Year: 1982
Duration: 01:28:00
Directed by: Joe Giannone
Actors: Gaylen Ross, Tony Fish and Harriet Bass
Language: English
Country: USA
Also known as: Madman, el loco | The Legend Lives |Szaleniec
Description: At a summer camp for youths, cockey pre-teen calls out the name of mass serial killer “Madman Marz”. Suddenly, counselors are being maimed and slaughtered in various ways by the backwoodsman who has returned when his name was called.
As far as slashers go, Madman is a curious entry stuck between two extremes: At times it’s so silly you can’t take it seriously, but just as many times its surprisingly good at crafting some scenes and images of genuine suspense (even if most of them aren’t entirely original). That odd mixture can be frustrating–you almost wish the filmmakers stuck to one approach, and it becomes particularly disappointing when a chilling scene gets ruined with a silly exclamation point. If Halloween set the slasher standard, Friday the 13th capitalized on the craze and took the genre on a cheapened camping trip. As for The Burning? It was a Friday the 13th knockoff. Madman? It makes The Burning look like Hitchcock. Nonetheless, the film is only half “so bad it’s good”, the other decent half easily raising it above the genre’s bottom-feeders.
Don’t stop me if this sounds familiar: It’s a dark summer (cough*fall*cough) night at a camp for kids, and the gang is huddled around a campfire as one of the counselors relates an urban legend. Seems their campsite is located near an infamous house where a crazy farmer slaughtered his wife and kids. The town took justice into its own hands, its residents disfiguring the man (his nose was bitten off in a bar brawl…yikes!) before hanging him from a tree for his crimes. But when the sun rose, his body was nowhere to be found (ditto his victims’ bodies)
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