Thursday, October 3, 2019

31 Days of Horror Day 03 Madman

TITLE-Madman
SOURCE-The Last Drive on Shudder

In the early 80s there was 2 slasher films based on the Cropsy urban legend.  One of these slashers has become a big cult favorite,mostly cause of the great FX work from Tom Savini. The other is the turd I am covering today...Madman!

I first heard of Madman in 1990. There was an exchange student from the UK at my high school. She was a huge horror fan. And after she discovered I was a big horror fan we would talk most days during lunch. I was telling her about The Burning and she asked if I had seen Madman. I decided I needed to see Madman. So the next Friday I went to 10 video stores. But none of them had the movie. The owner of Video Showboat said she could order me a copy. Sadly back then a copy was 60 bucks. I wasn't gonna spend that much for a film I had never seen.

Skip ahead to 2004. I was using bit torrent to download films. And found Madman on the Tracker 3 site. Since there was very few people seeding the file it took 5 days to download. I got home from a long day at work saw the download was done. Ran the file through a video converter and burnt the resulting file to a dvdr. The next day a few friends came over. We watched Madman...And it sucked. Crap acting ,crap FX And the film just wasn't good.

I had forgotten about Madman until 2010. I had discovered a horror podcast and one of the hosts is a huge Madman fan. Saw that Code Red was putting it out on DVD. Pre ordered it and the day it came in I rushed home from work to watch it. And again was disappointed . The previously mentioned podcast shit all over the Code Red release.  It wasn't until years later that I learned why they shat all over this release.  The podcast host considers himself a horror expert, when really his horror knowledge is limited to mostly mainstream horror films. And the host was made that Code Red didn't want to use the host on the dvd.

Madman is your standard summer camp slasher. If you have seen more than 2 summer camp slashers you know all the tropes. Really the only things about Madman that stands are the theme song,which is the best thing in this pile of shit. And Gaylon Ross,the female lead in the original Dawn of the Dead, appears in Madman. But she uses an alias.  Ms Ross claims she did this because she was a SAG member and Madman wasn't a SAG film. I ,and many others think she used an alias cause she knew the movie was shit.

Honestly if Madman wasn't a part of The Last Drive In with Joe Bob Briggs I wouldn't have bothered watching it again. But Joe Bob can usually make even the worst films worth seeing. In the case of Madman he didn't make this shitstain of a film worth watching. Madman gets a F.