That was an excellent one.

ridiculous rating

one of my absolute favorites!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I'm Tacey Robbins' cousin, but that isn't the reason I'm giving this movie the highest rating I can. It compares very favorably to Drive-In type movies of the same era, and was filmed on about one-tenth the budget. It's fun to watch on a number of levels: A great look at mid-1960's culture, a pretty good thriller-type story line, and Tacey Robbins' great voice. And she's pretty easy on the eyes, too! People interested in seeing this movie should be aware that John Carradine does not appear in it. Bits and pieces of "Psycho-A-Go-Go" were cannibalized over the years and randomly spliced into several other movies. This film was, in fact, lost completely until the company Troma took the trouble to edit it back to what it looked like when originally released in 1965.

This film is clearly dated to an interesting time in American history. Notice the hairstyles on both the men and the women and the type of cars everybody drove. You don't see those anymore. At any rate, the reason I bring these things up is because I think that in order to understand or enjoy this film a person has to appreciate the time-frame in which it was made. Whether it's the songs by "Linda Clark" (Tacey Robbins) or the nightclub atmosphere, there is something in this movie that probably makes no sense unless you've seen it firsthand. Now, don't get me wrong, this film is not a very good picture. Other than the performance of Roy Morton (as the psycho "Joe Corey") and the presence of the "go-go dancers" at the very beginning, I found most of the film to be quite routine and dull. Even so, this film exemplifies what a B-movie looked like back in the mid-60's and that's the standard by which it should be judged. So, people who see it now might think it's a lousy movie compared to films of today. And it probably is if you compare it today's standards. But I think we need to keep things in perspective. In short, while this movie is probably a bit below average, it isn't as bad as the score most people have given it. Neither is this movie one that will suit everyone's taste. For that reason I recommend it only for those who can understand and appreciate films from this period and are willing to make allowances.

And here I was thinking all movies from the 60's that ended in "a go go" had to be terrible. I was wrong."Psycho a go go" is a very underrated gangster-horror flick that definitely deserves better than an average of 2.1 on IMDb. It definitely looks very artistic at times, for example, the scene where the killer strangles the girl in a hotel while the neon lights lighten the scene.(This is probably due to expert cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond). Also, I'm sure this couldn't have been the inspiration for "The Shining" ,because I'm sure only a handful of people have seen this, but the scene at the end where(spoilers, I guess) the killer chases the little girl and her mother through the snow and the end scene from "The Shining" are eerily similar. All in all, this could have been a more well known picture today if the film was cleaned up a bit, had its draggy scenes removed, had the cheesy bullet sounds taken away, and maybe had a more competent director.

I'm a fan of Psycho a Go-Go, and Al Adamson in general, though his films can be hit or miss at best. Psycho a Go-Go is about middleground for him, not as dreadfully incoherent as Blood of Dracula's Castle, not as existential and apocalyptic as Satan's Sadists. Yet "Psycho" can at times reach the weirdness of a David Lynch movie (Blue Velvet comes to mind), and at other times the "coolness" level of Tarantino's overrated Pulp Fiction. Here we have thin-tied gangsters in black zoot suits, dames in beehive hair with lounge voices, the catchy but surreal siren call of go-go song and dance, a chipmunk-voiced black doll, and a killer who is a cross between a young Jack Nicholson and Michael Ironside, with an ugly butch haircut and an uglier mind. The scene where he sadistically strangles a girl, intercut with the blinking neon blue lights of a seedy motel sign, is unquestionably a work of art, or at least of high imitation.A decent genre flick without the pretensions of its later imitators, and a portal into the weird dark world of Los Angeles.