Mad About Madman

One of the most popular subsets of the slasher genre is the campground-set slasher (which, by the way, should not be considered the same as the carefree weekend in the woods-style slasher, a la Don't Go In The Woods and Just Before Dawn). The campground slasher film includes such touchstones of the genre as Friday the 13th, The Burning and the unjustly overlooked Madman (1982).

Madman doesn't get talked about much in slasher circles, with films like My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, and Happy Birthday to Me getting most of the love when it comes to the early '80s slasher cycle. For whatever reason, the whodunnit slashers from that time all have the biggest fanbases while the rampaging cretin slashers, not so much. But Madman is one rampaging cretin slasher film that deserves a much larger cheering section than it appears to have.

Written and directed by Joe Giannone, Madman opens with a tale told in song around a campfire of the legend of "Madman Marz," a backwoods superfreak who reportedly killed his family years ago and was hanged for his crimes. But somehow he lives on and now, if his name is spoken above a whisper, he'll come looking for blood. Naturally, one of the kids around the campfire takes it upon himself to be the asshole of the night and calls out Madman Marz at the top of his lungs. And whaddya know, the legends turn out to be 100% on the money and Marz drops whatever he's doing (not housecleaning, judging by the sloppy state of his home) and spends the night killing.

That's the whole plot of Madman. It's a story so simple it makes Halloween look like an example of byzantine plotting. But yet it works so well. It's as perfect a horror movie - certainly as perfect a slasher film - as I can think of. While most of the whodunnit slashers have enjoyed a more prominent afterlife than Madman, by their nature a lot of their time is spent dealing with red herrings and keeping the mystery of the killer's identity bubbling with soap opera-ish drama meant to spread suspicion across the cast. Madman has none of that and simply has Marz on the hunt. Yes, there are scenes dealing with the various personal relationships of the camp counselors but that's only because when you've got characters in a scene together, they've got to say something to each other, right?

To be fair, the counselors here are some of the better-drawn characters of any '80s slasher in that they actually have personality traits that one would hope to find in functioning adults. They're not flighty idiots, total horndogs, or irresponsible stoners. They're a level-headed bunch (even if they wander off alone into the woods too much for their own good), serious toward their responsibilities as counselors and cool with each other (after one guy has a minor public outburst, he later makes a point of apologizing to the entire group). Naturally, a few counselors are intimate with each other but it's not presented as lewdly as in most slasher films of the time.

Gaylen Ross, from Dawn of the Dead and Creepshow, plays a counselor named Besty but she's credited under the pseudonym of "Alexis Dubin." I guess this didn't seem like as classy a project as the Romero films she had done - and, really, it isn't - but it's certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

To the untrained eye, Madman plays out like any other cheap B-movie but those who have immersed themselves in the slasher sub-genre will note and appreciate several subtle touches that differentiate Madman from the pack. As mentioned earlier, the generally more adult portrayal of the counselors is a welcome change of pace from the slasher norm. Also, this might be the only horror film to take place entirely at night (feel free to hip me to other examples if you have them, 'cause I can't think of any). Many horror films take place over the course of twelve or twenty-four hours but seldom (ever?) has there been one that doesn't spend a single second in the daylight.

Typically a film like this would begin its story in the afternoon, allowing us to get to know the characters before nightfall, then the conclusion would take us (and the sole survivor) into the breaking dawn of a new day but Madman doesn't go that route. It begins in darkness and ends in darkness. That's a detail that some might not even register, much less consider important, but I feel that it lends Madman a particular vibe.

In tandem with that sense of perpetual night is the way the film seems to loop in on itself. As the film opens, a counselor named T.P. (Tony Fish) is singing about the legend of Madman Marz and as he walks around the campfire singing his song and passes the other counselors, we're shown a brief flash forward of each counselor's future brush with Marz. Of course, it's not news that most of these characters will meet a grisly fate during the course of the film but to be shown these precognitive flashes early on casts an effective pall of doom over the film. Close to the film's end, T.P.'s song is replayed as the camera pans across all the slain bodies in Marz's basement.

In calling back to that moment from the beginning, just as the opening of the film had peered into the future, it gives the film a circular feel, as though these characters exist within a narrative loop from which they never escape. For some reason, it puts me in mind of Amicus anthologies like Tales from the Crypt in which we discover that all the characters we met in the beginning have been dead from the start. But maybe that's just me.

Finally, and this is major spoiler territory so skip to the next paragraph if you like (in fact, don't even finish this sentence!), but Madman stands apart from other slashers in that it allows every sympathetic character to perish (well, save for Max, the head counselor, who leaves the main action very early on). This is the only slasher I can think of that lets its Final Girl (Ross) die at the conclusion. And the way that Ross' character meets her end is one of the most upsetting in slasherdom. Even though she has a chance to escape, Betsy decides to grab a shotgun and search to see if any of the other counselors have survived. She enters Marz's backwoods home - a place every bit as hopeless and foreboding as the house Heather and Mike stumble onto at the end of The Blair Witch Project - only to be overpowered by Marz. Betsy is then dragged alive and screaming into Marz's basement where she's impaled through her chest on a hook on the wall - a cruel vantage point from which she can see the bodies of all her friends. It's a truly terrible end for a likeable and brave character and it flies in the face of slasher tradition wherein the Final Girl is always allowed to get the upper hand. She might die in the opening moments of the sequel but she at least gets to walk away victorious that one time. Betsy does score a crucial last stab in against Marz but it's a dying gesture on her part.

Some might consider the generally cheap look of Madman to be a flaw but I think it adds to the film. Yes, the make-up on Marz (Paul Ehlers) looks about on par for what you'd see at a haunted hayride attraction and the splatter FX aren't nearly as polished as what Tom Savini or other skilled make-up artists were doing at the time but I think the slightly hokey look to both Marz and the gore helps the film from being unrelievedly grim. Without turning it into strictly camp, the detectable aura of artifice is just enough to give the film the feel of an enjoyable put-on. The fakery doesn't undercut the scares - it just allows the film to play out as spooky fun, rather than as unpleasant.

Most slasher films from the early '80s look pretty tepid by today's standards - even if they're still fun from a nostalgic standpoint. But Madman, to me, is still scary. Admittedly, some viewers might be immune to it simply because the slightest hint of amateur acting or dated fashions is enough to induce kneejerk peals of ironic laughter in some audiences (by the way, I'd like to award actress Jan Claire bonus points for expressing her terror in such a way as to make Veronica Cartwright's Alien performance look like a study in stoicism) but for those able to look past such things, Madman still works like, well, a madman.

Here's a glass raised in your honor, Marz. Salut!

My Supernatural Summer

There's been a real horror drought on the big screen this summer. Even in the best of years, summer is never the peak season for terror but it isn't usually quite this light. So far we've had Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Chernobyl Diaries, and Prometheus and that's about it, right? What ever happened to that movie Red Lights, with Robert DeNiro as a spooky psychic? That looked kind of cool but it sure didn't open anywhere in my neck of the woods.

With so few frights to be found on the big screen, I've had to turn to the small screen for my fear fix. It hasn't been ideal but I've gotten hooked on SyFy's cheeseball supernatural shows School Spirits and Haunted Collector (I haven't caught up with Haunted Highway yet and figure I can just let that one pass). If you've seen these shows, you already know they're as hokey as they come but, hey, I like hokey. My son is seven, is already a horror fanatic, and these have been perfect shows to watch with him - they're just creepy enough that he feels he's seeing something cool but not so intense that he's traumatized.

School Spirits centers on "true" tales of school hauntings with present day interviews with the real participants paired with staged reinactments while Haunted Collector is about a crack crew of paranormal investigators comprised of some old guy, his grown daughter and son, and another dude or two, who determine which object in a home or workplace or whatever is generating unwanted spiritual activity and then they, um, spirit it back to their home base and put it safely in storage. I like Haunted Collector more just because its premise of haunted objects reminds me of Friday the 13th: The Series and all the cursed objects of that show. Sadly there's no one on Haunted Collector as hot as Robey or even hot, period, but whatever.

Even taking for granted that these shows are nonsense from the jump, the level of staged baloney on Haunted Collector is still impressive. There's something endearing about watching the Haunted Collector crew gather around to intently study video of a marble rolling across a floor or listen to audio of ghostly whispers. The casts plays it straight, never winking at how silly it all is, and that's just the way it should be. It's been a welcome dose of spooky escapism over the summer.

But as fun as they've been, it looks like School Spirits and Haunted Collector have merely been the warm-up for the real event of the summer - Paranormal Witness. I guess this, like Haunted Collector, aired its first season last summer but I wasn't paying attention at the time. Well, I'm watching now and the ads for Paranormal Witness look like pure hair-raising goodness. See for yourself, if you dare:




As the summer starts to wind down, the supernatural is finally seeping back onto the big screen with The Apparition and The Possession due to debut in the final weeks of August and while I'm sure glad to see them arrive I'm pretty thankful to SyFy for keeping the chills coming in the meantime.

Dark Disappointment

Christopher Nolan was supposed to be the guy to finally break the third film curse. His Batman trilogy was expected to not follow the same disappointing pattern as Spider-Man, The X-Men, and Blade's cinematic trilogies where two good-to-great films are capped off by a lame, frustrating finale. Now, some people will tell you that he did accomplish that, that The Dark Knight Rises was pretty good - maybe even great! - but I don't think there's a legitimate case to be made in that regard. In its own way, Rises is yet another third film disaster, ending this series on a bum note.

Chief among its failings, Rises botches the character of Bruce Wayne/Batman. I know this is supposed to be Nolan's take on Batman so some leeway ought to be given for interpretation but under Nolan's guidance, Batman has become not so much a tireless crusader for justice but more of a self-pitying schlub who thinks nothing of sulking alone in his home for almost a decade. Yes, it's true that Bruce has given up on being Batman before in the comics - and in the world of animation - but it's always been due to either advancing age or some quickly resolved crisis of conscience concerning whether the Batman does more harm than good. Here, it's a lame combo of still being morose over the death of Rachel (!) as well as serving as the city's scapegoat for the death of Harvey Dent.

That last thing, by the way, is really asinine. Supposedly, after Dent's death, a piece of legislation known as The Dent Act was passed, making it possible for organized crime to be more easily prosecuted and before long, organized crime has been run out of Gotham entirely. But...isn't organized crime accustomed to working around the law? Isn't that part of the whole "crime" thing? And the plausibility of the Dent Act aside, even without organized crime, there'd still be plenty of old-fashioned disorganized crime to keep Batman busy. Just the idea of common criminals roaming the streets without fearing The Batman ought to be enough motivation for Bruce to keep donning the cowl at night, rather than spending the better part of a decade shuffling around Wayne Manor.

Not only do Nolan and co. have Bruce give up on crimefighting but they also have him all but abandon his own company and let all the potential good that could come from its charitable work fritter away (even the old, long retired Bruce Waynes of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and the animated series Batman Beyond were never shown as descending into cluelessness - the character was still portrayed as being sharp as a tack). If there's any way to make Batman look bad, Rises finds it. On top of retreating from both crime fighting and from managing Wayne Enterprises, Rises shows Bruce as being all but incompetent once he does get back in the game. Batman is supposed to be not just someone who has molded themselves into peak physical shape but is also one of the world's greatest detectives and, above all, a master strategist. In contrast to that, Rises gives us a Batman who is outplayed at every turn, taken by surprise over and over. Where Batman is supposed to be someone supremely on top of things, Nolan portrays him as always being a step behind.

Then there's also the confused politics of the film to contend with. Is this a film about the haves and the have-nots, a indictment of the 1%, or is it a kneejerk slamming of the Occupy movement? If anything, it seems like the latter as once Bane puts his plot in motion to isolate Gotham, the lower classes are portrayed as grasping greedy animals, swarming on the homes of the rich as the wealthy cower in fright. It's a grotesque cariacture of the OWS movement that Fox News itself would be proud of - the jealous poor getting revenge on all the people who have worked hard for their fortunes. This lines up with Nolan's curiously contemptuous view of Gothamites as sheep, easily led by a lie (Dent's legacy), and makes Rises seem like a simple-minded conservative jab at valid real world complaints about social and economic inequity.

Bane, certainly, doesn't represent any true political viewpoint. As much as, if not even more than, The Joker, he simply wants to watch the world burn. He's just lighting a much longer wick towards that end. His speeches about being for the oppressed are nothing but lip service meant to hide his true intentions and nowhere in Rises do we see any evidence of the people taking Gotham back. If anything, what we see is the police force reasserting themselves while "the people" do essentially nothing.

On a technical level, The Dark Knight Rises certainly looks just fine. But the storyline and the characterization of Batman (a big deal in a Batman film - in fact, a deal-breaker in my book) can't be defended. This is one of those movies that annoyed me on such a fundamental level that I could go through a whole laundry list of individual moments that had me rolling my eyes but that would just be piling on. Going forward, I'll just have to pretend that the series ended with The Dark Knight.

Finally, there's the matter of how guns are handled in this film. It wouldn't be fair to chastise the film for how it reflects against tragic real world events but it is fair to note that it goes against Batman's staunch anti-gun stance. Yes, Batman himself is still anti-gun and instructs Catwoman at one point - "No guns. No killing", to which Catwoman replies "Where's the fun in that?" but what really left a sour taste in my mouth is how at a crucial climatic moment, the use of a gun (a huge gun, of course) is allowed to end a battle, capped by a flip, "cool" comment to Batman to the effect of "That thing you have against guns? I don't have that." It's a moment that glibly undermines Batman's antipathy towards guns and his historic insistence on always finding a another, better way to deal with his foes. For any long-time Bat fan, it's a moment that will stick out as being wrong.

There's plenty of that kind of thing to go around in Rises, unfortunately. Having followed the character for many years through comics, TV, animation and film, I'm all for different interpretations of Batman but if you're going to just gut the core of the character, what's the point? The line "I Believe In Harvey Dent" echoed through the last two films in Nolan's trilogy but I just hope that whoever takes on the responsibility of rebooting this franchise down the line will be able to say "I Believe in Batman" and say it with real conviction.

A New Dimension In Terror

Over at Shock Till You Drop, the latest Retro Shock Theater is up, this column taking a fond look back at Friday the 13th Part 3. Since this summer began, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the hallowed Summer Of '82, tributes to the landmark films of that summer have rolled out across the internet and even though Friday the 13th Part 3 may be no Blade Runner or The Thing, it's still a classic of its kind.

This movie, of course, is when Jason really became a slasher superstar. He wasn't in the first movie at all save for in flashbacks and in Alice's dream and in the second, the character had some fashion issues. This movie, though, gave Jason the most successful style makeover of any movie monster ever. True, they didn't radically alter Jason but dumping that sack for the hockey mask was the change that made all the difference (ditching the overalls was a smart move, too). Now he was iconic, an instantly identifiable pop culture figure. Plus, it helped that actor Richard Brooker was much more physically imposing than Part 2's Steve Dash and he carried himself with almost a swagger. The scene where Jason steps out along the dock - the moment when we first see him in the hockey mask - there's a real laconic quality to the way Brooker walks in this scene and it's like we're seeing the character for the very first time.

Mostly what I think about when I rewatch these old Fridays is how younger viewers probably can't even concieve of the fact that these films were considered scary in their day. There's probably a few jump scares that would still work for new viewers but, in general, I think they come across as pretty mild - which is just mind-blowing to me, someone who vividly remembers how notorious this series once was. Back in the day, the public outcry over the violence in the Friday the 13th films was enough to make the MPAA crack down on splatter for the duration of the '80s.

Now these films carry an odd sense of innocence about them and could practically pass for PG-13 today (well, not really - but they're nothing anyone would even blink an eye at). We live in much more jaded times now and given that it's nice, in a bittersweet way, to revisit films like Friday the 13th Part 3 that represent a time where our cultural threshold for violence was much lower.

Plus, who doesn't love the rad disco remix of the Friday theme?

For The Love Of Freedom, Warts And All

Although it may often seem that the US is sinking into a pit of its own stupidity and that our government has become irreversibly dysfunctional, this is still (we hope) the greatest country on Earth, damn it, so in celebration of Independance Day and all the wonderful freedoms we Americans enjoy, the latest Retro Shock Theater column looks back fondly at 1972's 4th of July-set favorite, Frogs.

When I was a kid, Frogs was in regular rotation on the 4 O'Clock Movie on Channel 30 out of Hartford, Connecticut and it never failed to give me the creeps. Even though its sillier aspects became more apparent to me as time went on, I still think it's an effective horror yarn. I don't know if it's the best of the nature attacks films of the '70s as it has plenty of competition for that title (Kingdom of the Spiders might have a leg - or even eight! - up on it) but its all-star cast of critters makes Frogs the most emblematic of its sub-genre.

So on this 4th of July, I'm saluting not just the flag, but Frogs. It's a movie that has America written all over it. Like this country, loving Frogs means accepting the occasional troublesome, ugly, and possibly incurable, wart.

The Horror Dads Go Bad!

Just in time for Father's Day, the Horror Dads - myself, Dennis Cozzalio, Paul Gaita, Greg Ferrara, Nicholas McCarthy, and head HoDad Richard Harland Smith - have reconvened to take on all manner of puerile patriarch as we discuss the many Bad Dads of horror cinema.

Join us over at Movie Morlocks!

The Summer So Far

So here we are, about halfway through June and while the official start of summer on the calendar isn't until the 20th, for movie fans summer began as soon as The Avengers hit theaters back in May. For me, that could've been the whole summer slate right there and I would've been perfectly satisfied. Everything else afterwards is just gravy.

That said, for a summer that - like most summers - didn't seem up front to be too heavy on horror, there's been a fair amount of fear flicks to sample. I just haven't bothered to review any of them as I find myself pretty disenchanted with reviewing new films these days.

There are just so many voices out there giving their opinions - from paid critics to bloggers to talkbackers - and while there's still fine writing to be found here and there, I find myself wondering "what's the point?"

You know, what can I possibly say about Prometheus that hasn't already been said (and been said perfectly well) a hundred times over? It looks beautiful, has some jaw-dropping moments but the script could've been better. If I revisit it down the line I might see it in a new light and have something to say that might be a little more interesting but for now...no.

The same with Dark Shadows, a movie that was better than I'd expected but yet still was kind of a wash-out in the end. But yet, I have a hunch that movie will have a longevity to it. Most genre movies do, regardless of whatever initial reception they recieved. In his introduction to his book Cult Movies, author Danny Peary noted that "almost every science fiction and horror film has at least a minor cult" and while that might be slightly less true now that there's such a flood of product (thanks to the the technology needed to make movies becoming more affordable and accessible), much of it risible, it's still mostly true.

And that, maybe more than anything, is what makes me reluctant to keep up with reviewing the latest releases. Films aren't judged in the moment but over time. Sometimes it takes years for a film to reveal its true worth.

Even the bad ones tend to be rediscovered and embraced by a few devoted fans. So basically I'm just not so interested in judging films in the moment anymore. I'm happier shining a light on forgotten or little-known older films in my Retro Shock Theater column over at Shock Till You Drop (click here for my thoughts on Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor). As for the new stuff, I'm keeping up with all of it like I normally would but just keeping my opinions (mostly) to myself.

For the record, though, I'd like to say that Chernobyl Diaries wasn't so bad. Even though they did miss a golden opportunity to put this song on the soundtrack: