An ex-soldier is hired by local right-wingers as a vigilante to clean up criminals and street people. However, he freaks out and starts killing off everybody.An ex-soldier is hired by local right-wingers as a vigilante to clean up criminals and street people. However, he freaks out and starts killing off everybody.An ex-soldier is hired by local right-wingers as a vigilante to clean up criminals and street people. However, he freaks out and starts killing off everybody.
Terry TenBroek
- Larry Mead
- (as Terry Ten Broek)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaFilmed in St. Louis and its world premiere was held there on July 20, 1979.
- GoofsAfter the hitchhiker goes nude into the water for a swim & the killer attacks her, you can see that she's wearing underwear as she's thrashing around with the killer in the water.
- Alternate versionsThe film was banned in the UK and included on the DPP 72 list of video nasties. It was eventually issued as "Psycho Puppet" on the Viz video label in 1987 after 16 secs of BBFC cuts to edit a scene of a topless woman being impaled with a spear.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape (2010)
Featured review
A secret society of vigilante businessmen hire ex-military man Eric Stem (Barron Winchester) to bring justice to criminals who have been set free thanks to loopholes in the law. When one of Stern's men, an impotent Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, flips out and begins to murder innocent people (primarily attractive, semi-naked or completely naked young women), the group's illicit activities attract the unwanted attention of the police.
Boasting a volatile combination of vigilantism and misogynistic violence, it's not surprising that director Peter Maris's Delirium (AKA Psycho Puppet) was given a hard time during the Video Nasty era; in these more tolerant, less Draconian days, however, the film's insalubrious content—some graphic gore and gratuitous female nudity—is unlikely to be an issue with any but the most joyless of fascist zealots, people who thankfully no longer wield the social clout that they used to.
If anything, the one element that is most likely to raise an eyebrow (in the UK, at least) is the film's strange use of BBC's 'Mastermind' theme music during its most dramatic moments; it's hard to take matters seriously when it sounds as though Magnus Magnusson might pop up at any moment to put the film's characters through a gruelling two minutes of quick-fire questions on their specialist subject.
5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for the brief but impressive spear through the chest, all the unnecessary but very welcome nekkidness, and the juicy war wounds in the Vietnam flashbacks.
Boasting a volatile combination of vigilantism and misogynistic violence, it's not surprising that director Peter Maris's Delirium (AKA Psycho Puppet) was given a hard time during the Video Nasty era; in these more tolerant, less Draconian days, however, the film's insalubrious content—some graphic gore and gratuitous female nudity—is unlikely to be an issue with any but the most joyless of fascist zealots, people who thankfully no longer wield the social clout that they used to.
If anything, the one element that is most likely to raise an eyebrow (in the UK, at least) is the film's strange use of BBC's 'Mastermind' theme music during its most dramatic moments; it's hard to take matters seriously when it sounds as though Magnus Magnusson might pop up at any moment to put the film's characters through a gruelling two minutes of quick-fire questions on their specialist subject.
5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for the brief but impressive spear through the chest, all the unnecessary but very welcome nekkidness, and the juicy war wounds in the Vietnam flashbacks.
- BA_Harrison
- Jan 9, 2011
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