Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Paul Andrews Schizo is set in England & starts in the North East as a man named William Haskin (Jack Watson) reads a national newspaper, Haskin notices a story about ice skating champion Samantha Gray (Lynne Frederick) & her fiancé Alan Falconer (John Leyton) who are about to get married in London. Haskin takes a great interest in the story & heads off to London where he books into a hotel & starts making enquiries as to where Samantha lives, Haskin manages to discover where Samantha & Alan are holding their reception & posing as a waiter manages to leave a bloody knife next to the wedding cake which Samantha finds. Samantha then starts to get mysterious phone-calls & sees Haskin hanging around. Samantha starts to panic & confides in her friend & psychiatrist Leornard Hawthorne (John Fraser), soon after Leonard is murdered & he is just the first as other's around Samantha are also found dead but who is responsible & why?This British production was produced & directed by Pete Walker & to me felt quite similar to his next film The Comeback (1977) in which both the main character's start seeing & hearing things as those around them are killed off by a mystery killer who seems to have some sort of connection to the lead, I gave The Comeback four stars out of ten & I see no reason not to award Schizo exactly the same as it's not really any better but at the same time no worse. Schizo takes a while to get going, the first murder doesn't happen until about the hour mark so there's a lot of talk to get through which doesn't really amount to much. Sure, some may say it's necessary build-up but I'd rather describe it as padding & at an hour & fifty minutes long Schizo really didn't need any padding. The central mystery isn't that good or engaging, in fact the title of the film gives the entire twist away & I will say that I guessed the twist quite easily due to the script trying far too hard to single one character out as the killer & it's fairly obvious that they haven't killed anyone. The script takes itself very seriously & seems to think it's the cleverest thing around, while the majority of Schizo is set in the real world & tries to paint the mysterious goings-on with scientific credibility there is one totally out of place scene set at a séance which verges into the supernatural for no apparent reason. Schizo feels like a Pete Walker film, the middle class English setting & the inadequacies of authority & justice are constant themes throughout his films & they are very much evident here. I can't say I hated Schizo as it has it's moments but I found the mystery aspect weak & too predictable while there's not quite enough gore here to satisfy the exploitation crowd as Schizo falls somewhere between exploitation & psychological thriller. The ambiguous ending doesn't help end things on a positive note either, while Schizo tries to be clever & deep in it's depiction of schizophrenia it ends up looking silly so don't base any psychological studies on it.With a very middle class mid 70's British setting Schizo is one of those films that could be used in history lessons as it show's lots of fashions (I'd like to see someone wear that red bobble hat in public today that Haskins does in the opening), cars & locations as they would have been in reality back then without any fancy production design or window dressing. There's a bit of gore, someone gets a knitting needle through their head & out their eye, someones head is bashed in with a hammer & someones throat is slit although none of these scenes are that gory. The bloodiest bit is during a flashback where a naked woman is brutally stabbed several times. Schizo isn't that scary & doe shave it's daft moments like the end as a shocked panting Samantha just stands there as a demented Haskins walks up behind her pulling some very silly faces & just how did that meat cleaver get into her super market shopping trolley?Filmed entirely on locations the production values are good & it looks alright, the acting is OK with Frederick the ex-wife of Peter Sellers quite good as the lead. Stephanie Beacham has yet another minor role in a British horror film but sports a very ugly hair style.Schizo is an OK horror thriller that thinks it's smarter than it is, there's a touch of gore & a real world look & while it's not terrible I doubt I would ever want to see it again. A passable time waster that Pete Walker fans might get more out of than the average viewer.

jaibo Forget any notions that the film is a serious look at schizophrenia, premier British 70s exploitation filmmaker Pete Walker's Schizo is a belated entry in the rash of British rip-offs of Psycho which appeared in the wake of Hitchcock's own medically dubious masterpiece (compare Berserk, Paranoiac etc.). Walker's film has a pretty young celebrity supposedly being stalked and members of her close circle bumped off by the sad-sack killer of her mother, released a couple of years ago from prison. But things are not all that they seem...The small genius of Walker's film is that it reverses the idea of who is the villain in contemporary Western society. Usually, the role is played by a lonely, middle-aged psychotic man who puts the beautiful young things at risk; in Schizo, he has been framed by the beautiful young celebrity herself, who suffers from a split personality - one moment she's all sweetness and light, the nation's favourite skating star and tabloid fodder; but beneath she's a murderous Ice Queen, jealous and capable of the utmost acts of brutality when faced with anything which upsets her equilibrium. There's a certain barmy truth in Walker's vision of with whom the danger really lies in our bleak post-industrial society. An intriguing sub-plot shows how religion or spiritual belief has been denigrated into a brotherhood of superstitious women, who haven't the foggiest idea of what is actually going on.Lynne Frederick - a celebrity who herself went supremely off-the-rails when left a cool £4.5 million as Peter Sellers' widow - is prophetically cast as the Ice Queen; and there's a wonderful supporting turn by the great Queenie Watts as the psychic-mongering help.Schizo is not one of Walker's best films - it doesn't reach the heights of lunacy of House of Whipcord or Frightmare, nor does it match the near-contemporary Italian giallos which is seeks at times to mimic; yet it has some games to play with notions of villainy in tabloid cultures.

rose-294 Schitzophrenia - that eeevil murder mania! The British mental health organization MIND get angry from this - hey, Schitzo was co-written by a pornographer David McGillivray, the expert of leeringly trashy, sleazy horror movies like Frightmare, so what did you expect? Something mature or at least partly honest? Or that facts would be in the right place in your mentally-ill-as-a-murderer-story? Well, this leeringly trashy exploitation of mental illness mangles the facts and slashes some victims, the truth being one of them, and all the entertainment and other value lay in the gutter. The plot? The ice-skater Lynne Frederick is stalked, the bodies pile up and a schizophrenic - but whoooo? - is the guilty party. I just tried to stay awake.

bensonmum2 Samantha's wedding day should be one of the happiest days of her life. But Samantha is convinced she has seen the man she help convict of brutally murdering her mother 15 years previous when she was 7 years old. No one seems to believe that a killer is stalking Samantha, but she sees the man everywhere. Soon enough, anyone close to Samantha who knows anything about her mother's murder turns up dead. Is the man she has seen the killer, or is it someone else? I really don't understand the IMDb rating of 4.3 for Schizo. The movie is much better than that rating would indicate. I found it to be an entertaining little thriller in the Italian Giallo style. A few good kill scenes, a deranged looking stalker, and an incredible séance make this one above average for me. Director Pete Walker threw in just enough of the red herrings to keep me doubting the killer's identity throughout. Like Walker's other films, Schizo has a downbeat look to it that adds a lot of gloom to the proceedings. I don't think the sun ever shines in a Walker film.