Psychotherapy has existed for centuries … and yet so has its stigma. Perhaps it’s because films like The Couch, where the emphasis is on the suffix — something bound to happen when you hire Psycho scribe Robert Bloch as your screenwriter.
In the first scene, a young man named Charles Campbell (The Incredible Shrinking Man himself, Grant Williams) calls the police to report a murder — one that’s about to happen, as the clock strikes 7 p.m. Sure enough, he’s absolutely correct, because at the top o’ the hour, Charles inserts an ice pick through the back of a random person on the street. More homicides follow, all with the “1900 hours” gimmick.
But, hey, other than that, Charles is a normal dude! He lives in a dingy boardinghouse, works as a lowly stock clerk in a paper factory and regularly attends therapy with Dr. Janz (Onslow Stevens, Them!), whose secretary (Shirley Knight, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure) he romances. This culminates in ol’ Chuck stealing scrubs and running loose in a hospital, prepared to perform surgery on somebody to keep all his killer secrets from being exposed.
If director Owen Crump (an Oscar-nominated documentarian who dreamed up the story with that S.O.B. Blake Edwards) intended for Charles to be sympathetic, he failed. Pouty and inclined to perspiration, Charles is no Norman Bates, even if his backstory is equally unsavory. Williams’ choice to overplay the histrionics further alienate him from audience goodwill, raising those scenes — and flashbacks to Charles’ childhood — to a level of camp to which the remainder of The Couch is ill-prepared to scale. All of that leads to one good question: Why couldn’t William Castle have made this instead? —Rod Lott