Parapsycho

Remote Control

Parapsycho - 
Spektrum der Angst
West Germany/Austria 1975
Directed by Peter Patzak
Cinerama Filmgesellschaft MBH 

Warning: Big spoilers projected into your head.

Parapsycho - Spektrum der Angst is a bit of an unusual film. The DVD copy I have of this is in a 4:3 aspect ratio but I can’t tell whether this was actually originally made for television in its countries of origin, whether it’s an open matte transfer of a cinematic release or, as someone has suggested, due to the experimental nature of the film. The shots do seem pretty well composed for the frame though and, on that last statement, it’s not that experimental, it seems to me.

The film is one of those horror anthology films which used to be so popular at the tail end of the 1960s and early 1970s and starts out with all the titles and cast for each of the three segments being typed out on a teletype machine. It then goes on to say something about various paranormal aspects before leading into the next segment. The three segments are, as far as I could make out (the subtitling wasn’t 100% thought through), Reinkarnation, Metempsychose and Telepathie Hypnose.

The first film tells of a man who is trying to get home to his wife and child after a long journey from work but, on the way, he gets a longing to visit a chateau which he sees a picture of and then he stumbles across it by the side of the road. So he goes in to investigate and is mistaken for someone who wants to hire the chateau as a holiday retreat. Then a character played by the great Marisa Mell turns up and seems to somehow know the man (who is now suffering from some kind of amnesia)... she makes love to him but when he discovers she has the dead body of her freshly murdered husband in her car, he does a runner back to his wife and kids. He then discovers, the next day, that the woman has been dead for 35 years and that, quite possibly, he was also her accomplice and may also be a dead, wandering spirit who he and other people have mistaken for a living person. Possibly. The score in this section is all variations and riffs on a Beethoven piece (the name of which escapes me) and, to be honest, it doesn’t really help the visual content or feel of the the film. 

The second segment tells of a medical professor/pathologist played by William Berger, who is having an affair. His wife realises this and when she, he and their daughter are in the car, she starts speeding and drives it off the road trying to kill everyone... but she only succeeds in killing herself. After a while, though, the daughter starts seeing her mother and is taken to a mental hospital. Then Berger’s affair woman somehow sets a psychic link up with the daughter by overdosing on the same pills she is having for treatment, then kills herself by slashing her wrists. Then, however, Berger’s daughter is taken over by the spirit of his girlfriend and flings herself into her dad’s bed. Later, when the girlfriend is cut up during an autopsy, the daughter feels all of the cuts and evisceration of the process on the dead woman and dies herself from the shock. This one is interesting because real autopsy footage is used and inserted into that particular scene.

The third film sees a somewhat disturbed, evil guy played by Mathieu Carrière using sketches of a woman to psychically kidnap her when she’s supposed to be on her honeymoon with her new husband. His previous psychic mannequin woman has killed herself by jumping off a balcony. He sexes up his new acquisition by just running his hands over her naked body, which gives her an uncontrollable and powerful orgasm... yeah, don’t we all do this at some point? ‘-) and it’s hinted that the man is sexually impotent himself. He keeps her captive until she is rescued by an unlikely person... the guy’s mother. When he finds she has been freed from his apartment, he’s already onto the next girl, so he just uses the power of his mind to make honeymoon gal jump out of a window to her death also. Yep, evil definitely trumps good on this last segment, for sure. Innocents are killed... evil prospers, seems to be the underlying message of this last part. 

The film itself has a fairly low key atmosphere and there are some nice shot set ups on occasion. For instance, in the first segment, the man drives his car towards the camera with light bouncing off the windshield, obscuring his features and, when he parks at a point in close up, the camera moves around to frame the windshield in the middle of the screen. Where the guy’s head is, the reflection of a tree branch overhangs and the shadow of it in the windscreen means that only his face is visible against the rest of it. So, yeah, stuff like this is pretty well thought out, it seemed to me. 

The odd thing is that there is sex and nudity in each segment... in the first one it feels pretty shoehorned into the plot (although I’m really not complaining about a naked Marisa Mell, to be honest) and it seems almost to be part of the brief, so to speak, that all the women in the movie expose their bodies. Again, I’ve not got a problem with it but it did seem a little like overkill here at times. 

Although it’s firmly entrenched in the portmanteau horror movie style, to be honest it made me think more of a series of episodes of a British TV show such as Tales Of The Unexpected or Hammer House Of Horror (reviewed here) rather than anything put together for a cinema release. It just seems to have that kind of homespun quality about it, like the cast and crew are all doing their best trying to make something compelling for a fairly small budget and having to make do and mend. It doesn’t detract from it too much but it did feel like a somewhat diminished form of the art to me, as I was watching it... despite having some nice frame designs and some unusual pieces of interior design on the sets. 

And that’s me done with Parapsycho - Spektrum der Angst... I’m glad I saw it (relatively cheaply) and I think people who revel in things like the old BBC seasonal Winter ghost stories and entertainments of that ilk might find themselves occupied by it. I can’t say I’d especially recommend it to many of the people I know, though.