What is “psychotronic”? Well, it can mean many things. For film aficionados, it’s a subgenre of films that dissolve all boundaries and are confoundingly indescribable. Psychotronic films tend to deal with taboo themes, deal with ambitious ideas despite inadequate financial resources (or technical prowess), and they tend to be confoundingly difficult to track down.

A great initiation into the world of psychotronica is Albert Zugsmith’s 1962 Confessions of an Opium Eater, starring the great (and greatly underrated) Vincent Price and directed by the man who produced, in addition to a whole lot of exploitation trash, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and Douglas Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels. Based (very loosely) on Thomas De Quincey’s famous 1821 novel of the same name, Opium’s decades-long unavailability has given it a rarefied status in psychotronic circles. Now that it’s finally available, if only on YouTube, it’s a relief to see that it fully lives up to its lavish reputation as a film that’s as weird as weird can be.

It’s set against the backdrop of the San Francisco tong wars of the early 20th century. While working undercover to crack an underground Chinatown slave ring, Price becomes acquainted with the opium pipe and begins to understand that the mysteries that the orient holds can never be understood. As he (literally) descends into the slave-trading demimonde, he must navigate a maze where success or failure is always just a secret passage away.

This film makes no sense whatsoever, and that’s the wonderful beauty of it all. Fight scenes come out of nowhere, sordid dance numbers burst out when we least expect them, and a roster of actors who were either found at a coffee house or at the local bar where Zugsmith hung out add to the logic mayhem. Whenever you think the film will explode into mediocrity, it unearths a canal of decadent corruption, and beckons you to swim into sin.

As photographed by Joseph Biroc, Confessions has a decidedly low-budget veneer, but the ingenuity and creativity on display banishes the obvious budgetary limitations. The film possesses a remarkable dreamlike ambience that anticipates David Lynch and every other “weird” film of the past 30 years. It’s not unlike catching a movie on TV at 3 a.m. and dozing fitfully throughout, only to wake up as the credits roll and having a vague sense that you’ve witnessed something that just wasn’t right.
It’s a trip that will never bring you down and a perfect introduction to everything psychotronic.