The title is inviting dangerous comparisons with Psycho - and to ramp that up there's the same screenwriter, Robert Bloch, and the same genre, psycho thriller. The similarities don't end there: there's a spooky house, a young man with a mother fixation, a little old lady in a wheelchair, a young heroine, an investigating detective.
To be fair, a lot of the elements are mixed differently - and, as pointed out by Turner Classic Movies, it also rips off Charade. The largest role is the detective, Patrick Wymark - which makes this a more conventional piece, and feel like an episode of a cop show most of the time. Unfortunately since it's better when dealing with the weirdness of the others, such as the old lady who collects dolls and the weird blonde artist who paints racy models.
Margaret Johnston has a fine old hammy time as the little old lady in the wheelchair, John Standing as her son, Judy Huxtable is pretty as a heroine and Wymark effective despite the blandness of his role. The last ten minutes are good, gothic psycho horror; there should have been more of this - lots more shocks and so on. Still, it's not bad.
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