Released four months after Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), Schizoid was an early and mostly forgettable addition to the burgeoning slasher film, directed by David Paulsen who had already made a pass at the sub-genre with the mostly awful Savage Weekend (1979) but who went onto a very different world, writing and producing television soap operas Dallas (1978-1991), Knots Landing (1979-1993) and Dynasty (1981-1989). Strip away some of its sleazier elements (hints of incestuous desire, a couple of tacky sex scenes and some gore) and Schizoid is tame enough to pass as a television production itself.

Much of this sleaziness comes, almost inevitably, from Klaus Kinski who plays widowed psychoanalyst Dr Pieter Fales who runs a group therapy session when he’s not ogling his teenage daughter Alison (Donna Wilkes) in the shower. Among his group are lonely handyman Gilbert (played by none other than Doc Brown himself, Christopher Lloyd, playing “Reverend” Jim on television sitcom Taxi (1978-1983) at the time), stripper Pat (Flo Lawrence); spinster Rosemary Boyle (Kiva Lawrence); and recently divorced newspaper “agony aunt” Julie Caffret (Marianna Hill). Before long, a black-gloved killer is picking off members of the group, brutally stabbing them to death with a pair of scissors. Julie begins to receive threatening anonymous letters and red herrings are everywhere – could the killer be Julie’s affable ex-husband Doug (Craig Wasson)? The perpetually angry Alison? Or is the creepy Fales too obvious a suspect? In fairness, the culprit isn’t all that hard to work out.

The killer dressing in black gloves with matching leather coat and hat immediately outs us in mind of the Italian gialli of the 1970s, a comparison that Paulsen’s feeble film simply can’t match. It’s a better paced film than the terminally dull Savage Weekend (we at least get a murder in the first few minutes for a start) but it’s still a dreary film, the all-important stalking and slashing scenes being particularly weak and drawn out to the point where any suspense – and there isn’t much – is lost altogether.

For all its sleaziness, and it couldn’t help be sleazy with Kinski about, Schizoid is just far too restrained for its own good. Friday the 13th had shown the way forward for this sort of thing earlier in the year with its higher body count and grislier killings, but Schizoid falls a long way short in both respects. The plodding, leaden pace and paper-thin characters kill it stone dead. Kinski gets surprisingly little to do, particularly in the first half of the film (he was accused of inappropriate behaviour on the set by Lawrence); Hill comes out if best even if she’s a very long way from her best work; Wasson is as bland as ever, though he would fare better in a later giallo-inspired thriller, Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984); Lloyd is pretty good in the sort of role he’d rarely – if ever – play again; and Wilkes – on her way to Blood Song (1982) and Angel (1984) – really attacks her role with so much gusto she’s on the verge of going right over the edge.

Schizoid is a distinctly minor addition to the slasher film, and the fault for that has to lie firmly at the door of Paulsen. His script is obvious, derivative and ties itself in knots trying to line up as many potential subjects as he can – and the less said about his embarrassing attempts to crowbar in limp humour, the better. And as a director, he shows no imagination at all. He would direct episodes of the aforementioned soaps (which seemed to suit him more) though Schizoid would be his second and final feature film. One suspects that he’s seen a few of the previous slashers and perhaps a few gialli, made notes, but not really understood how they worked. He recycles techniques that were already becoming long in the tooth – he trots out killer’s point of view shots at least once too often – but never uses them at all well. The result is a plodding film that’s better made than the worst of the slashers but nowhere near as interesting as the best of the breed. It sluggishly lumbers from one killing to the next, leaving the police (represented by Richard Herd and Joe Regalbuto) to scratch their heads ineffectively while almost everyone behaves in terribly suspicious fashion even though the identity of the killer has been obvious since the start.

Savage Weekend and Schizoid were half of a quarter of slashers made by producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and released by their recently acquired The Cannon Group, Inc. (they’d bought the company from founders Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey in 1979) – the others were the no more interesting New Year’s Evil (1980) and Hospital Massacre (1980 (aka X-Ray). In the UK, it was coupled by Cannon with Gabrielle Beaumont’s stodgy The Omen (1976) cash-in The Godsend (1980), making for a particularly challenging night at the local fleapit. Director Richard Rush would later cast Bruce Willis as another psychoanalyst troubled by a killer thinning out is therapy group in Color of Night (1994) which turned up during that post-Fatal Attraction (1987) run of serial killer films, marketed as “erotic thrillers” to avoid the stigma of being lumped in with the slashers. It was hardly any better for all its movie star sheen.