'Madman' Movie Review

There's a shot in Madman where the killer just stands in a tree. He's a silhouette. The wind moves through the leaves, the camera holds, and Stephen Horelick's synth slithers underneath the frame like something alive. That shot is why this movie has a cult. Forty-five years later, slasher fans still talk about it.

Joe Giannone's Madman came out in 1981, found wider theatrical play through 1982 and into early 1983, and then quietly mutated into one of the most rented horror VHS tapes of the decade. It's the only feature Giannone ever directed (he passed in 2006), and the whole thing was made on $350,000 by two college friends, Giannone and producer Gary Sales, who took eight months and over a hundred pitch meetings to land an investor. That kind of origin story usually ends with a movie nobody remembers. This one ended differently.

Here's the setup, briefly. Last night of summer camp. Counsellors, kids, a fire, a story. The head counselor Max warns the group never to whisper the name of Madman Marz, a local farmer who hacked up his family with an axe and disappeared into the woods after a botched lynching. One smug kid says it anyway. The woods wake up.

If that synopsis sounds familiar, that's because the movie almost wasn't this movie. Giannone originally based his script on the Cropsey legend, the upstate New York boogeyman, until they discovered Harvey Weinstein's The Burning was in production at the same time, using the exact same source. So Giannone scrapped his villain and built a new one from scratch on a deadline. Madman Marz is what came out the other side. A hulking, near-mute backwoods nightmare with a chunk of his nose missing and a beard like an Old Testament prophecy. Paul Ehlers plays him. He's 6'5". He was originally hired just to paint the poster.

That's not a metaphor. Ehlers was an illustrator brought in for art duties. He started telling the producers how he'd play the character, demonstrated the walk, did the growl, and they cast him on the spot after a previously cast actor didn't work out. The performance is mostly silhouette and shoulder, but Ehlers gives Marz this lurching, almost mournful body language that elevates a cheap mask into something you actually feel in the room.

The lead is Gaylen Ross, billed under the pseudonym Alexis Dubin. Ross is the genuine article. She's the woman from George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and would turn up the next year in Creepshow. According to multiple interviews she's never been thrilled to discuss this one, which is its own kind of charm. The only real name in the cast went uncredited and the movie still works. Ross plays Betsy with this watchful, slightly checked-out quality that makes the back half land. The third act is essentially a one-woman siege movie, and she carries it.

Watch for what Ehlers does with a car bonnet. Watch for the fridge scene. Watch for the hot tub, which is basically the slasher hot tub the genre has been ripping off ever since. And watch the opening campfire scene, where Tony Fish (playing T.P.) sings Song of the Fifth Wind, a folk-creep ditty written by producer Gary Sales. Fish reportedly had one night to memorize it because the Madman Marz prosthetics showed up late and Giannone had to flip the schedule. It's the best sequence in the movie. Fish died in 2009. Madman was the only film he ever made.

Now the honest part. The middle of the film has issues. Characters wander the woods for what feels like a third of the runtime, the dialogue is functional at best, and a couple of the supporting kills are paced more like errands than set pieces. Anyone watching this expecting the lean meanness of Halloween or the grimy rhythm of the original Friday the 13th is going to feel the budget. Don't fight it. The movie isn't trying to be efficient. It's trying to be folkloric.

The behind-the-scenes lore is half the appeal at this point. Giannone and Sales originally wanted Vincent Price as Max, which the production sensibly assumed Price would never accept for a non-union slasher. The skull-crushing effect was rigged with a condom full of fake blood under a wig. Crew kept seeing a strange figure in the woods at night, and one evening Giannone sent Ehlers, in full Marz makeup, into the trees with an actual axe to investigate. He didn't find anyone. The figure stopped appearing. Ehlers' son Jonathan was born during the shoot, and he reportedly held the baby for the first time still in full prosthetics and bloodstained overalls. And on December 8th, production shut down for the day after news came in that John Lennon had been killed across the city.

Cinematographer James Lemmo (credited here as James Momel) is the other quiet hero. He went on to shoot Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 and most of William Lustig's run including Maniac Cop and Vigilante. His night photography here, all forest greens and stark blue moonlight, is doing more for the atmosphere than people give it credit for. A lot of slashers from this era look flat. This one has actual mood.

Watch Madman if you grew up haunting the horror aisle, if you're a Vinegar Syndrome completist, if you love the Friday the 13th template but want something a little weirder and a little more hand-built around the edges. Don't watch it if you need every second to earn its keep. The pleasures here are atmospheric, not surgical.

It's a campfire story told twice. Once around the fire. Once across 88 minutes. Don't say his name above a whisper.