Psychosis begins rather random: with a group of tree huggers in the middle of a forest where they are planning some tree hugging thing when they are brutally attacked by some dude that apparently just doesn’t like their peace, love and understanding.
Unfortunately, this slasher type opening is about as good as it gets and had it stayed in this format at least we would have had a sub-par slasher movie playing on all the clichés we’ve seen numerous times. Instead it turns to a rather milquetoast haunting horror film as we are introduced to new, cute couple Susan (Carpenter) and David (Paul Sculfor).
But as soon as they move into their Victorian-type mansion house, Susan begins to lose it. There isn’t really a reason for this, it simply happens. But it also so happens that Susan is rather boring. Extremely boring in fact. She mopes around feeling sorry for herself and looking all boring and tired. Apparently way to boring for David as he begins to stray from their relationship, finding comfort in the arms of some hooker of some sort and attending weird hot tub parties with a bunch of hot British chicks with quite possibly a Cleveland Steamer happening (although they never really get to the finality of the event). Not kidding, this actually happens.
Susan, meanwhile, begins to have all sorts of strange visions inside her house as she fully begins to lose it. She gets the ole blood in the bathtub trick, the strange kid kicking a soccer ball on the front lawn, the crazy picture making her wig out, nonsensical séances, having sex with some weird British dude with a terrible goatee and then a full freak out with visions of the same dude from the hippie killings chopping up random people that she has seen around her house.
Now, the pay off here is pretty lame, in fact, you can probably see it coming. And director Reg Traviss just couldn’t resist going for the shock ending. So, without a lack of scares (in fact, there are none whatsoever), a lack of blood and gore except for the beginning and a very boring, seen-it-before storyline this is worth skipping. Unless, of course, you want to check out the prelude to a Cleveland Steamer.
