Director/Screenplay – David Paulsen, Producers – Yoram Globus & Menahem Golan, Photography – Norman Leigh, Music – Craig Hundley, Special Effects – Joe Quinlivan, Art Direction – Kathy Curtis Cahill. Production Company – Golan-Globus.
Cast
Klaus Kinski (Pieter Fales), Mariana Hill (Julie Caffrey), Donna Wilkes (Alison Fales), Craig Wasson (Doug Parker), Christopher Lloyd (Gilbert), Richard Herd (Lieutenant Lew Donahue), Joe Regalbuto (Jake Bend), Flo Gerrish (Pat), Kiva Lawrence (Rosemary Doyle), Claude Duvernoy (Francoise)
Plot
In Los Angeles, Julie Caffrey, who writes a romantic advice column for the Press Herald, begins to receive a series of threatening letters pasted together from words cut out of newspapers. Both her ex-husband, the paper’s editor Doug Parker, and the police urge her to dismiss these as coming from a harmless crank. Julie also attends a therapy group led by psychologist Peter Fales. However, the other women in the therapy group then start to be killed off.
Schizoid was one of the earliest US films produced by legendary Israeli producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Golan and Globus had purchased the Cannon Group in 1979. Over the next decade, they embarked on producing a whole bunch of films under the Cannon Films banner, including assorted Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris action films and the likes of King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Lifeforce (1985), among a great many others. During this period, they briefly jumped aboard the
Slasher Film fad that was just finding its feet and in very short time produced New Year’s Evil (1980), Schizoid and X-Ray/Hospital Massacre (1982) and then just as quickly abandoned it and went on to other things.
David Paulsen was a director who was associated with Cannon during this time. Though American born, Paulsen had written several films that were directed by Menahem Golan back when he was still based in Israel with Kasablan (1973), Diamonds (1975) and The Uranium Conspiracy (1978). Paulsen then raised capital to make the psycho film Savage Weekend (1979), which was picked up by Cannon for release. At the time, Golan and Globus had Klaus Kinski on contract and asked Paulsen to quickly put together a film before this expired. Schizoid was the result. This and Savage Weekend were the only two films that David Paulsen ever directed. Paulsen subsequently went on to greater success as a producer and writer, sometimes director, on the primetime tv soap operas Dallas (1978-91), Knots Landing (1979-93) and Dynasty (1981-9).
Schizoid was condemned as sleazy and perpetuating violence against women by Roger Ebert and several other critics of the day and as a result has gained a reputation as being a sordid work. Watching the dvd restoration released in 2022, it seems a moral outrage in a teacup that is no more and no less guilty of doing this than any of the other films made around the same time. There are far worse and much more overtly misogynistic examples that can be pointed to in the slasher fad.
Klaus Kinski as sinister psychologist Pieter Fales
Schizoid is fairly average for the era. It is more of a Psycho Film than it is a slasher film – there are not the hulking killers pursuing teenage victims that you usually get in slasher films, while its plot denouement is more founded in the sort of murder mystery plots that were popular among the Italian Giallo Films where the killer is revealed to be one among several potential suspects. The suspects include Klaus Kinski’s psychologist, his troubled teenage daughter Donna Wilkes and a youngish Christopher Lloyd, who was then just finding fame on tv’s Taxi (1978-83) and was still a few years away from Back to the Future (1985), as a possibly disturbed handyman.
What the film centres around is the persona of Klaus Kinski. Kinski had emerged in German cinema in the 1950s, finding his feet in the 1960s and gaining international acclaim with his work with Werner Herzog in the 1970s. In the 80s, Kinski enjoyed brief fame in the US and appeared in a handful of B movies with the likes of Venom (1981), Android (1982), Titan Find (1984), Crawlspace (1986) and Timestalkers (1989). By this point, Kinski had developed a reputation as a wild and crazy individual and a notoriously difficult actor to deal with it – there are even two films made about this very subject with Werner Herzog’s My Best Fiend (1999) and David Schmoeller’s Please Kill Mr Kinski (1999) in which both directors express a desire to kill Kinski.
Much of Schizoid is built around this Kinski as Madman presence. In the opening scene alone, he is in his office and looking in on his teenage daughter (Donna Wilkes) as she undresses and showers. In subsequent scenes, we see him come onto stripper Flo Lawrence and abruptly kissing her, and later in bed with patient Marianna Hill. We see him as a sinister figure in a phone booth calling Hill. There is an entertaining scene where a dinner invite he extends to Hill ends in a psychodrama blow-up between he and daughter Wilkes.
The main problem with Schizoid is that it does a great job of building Kinski up as a Sinister Psychologist but it is less interesting whenever he is not around and the drama is focused on the other characters. The great disappointment is [PLOT SPOILERS] that the film reaches an ending where a character other than Kinski is revealed to be the killer (which at least does prove a moderate surprise). The film is so successful in making Kinski into a sinister or ambiguous figure that to then reverse those sympathies and have him consoling Marianna Hill offsets it.
