William Castle's Homicidal straddles a mile wide line between Hitchcock's consensus classic Psycho and Ed Wood's no budget foray into transvestitism, Glen or Glenda. That's probably reason enough for a lot of people to check Homicidal out, though apart from some nice details, there isn't a whole lot there. A couple of scenes on a stairway with a special track for a wheelchair, where a disabled old woman descends aren't bad, especially the latter, which is done in the semi-darkness as the film heads into those final ten minutes of terror, where the audience is warned in advance to clear the theater. Before that final act, a knife sharpener has to drive twenty miles to the big house to sharpen the special knife, a rush job, so that it can be used for the next victim. There's other little parts here and there that sort of make up for a general lack of direction, a newspaper headline blares "Homicidal Maniac!", and a subplot about Denmark and transsexual surgical procedures, that at the time were a bigger, darker, and juicier subject.
Review of Homicidal
