Director – Gerard Ciccoritti, Screenplay – Michael Bockner & Gerard Ciccoritti, Producer – Michael Bockner, Photography – Robert Bergman, Music – Joel Rosenbaum, Makeup Effects – Timothy Mogg, Art Direction – Craig Richards. Production Company – Lightshow Communications.
Cast
John Haslett Cuff (Richard Foster), Darlene Mignacco (Sarah Tusk), Rose Graham (Diane Foster), Agi Gallus (Victoria Tusk), Silvio Oliviero (Kazma), Pier Giorgio DiCicco (Tony), Dorian Ferber (Fema Wilson), Kim Cayer (Wendy Fields), Dan Rose (Dr Decker Wilson), Michael Hoole (Dr Hippocampus), Frank Procopio (Anthony Zito), Fernie Kane (Pearl Tusk), Michael Bockner (Victor Tusk), Maria Cortese (Young Sarah)
Plot
In 1966, young Sarah Tusk kills both her parents with rat poison placed in the breakfast she makes them for their anniversary. Her sister Victoria insists that Sarah remain confined in the Lakeview Asylum. In the present-day, Victoria is working as cook for detective story writer Richard Foster and his wife when she receives news that Sarah has escaped from custody. Sarah makes calls demanding Victoria come to meet her at the abandoned Lakeview hospital. Richard and his wife Diane are hosting a dinner party with friends that evening but Victoria is missing. Sarah turns up in her place and offers to be the chef, they unaware that she is serving cooked human flesh. They and the guests are drugged and taken to the abandoned asylum where Sarah and two other psychos obtain great amusement torturing and killing them.
Gerard Ciccoritti, who these days is usually billed as Jerry Ciccoritti, is a Canadian director. Ciccoritti made his directorial debut with Psycho Girls and went on to the moderate video hit of Graveyard Shift (1987) and its sequel The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II (1988). His most well-known (non-genre) film was the erotic thriller Paris, France (1993). Ciccoritti should be well more known but all his work subsequent to that has all been directing tv movies and episodes of Canadian television series such as Forever Knight, Highlander, Due South, Poltergeist: The Legacy and La Femme Nikita, among others. Ciccoritti can also be seen in the film here as the delivery guy who brings pizza to the asylum.
Psycho Girls was Gerard Ciccoritti’s first film. As a result, some of the acting is on the amateurish side where clearly he is not quite versed in giving actors the direction they need, although this improves considerably as the film goes on. At least, John Haslett Cuff’s voiceover dialogue is an amusing mimicry of snub-nosed Dashiell Hammett/Mickey Spillane-type detective thriller purple prose. The film finds its feet about the point of the dinner party scene where the performances are on the ball. These scenes come with a nasty undertow as Ciccoritti cuts away from the dinner table to the kitchen to reveal that the meat being served up comes from a human body.
The lunatics in the asylum – (l to r) Pier Giorgio DiCicco, psycho girl Darlene Mignacco and Silvio Oliviero
This segues into the extended scenes at the abandoned asylum. This last third is by far the most entertaining in the film. Here Ciccoritti goes for broke with a sadistic nastiness all done in a camp New Wave style. We get scenes with one victim tied up as a madly overacting Silvio Oliveri plays barber and gives them a shave and a haircut before slashing their throat; one girl is thrown in a bath and electrocuted; another girl has her toenails torn out, all before reaching a mad climax. Silvio Oliveri, later the vampire taxi driver in Graveyard Shift, owns the show in these scenes, playing madly over-the-top. Ciccoritti indulges his performance, particularly when it comes to throwing in a series of scenes with him doing impression of well-known actors.
The main problem with the film is that it lacks much focus as a story. It is called ‘Psycho Girls’ but that is a misnomer as there is only a single psycho girl. A title like Psycho Girls gives the impression it is going to be a film about two girls on a killing spree. Moreover, during the asylum scenes, the single psycho girl is sidelined and it is the two associates who are introduced only during those scenes who take over to do most of the cruelty and nastiness, while she sits watching. There is a long preamble to the story of the two sisters, only for this to prove to be of no real relevance to what happens at the asylum.
