Why do some slasher films get the highest of praise, and others fizzle out and disappear as if they never existed? The fizzling out happened to our film on display here, and odds are you've never heard of it, God knows I hadn't. Despite its extreme kills and gushing red stuff, this film became an obscure slasher classic that only a few older fans remembered even existing. Is it because it's bad? No, I think it's because there's nothing new under Madman's sun.

Written and directed by Joe Giannone, this movie is nothing but a Friday the 13th ripoff, without the humor or sex appeal. We open on a group of campers sitting around a campfire. They hear the story of Madman Marz, a local farmer who went nuts and hacked up his family with an axe one night, then went to a bar to have a beer. When the townspeople found out what he had done, they formed an old-fashioned lynch mob and strung him up by his neck. They came to visit the hanging corpse in the morning, but found him gone. Since then, he has been stalking the woods and staying hidden in his old, dilapidated farmhouse, which just so happens to be mere feet away from the campfire. They warn that if you say his name aloud he will kill your ass, so of course there's the dumb ass in the group that has to prove he's got balls so he stands and yells out the name. Of course, as is customary, Madman Marz arrives to kill some asses.

This is a great setup for what could be a nonstop killfest, however the movie tries to pace itself and ends up stifling tense moments in silent boredom, but at least the kills are sweet and bloody! There isn't much story from this point on, so I really have no idea what to add here to this review. Basically, the campers go off to their cabins to sleep, and the couselers, as is customary, get randy and then get killed. But their idea of getting randy isn't the fun kind, it's more of a "lets start a family together" type of randiness that really bleeds the sexiness out of the movie. Plus, and I mean no offense, the cast is plug ugly. There isn't a great looking dame in the bunch, and the guys all look like sleazy pornstar actors from the 70s. Maybe it's just me, but part of the fun of a slasher movie is seeing hot girls, and when the girls aren't hot then we have a problem. It also doesn't help that there isn't much nudity, except for a brief boob shot as the main girl (whom I call Snail Eyes, because her eyes are monstrously too far apart) enters a hot tub, and then a lingering shot of her boyfriend's ass as he dips it into the water...yikes!

Anyway, in the end Snail Eyes finds herself alone, with the rest of her friends dead or dying. One gal (the best looking one) gets her head chopped off when she is looking into the engine of her car and Madman Marz jumps on the hood and decapitates her. Then a dude gets his throat cut with bloody aplomb while another gets violently hanged. Finding herself in charge, Snail Eyes puts the kids on a bus and makes the oldest boy drive into town. She stays behind, as is customary, to fight Madman Marz or some crap, and I have to say that the ending of this sluggish little movie actually surprised me, but not enough to instruct you to go buy the dvd...if there ever is one.

While the film did satisfy my gore quota, and the plotting had some twists and turns that made the film interesting, it was the moments of quiet nothing that really screwed the pooch for me. There is not much happening in this film, as I have shown, so a straight on killfest would have made it maybe 30 minutes long. Giannone's idea of padding the movie out to make a feature was to include extended scenes of people wandering around quietly, with no music or anything, doing almost nothing but looking or walking or thinking. This turgid pace, mixed with the bland-looking cast, adds up to a miss in my book, but it deserves 3 coffins for being inventive and for going for the kills with gusto. I can see why this movie has remained obscure...there is not much here to praise.

- Jose Prendes