Psycho from Texas (1975)

Psycho from Texas….now there’s a movie title that takes me back. If you were around the bargain basement video shops of Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s a run-in with this film was inevitable, you just couldn’t move in those places without tripping over a copy of it. My own initial encounter with Psycho from Texas came at ‘Pricebusters’ in Blackpool. Pricebusters was two floors worth of market trading stalls, hidden away in the basement of which was this stall selling cheap video releases of horror and exploitation titles. Truth be told though, there were places like that scattered all over Blackpool back then.

Their niche was the type of videos that never made it into the rental shops or chains like HMV and Our Price, this was the absolute underclass of the video industry, labels like Apex, Network, Viz, Elephant Video, Stablecane, Bronx Video, all those here today, gone tomorrow outfits. If you were growing up in the era that came after the fleapit cinemas and the video nasties, and prior to the internet and DVD, this was how you got your education in exploitation movies. To venture into those bargain basement VHS shops really was a trip into the unknown. Very little documentation of these types of film were readily available then, and even if it was, most of these films had been re-titled anyhow. For reasons that looking back on it you can’t help thinking were a bit suspect, especially as you often had entire video labels that put out nothing but re-titled product, which dare I say is an ideal way of keeping one step ahead of a film’s rights owner.


Don't Look in the Basement- the entrance to the long gone Pricebusters


Anyway, it was in Pricebusters that I encountered the likes of Exorcist 3: Cries and Shadows, Al Adamson’s Dracula Vs Frankenstein (re-titled: Revenge of Dracula), The Witchmaker, Night Fright, Malpertuis, Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast (re-titled: Death’s Ecstasy), Borowczyk’s Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (re-titled: The Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll), Death Curse of Tartu and Werewolf Woman, all thrown together in a Blackpool basement, along with this ‘Psycho from Texas’ film. Not that it was called Psycho from Texas back then of course, the film had been re-titled ‘The Butcher’ by a distributor called Bronx Video, who liked it so much they put it out twice, under two different covers. One that sold it as a horror movie, and had a Michael Myers type mask on the cover, and another that had a cartoonish drawing of someone getting shot-gunned to death on the cover….which completely spoils the end of the film by the way. Every one of these films was an adventure in itself, would you stumble upon a lost gem, or be bored to tears by the likes of Wendigo and The Thirsty Dead, be off to Italy for a heavily-cut Lucio Fulci film, or experience an art film in horror movie clothing like Malpertuis and the Boro movies.

Let’s not look back on the VHS era with too much misplaced nostalgia though, don’t forget that back then these films were frequently cut, panned and scanned, and quality wise looked like shitty 3rd or 4th generation copies. No one remotely sane would argue that this was the ideal way to watch these movies, but such video releases brought these films allot of attention, put them out there at affordable prices, thus making them easily accessible to the common man, and helped pave the way for the whistles and bells, deluxe treatment that some of these films are receiving on blu-ray today.



VHS cover courtesy of Charles Devlin 

Psycho from Texas is a prime example of the kind of American regional obscurity that you tended to encounter in bargain basement video shops back then. The type of films that cast a spell over British VHS viewers on account of their ability to spirit you away down the forgotten, dirt roads of America’s past. You knew with films like these that you were seeing an America far removed from the gloss of Hollywood. We’re talking films made in places like Florida and the Deep South, films directed by and starring people you’ve never heard of before, and chances are would never hear from again.

Psycho from Texas’ director Jim Feazell, sort of fits the bill in that respect, this being his one shot at directing, producing and writing a feature film. Prior to the film though, Feazell had been kicking around filmmaking for a number of years as a stuntman. He’d done stunt work on Chisum, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Once you realize the Peckinpah connection, the ending of Psycho from Texas makes perfect sense, it being everything you’d expect from someone who’d worked under the tutelage of bloody Sam. Feazell was also the author of several books, whose plots make you wish he’d directed more feature films. Who wouldn’t want to have seen a film version of Feazell’s horror novel ‘Return to Heaven’ in which “Chuck Abbott, three years after he and Bubba destroyed the demon from hell” returns to “help Bubba quell another bedeviled shroud of evil that had enveloped heaven”.

Believe it or not, Feazell did actually base Psycho from Texas on a real-life story, that of George James, a rich businessman who in April 1967 was held against his will by two men who forced him to sign cheques over to them, before James managed to escape and alert the authorities. Feazell filmed Psycho from Texas in Eldorado, Texas where he lived and where the actual events took place. What made it onto the screen though can’t really claim too much basis in reality, with Psycho from Texas it feels like we’re getting a 10th generation retelling of a true story. Where every time the story has been told the teller has added their own salacious details and blown incidents that little bit more out of proportion.

Rechristened ‘William Phillips’ for a big screen, the film’s George James character is a widowed rich businessman with a blonde daughter and a luxurious mansion, who enjoys fishing and inexplicably likes to hang around with poor black children. Like Conrad Bain’s character in Diff’rent Strokes though, Philips is just a big hearted guy who loves to reach out to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and who could knock that, after all

“Now, the world don't move to the beat of just one drum 
What might be right for you, may not be right for some 
A man is born, he's a man of means 
Then along come two, they got nothing but their jeans 

But they got, Diff'rent Strokes 
It takes, Diff'rent Strokes 
It takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world 

Everybody's got a special kind of story 
Everybody finds a way to shine 
It don't matter that you got not allot 
So what 
They'll have theirs, and you'll have yours, and I'll have mine 
And together we'll be fine.... 

Because it takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world 
Yes it does 
It takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world”



Left to its own devices this film could have played out as a gentle drama about how fishing can bridge boundaries of age, race and class in America, but ya’ can’t be having a film called Psycho from Texas without having a Psycho. So…enter Wheeler, a psychotic drifter played by John King III, the kind of mean looking sombitch that sure makes you glad you never got to meet John King II, or indeed John King- the original.

It might be blasphemous to mention them in the same breath, but in its own amateur hour way Psycho from Texas anticipates ‘Henry- Portrait of a Serial Killer’ in several ways. There are flashbacks to the bloody aftermaths of Wheeler’s crimes, as you see one of the …you suspect many… dead corpses that Wheeler has left in the motel rooms of America. Wheeler’s back-story is your typical serial killer sob story…Momma was a whore, young Wheeler got exposed to some inappropriate fornicating, now he hates all women cause they remind him of Momma….you know the drill. Wheeler finds his own Otis in Slick (Tommy Lamey) a low-IQed, mustachioed criminal who Wheeler is partnered up with to kidnap Mr. Phillips. Needless to say, what with Wheeler’s psychopathic tendencies and Slick’s general air of incompetence, together this duo are definitely not the greater sum of their parts.

As you might expect from a film made by a local resident Psycho from Texas has a great feel for its area, and gives the impression that very little has changed about the South since the days of Gone with the Wind. Phillips’ grand Southern mansion and gospel humming black maid is in sharp contrast to the dirt poor areas of town he drives through to pick up his young black fishing buddy. It might not have been Feazell’s intension but such scenes do hammer home that this is still a place of the haves and the have-nots, with the houses along Philips’ journey being little more than shacks, and a bucket full of dirty water being unceremoniously thrown out onto the street as Phillips drives by.



It is hard to know who Wheeler hates most rich people or women…who of course remind him of Momma. “I’d sure likely to take a pretty girl into the woods than a hairy legged old man” Wheeler bitterly complains to Phillips. Whoever came up with the music for Psycho from Texas appears to have been singing from a different hymn sheet than its director. Whereas the C&W songs on the soundtrack practically weep for Wheeler’s lost, tormented soul “I’d give my very life away, everything I own, if I could turn his world around”, the film seems to revel in portraying him as a tough, heartless bastard. Would you give your very life away, everything you own, for a man who moments later is brutalizing a harmless old man onscreen and referring to his daughter as a “stuck up bitch”.

As per their real life counterparts, Wheeler and Slick kidnap Phillips, take him to a woodlands shack and force him to sign over cheques. Psycho from Texas also sticks to the facts when it comes to the pair’s plan quickly going belly up. Wheeler goes to cash the cheques but can’t stay out of trouble for long, getting into a fight with a drug dealer, having more childhood flashbacks and raping and murdering the Sheriff’s daughter. Slick also fails miserably to live up to his name, and gets drunk, which allows Philips the chance to escape. Given that Slick sports a red hanky in his left pocket throughout the movie, which as per the rules of William Friedkin’s Cruising, means Slick is into gay S&M, old man Phillips was perhaps wise to make a quick getaway.

Psycho from Texas is the stuff of VHS era legend for two reasons, one of which is the foot chase that goes on…and on…and on. Slick’s pursuit of Phillips beginning at around 40 minutes into the film and ending at 66 minutes in. Roughly taking place in real time, Psycho from Texas might well contain the mother of all movie foot chases, played out over a landscape of cow fields, woodlands and muddy swamps. For thespians Tommy Lamey and Herschel Mays, this must have felt less like an acting assignment and more like the obstacle course from hell. As even the significantly younger Tommy Lamey appears visibly exhausted at one point, your heart has to go out to Herschel Mays, an out of shape, bespectacled, bewigged old man that this film seems determined to give a fatal coronary too. Psycho from Texas’ never ending foot chase also gives Tommy Lamey the chance to shine as the film’s comic relief, with plentiful opportunities to laugh at dumb ol’ Slick, as his pursuit of Phillips is impeded by a skunk and then a herd of pigs, all of whom add to the overall humiliation of being unable to catch up to a wheezing old man.



The second reason for Psycho from Texas being the stuff of VHS era legend is, but of course, it’s theme tune ‘Yesterday was a long time ago’. Psycho from Texas’ love affair with that damn theme tune knows no bounds, it’s rarely off Psycho from Texas’ jukebox and is repeated ad infinitum during the film. Along with the foot chase, this song puts forward a case that words like ‘overkill’ and ‘repetition’ were not part of Jim Feazell’s vocabulary. Once heard, impossible to forget ‘Yesterday was a long time ago’ is another C&W number that begs audience sympathy for the unsympathetic Wheeler

“Yesterday was a long time ago, 
Yesterday he did not understand, 
Now he’s learned how to hate, to kill and to rape, 
He’s lived a thousand lives and Wheeler knows, 
The fear of being a man, 
But fears come and go, and Wheeler doesn’t know, 
What’s to become of his soul”. 

There are further lyrics but if you’ve ever seen the film they should already be imprinted on your brain, and if you haven’t seen the film its best to experience the Psycho from Texas theme song for yourself. ‘Yesterday was a long time ago’ rivals ‘Keep on Driving’ from Pigs (1973) and the theme tune from Hitchhike to Hell (1977), as the most catchiest ditty ever heard in a regional exploitation film.

 

Psycho from Texas originally unspooled for local audiences in 1975 as ‘Wheeler’, self distributed by Feazell and bearing a phony PG rating (note the lack of MPAA logo on the poster). After lying dormant for a few years, the film was reworked in the late 1970s, with additional scenes shot to beef the film up to an R rating. A turn of events that meant Jim Feazell had to get all Jim Sleaze’ll. John King III was recalled to shoot a scene featuring Wheeler with a (dead) nude woman in a motel room, also added were explicit flashbacks involving a mangy salesman humping away at Wheeler’s no-good mother.

The most noteworthy scene that transformed the PG rated Wheeler into the R-rated Psycho from Texas, involves Wheeler getting into a bar fight and then blowing his top at a barmaid whose indifferent attitude has wound him up the wrong way. It’s an add-on that gave the film its biggest claim to fame, on account of the unfortunate barmaid being played by future scream queen Linnea Quigley, in one of her earliest screen roles. The years in-between did nothing to dim the bug eyed intensity John King III brought to the role, as Wheeler hollers “now bitch, let’s dance” to poor Linnea, who is forced to dance, strip, then has beer poured over her by the sadistic Wheeler. Talk about a trial by fire – or should that be trial by beer- introduction to the film industry. Then again, in a career that would see her being impaled on deer antlers, be eaten by zombies and pushing lipstick into one of her breasts, Linnea certainly began and she meant to go on.

After being shopped around under the titles ‘The Hurting’ and ‘The Mama’s Boy’ this new version of the film finally resurfaced under its now best known title ‘Psycho from Texas’, presumably dreamed up to cash in on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which was enjoying a successful Stateside re-release in 1981. Its distribution in the NYC area was handled by New American Films, a company ran by gay porn director Joe Gage, who soon after would himself be branching out into R-rated exploitation films (Breeders, Bad Girls Dormitory) under the name Tim Kincaid.



In the UK, Psycho from Texas was meant to have been cut by 5 minutes and 20 seconds by the British censor for its late 1980s VHS release. A fact that immediately put it on the radar of sleaze film fans who figured that any film which warranted such heavy censorship had to be worth seeking out, at least in its uncut state. The irony is that, I now suspect Bronx video never implemented the cuts that the BBFC insisted on. The Linnea Quigley scene, surely the only scene that could have warranted such excessive censor cuts, was intacto on the Bronx release, and while the version the BBFC passed ran 78 minutes, the Bronx tape clocks in closer to 84 minutes. For that Bronx video deserve kudos, even if you suspect that their issuing of it uncut was more down to error and incompetence rather than an attempt to defy the British censor.

There are a couple of different versions of Psycho from Texas floating around however. Some versions of the scene where Phillips escapes Slick allow it to play out in real time, while other versions curiously depict Phillip’s escape via a series of dissolves on Slick’s face. Evidentially language edits have also been made to the film at some point as well, as there exists racist and non-racist versions of Psycho from Texas. In one version of the film the redneck Sheriff makes reference to “that little nigger boy that fishes allot with Bill”, while other versions awkwardly edit out the racial insult. The deletion of that tiny piece of dialogue can’t hide the fact though that films like Psycho from Texas weren’t made for sensitive times. Scenes involving Phillips’ black maid becoming hysterical and wailing “lord ha’ mercy” while crawling about on her hands and feet having seemingly been included in the film to give racist whites a few belly laughs. As I say, films like this sure weren’t made for sensitive times.

Yesterday was a long time ago…yesterday people went to drive-ins and bargain basement VHS shops to watch old geezers being run ragged and neekid young ladies having beer poured over them…you might not have had to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre, but you do have to go to Psycho from Texas for a 26 minute foot chase.