DVD: Horror: Madman
Madman
Year: 1982
Rating: 4/10
Bottom line: Why yes, Friday the 13th was released two years earlier. Why do you ask?
Betsy: I think we should both stay here.
Tracy: Well Betsy, that's the difference between you and me. You're content to sit behind, and I'm not. I like to know what's going on. I'll see you in a little while.
Audience: Tcha! As a severed head, maybe!
Yes yes, Tennis Champion, campers irritate a crazy serial killer with an axe in the middle of New Jersey.
No, *you* come on.
The Good
The production values are pretty good for a movie made at any time, but especially one from 1982. The colors are super-saturated and some attempt was made at thematic coloring, framing and general cinematography. The outfits and furnishings are lovingly detailed by the camera. The camp is very woodsy and atmospheric, the dialogue is not entirely far-fetched, and the fatal wounds are all appropriately gory. The sets are so very, very 1982. Avocado, burnished gold, burnt orange, lots of floor pillows. It's just like one of those time capsules buried outside a courthouse. With severed heads.
Plus I'm sort of fascinated by the fact that the actress who played the lead screamer, Gaylen Ross, went on to write, produce and direct all kinds of interesting documentaries about Russian mail-order brides and stolen Nazi gold. In this movie, she runs around sporting a 3-2-1-Contact braid, accidentally shoots one of her friends while trying to off the bad guy, and then delivers a bus full of screaming child campers to the madman's axe-wielding whims.
So it just goes to show, you never know.
The Bad
Furry, full-rear male nudity.
Also, the plot is so very much Please Give Us Your Money Before Friday the 13th Part Two Comes Out, that about twenty minutes into the movie, I realized I'd seen it a couple years before on some latenight cable gorefest. Also? Pornstache. Appropriate for the era maybe, but frightening when released into the wild.
And sadly, that's the most frightening thing about the movie. I mean, there's an unhinged necrotic madman stalking people in a dark forest. Shouldn't that be somewhat suspenseful? No? Granted, it takes him for-EVER to get from one victim to the next, but perhaps the focus in a slasher film should be the slashing. What? Really? The focus should be much more on lavender turtlenecks and leather vests? Oh y'all, there is so much to being a film critic I just do not know.
Also, the incidental music sucked; every time someone got killed, it sounded like someone dropped a can of prunes on a Casio keyboard. Hellooooo, there are some more notes over there, waaaay over on that other end.
And the Meta
Well, the first victim's name *is* Dippy.
Yes. Dippy.
Also, the furry rear in question belongs to a dude named TP. Really, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
Were I to reach, I could possibly believe the filmmakers hid a variation of the Sword in the Stone legend in this cinematic masterpiece, but......dude. Dippy?