I love genre cinema. I will always have a soft spot for horror, action, sci-fi, and all the subgenres that exist inside those larger categories. What I never used to feel any real connection to are those films that exist in the realm of pure sleaze. You know the ones: the films from the ’70s and ’80s, filled with ugly violence and sex that is the opposite of titillating, usually shot on cheap film stock with semi-amateur casts. But knowing these films have a large following and several companies devoted to restoring them made me wonder what I was missing. With that in mind, I started a deep dive into the world of sleazy exploitation that continues to this day. This is My Exploitation Education. Today’s lesson is MADHOUSE.
Existing at the intersection of THE BAD SEED, family psychodrama, and hand puppets haphazardly crafted to look like the jaws of a rottweiler, you will find the blissfully nonsensical world where MADHOUSE exists. But since that world is created by co-writer/producer/director Ovidio G. Assonitis, the longtime genre stalwart behind THE EXORCIST rip-off BEYOND THE DOOR, the JAWS rip-off TENTACLES, and other cheerfully absurd films like THE VISITOR and AMOK TRAIN (retitled BEYOND THE DOOR III), it’s best to not look too deeply for some kind of genre re-invention or subversion. This is horror movie meat-and-potatoes and sometimes that’s just what is needed.
A surreal prologue features a little girl repeatedly bashing a rock against the face of another little girl. This would-be gruesome moment is lightened by the cheapness of the effect as the victim is clearly a mannequin with a wax face. Whether this moment is intended to be seen as a piece of fantasy, given the obvious fakery of the assault, is up for debate. What it does do is start the film with a much-needed jolt as the very long first act exposition dump is sorely lacking in any kind of tension or scares and could easily lose hardened horror lovers. But said exposition dump is necessary, lest MADHOUSE wind up even less coherent than the finished film eventually is.
Julia (Trish Everly) is an elementary teacher at a school for the deaf. Since this occupation practically assures the viewer that she is already a saint, it puts the audience on her side as she puts up with her always too busy boyfriend Sam (Michael MacRae) and the passive-aggressive needling of her priest uncle Father James (Dennis Robertson). Father James is eager for Julia to visit her twin sister Mary (Allison Biggers) in the mental hospital, feeding her guilt trips about their impending shared birthday and that Mary’s health is failing.
Julia wants nothing to do with her sister. She recalls Mary as a malevolent child who played sadistic games with her, while threatening to unleash her vicious rottweiler on her. Father John waves off her memories as her imagination gone wild and despite her better instincts, Julia visits Mary. Instead of being on her death bed, Mary is physically strong, with a scarred-up face and a broken mind. She promises Julia that she will resume her evil ways for their birthday and sends her running from the hospital.
It’s not long before Mary escapes the hospital, killing a guard as her (psychically guided?) rottweiler bloodily rips his throat out. Despite this turn of events, no one in Julia’s life seems particularly worried about her claims that Mary is out to get her. If the eventual point of the film is to say that you should listen to women when they claim to be in danger, all of the men in the film — and Julia’s token friend Helen (Morgan Hart) — fail to learn that lesson as secondary characters start dropping like flies.
Like most international productions of the time-period, there is a unique flavor to MADHOUSE that comes from European filmmakers trying to make a movie set in America. Even with an American cast and location shooting in Savannah, Georgia, the tone is odd as Assonitis presents a world where it’s normal for a teacher at a non-religious school to take one of her students to church or for a man to waltz uninvited into the apartment of his girlfriend’s best friend (who is of course stretching in form fitting exercise gear) and not get immediately labeled a creep with boundary issues. Even stranger, the titular abode where Julia lives is a repurposed funeral home, yet the film never rings any atmosphere from the location. The same issue can be said for choosing to shoot in a city as dripping with gothic atmosphere as Savannah, yet here it looks about as unique as a small-town USA studio backlot.
But that lack of specificity helps give the film a feel of Mary’s madness as she is joined in her killing spree by a secondary villain. What is the second killer’s motivation for showing up with a butcher knife and stabbing people? Are they just homicidally insane? That certainly seems to be the only reason offered up. Weirdly, though this killer is using a massive knife to off yet more expendable characters, these murders are almost bloodless. I suppose it is the bloody rottweiler attacks that somehow got MADHOUSE placed on the infamous Video Nasties list. But even then, the killings are undermined by the clearly fake dog head puppet used to clamp down on the necks of the victims.
Despite my complaints when it comes to the effects work and the haphazard plot, I had fun with MADHOUSE. The cast may all be acting in their own movies, but none of them phone it in as over-the-top becomes the baseline for each performance. Between the overwrought nature of the acting on display and the loopy logic (or lack thereof) of the screenplay that somehow took four writers to cobble it together, it hits that sweet spot of nonsensical cinematic junk food that exploitation flicks always promise but don’t always deliver.
Tags: Allison Biggers, Columns, Dennis Robertson, Dogs, Don Devendorf, Edith Ivey, Exploitation Film, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horror, Italy, Jerry Fujikawa, Matt Wedge, Michael Macrae, Morgan Hart, Ovidio G. Assonitis, Peter Sheperd, Puppets, Richard Baker, Roberto D'Ettorre Piazzoli, Roberto Gandus, Stephen Blakeley, The 1980s, Trish Everly, Video Nasties, Warner Bros.
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