Bizarre film from 1960 In this surprisingly watchable chiller from 1960, a hypnotist Desmond (Bergerac) gets his entertainment by having beautiful young women disfigure themselves in pretty graphic ways—setting their hair on fire, washing faces with acid, drinking lye, putting their faces in fans—well, you get the idea. With all of this going on, the local police send a detective and a police psychologist out to solve the cases. This movie features undoubtedly the dumbest duo of police officers ever, detective Steve Kennedy and Dr. Philip Hecht. These two guys are such idiots that their incompetence is fascinating to watch. At first, they can’t decide whether all of these disfigurement cases are related (duh!) and spend the rest of the movie trying—sort of—to catch the perpetrator. The many unintentionally funny scenes include Steve’s girlfriend (Henderson) being kissed and groped by Desmond (while Steve blankly watches from a distance), the first hypnosis scene (“You are the meanest of all the dogs!!”), the beatnik bar scene, and the final scene at a theater, where the “secret” is revealed, but only after the audience is mesmerized into doing pretty outrageous things—like bad acting. Released during the hypnosis and beatnik crazes of the early 1960s, this bizarre movie is an interesting time capsule and stars cult actress Allison Hayes. Be sure and catch Hecht’s (Guy Prescott) jaw-dropping closing line…it’s guaranteed to leave you speechless.
