Look, fans of 1980s slasher pictures aren’t expecting seamless masterpieces. All we want are one or two of the genre’s key elements: a well-choreographed kill, a memorable monster, a few good jumps, a strong performance, a snazzy score, or clever make-up effects. And more than anything, slasher aficionados want something offbeat. When a horror film is weird enough, it throws us off-guard, and pokes that part of us that enjoys a good, disorienting nightmare.
By that standard, Madman is some choice trash. In its broad strokes, writer-director Joe Giannone’s 1982 summer-camp shocker is just another Halloween/Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Friday the 13th hybrid, this one about a group of teenagers in the woods who inadvertently summon regional boogeyman “Madman Marz” — a hulking, inarticulate redneck with a rotting face, inspired by the real-life “Cropsey” urban legend. But it’s Madman’s particulars that made it a VHS favorite.
The film’s only “name” actor is the ’78 Dawn of the Dead’s Gaylen Ross, playing Betsy, a counselor who worries that her boyfriend T.P. is too callous about how much he’s scaring the kids with his ghost stories. Tony Fish gives an indelibly odd performance as T.P. — a philosophical young man prone to tangled, ostensibly irrelevant speeches about the war between emotion and intellect, and about what it means to be “a winner.” Carl Fredericks is even better as Max, the jovial, theatrical, excessively articulate camp director. The roster of victims is filled out by a batch of amateurs with New York accents. None of these are generic Hollywood glamourpusses.
Madman follows the usual progression of characters splitting off into various creepy dark places to be slaughtered. But Giannone keeps the dated synthesizer score to a minimum, preferring long scenes where the only sound is creaky floorboards. And he bookends the film with two arty montages, where images of human butchery are presented in a series of dissolves — repackaging traditional slasher beats as a poetic dream sequence.
Is the rest of Madman as interesting as those few standout moments? Frankly, no. The plot’s hackneyed and the scares are sparse. But anyone compiling a supercut of the slasher genre’s greatest hits would be wrong to exclude Madman’s super-creepy shot of the shaggy Marz silhouetted up in a tree — or to skip over one of T.P.’s meandering monologues, which are just the sort of clunky personal touch that burns one of these movies into the subconscious.
