Let's talk about one of the more lowkey entries from the golden year of slasher film, Joe Giannone's Madman.

Starring: Gaylen Ross (credited as Alexis Dubin), Tony Fish, Harriet Bass, Seth Jones, Jan Claire and Alex Murphy.

Along with Friday the 13th (1980), The Burning (1981), and Sleepaway Camp (1983), Madman is one of the seminal films which helped cement the now-beloved summer camp themed slasher. Shot on Long Island, NY in late 1980, and initially conceived as an adaptation of the Staten Island urban legend of Cropsey, a boogeyman-like figure who would kidnap children, but production got off to a bumpy start for Joe Giannone as he was beaten to the punch by Tony Maylam, Brad Grey, and Harvey Weinstein in co-opting the legend for The Burning (1981), an early Weinstein production, and inarguably the better of the two films.
Now unable to use Cropsey, since The Burning explicitly uses that name, Giannone had to quickly re-write and alter his antagonist, conjuring a new urban legend, or at least a variation of Cropsey, and so for better or worse, the yarn of Madman Marz - the homicidal farmer, was spun.

You know, I can't help but feel a bit sorry for the kids in these summer camp slasher flix, they only went away for the summer to have a good time and make lasting memories, instead they end up traumatised, or worse, murdered by a maniacal living legend. Comparatively to the poor fuckers seen these movies, I had relatively safe and uneventful summer breaks as a kid. Sure, I fractured my wrist one time falling 6ft from a rope swing, but that's all part of growing up, what I didn't experience is seeing a friend being decapitated by a 7ft lunatic farmer wielding an axe, and I struggle to recall any instances of urban legends coming to life after a word or two of disrespect - no matter how hard we tried, and chasing us through the woods. Nor do I recall any of my so-called friends suffering a psychotic episode, donning a mask, and stalking the rest of us around a forest with an instrument of death.



In any event, Madman opens with a ragtag group of shithead youths and gaggle of bored-looking counsellors gathered around a campfire. The eldest counsellor, a middle-aged yet utterly haggard-lookin' Max (Frederick Neumann) is relating to the group the terrifying legend of Madman Marz, a local farmer who one day for no-apparent reason took up an axe and decided to dismember his entire family, and was subsequently lynched by villagers. Max warns the campers that merely saying his name aloud is enough to summon him, so ace twat Richie (Tom Candela) decides it's a good idea to defy Max's warning, yelling "Marz" at the top of his lungs and lobbing a rock through the window of Marz's abandoned abode.

The group breaks-up to return to camp with Richie catching a brief threatening silhouette of Madman Marz hanging out in a tree above. Captivated, Richie absconds to snoop around the Marz house instead of returning to camp with the other kids, meanwhile counsellors Betsy (Gaylen Ross) and T.P. (Tony Fish) engage in the most awkward and unromantic hot tub romance scene in cinematic history, complimented by Gaylen Ross' criminally gormless expression. Marz wastes no time initiating the body count, brazenly slashing the chef's throat with his razor-sharp fingernails. From here on out, Madman kind of aimlessly meanders along with a handful of kills sprinkled throughout, until the last 20 mins when the action becomes a bit more desperate.



"One by one you'll start to fall, before night's over I'll get you all" - Max (Frederick Neumann)

Marz, the titular madman, manages to simultaneously appear imposing and laughably-ridiculous; from a distance he's menacing, but in close-up the effects don't sell it, still as silly as he often appears, with his gnarled blancmange features, the tone is always stone-cold vicious. The kills are mean spirited and brutal in execution; a hanging of one counsellor is cruelly drawn-out, and the shot of Marz holding another above his head is a formidable sight to behold. Unfortunately, characters are so one dimensional that it's hard to give a shit when any of them are in peril, let alone about to be decapitated by the hood of a car - yes that's a verified kill here in Madman. Whether it's down to ability or boredom; Gaylen Ross/Alexis Dubin in particular looks even more vacant, bordering on comatose, than she did as Francine Parker in Romero's zombie epic Dawn of the Dead (1978), or the script they're working from, but performances are noticeably wooden and lacking any sense of enthusiasm.



For the most part Madman follows every established slasher trope, but breaks convention during the final moments by offing and allowing the cocky brat Richie - who started Marz's rampage, to survive the whole ordeal, only with his sanity in tatters, in a way, it's kind of poetic.

I dig Madman although it's taken several watches over a very many years to fully appreciate its charm, there's enough to admire. I think the biggest problem for anybody watching it for the first time is just how dull it is, sure it has a great poster to pull you in and all the necessary ingredients to be a great slasher, as well as, a pretty iconic antagonist in the form of the hulking Marz, but it's all so flavourless and lacking. Cinematographer, James Lemmo, does his best to keep everything visible; naturally it's a very dark film, everything happens over the course of a single night, and there's no day-time footage. Lemmo infuses most outdoor sequences with a blue tint, adding to the already cold and chilly atmosphere.
Sadly, Madman is further bogged down by the collective apathy of the cast, rendering a good portion of the runtime as a bit of a slog. Mercifully, in the last 20 minutes the tension is ramped up and you're bludgeoned by a few (welcomed) shocking sequences, creating a sense of dread and mayhem as the remaining characters fight to survive against a seemingly unstoppable boogeyman.

Leonard Kirtman's spicy skin flick starring Seka & Veronica Hart, supported by a plethora of NYC regulars; Samantha Fox, Serena, Jamie Gillis, Bobby Aystr, and Ron Jeremy.

Here's a real goodie! One day, I'll get around to doing a proper write-up for this sleazy creature feature, until then...

A day late, but nevertheless, this week's choice is Doris Wishman's Double Agent 73, a farcical spy caper and spiritual successor to Deadly Weapons (1974), starring Chesty Morgan.

Hot off the back of a recent viewing, Eddie Romero's Filipino-lensed Black Mama White Mama is a terrific adventure with Pam Grier & Margaret Markov; a prostitute and revolutionary, butting heads and causing havoc as two opposing women forced to work together!

It's been a helluva long time since I covered anything related to the living dead and I've been wanting to check this out for a number of years, so let's delve headfirst into John Hayes' drug-fuelled zombie horror, Garden of the Dead.

Starring: Phil Kenneally, Duncan McLeod, John Dullaghan, John Dennis, Marland Proctor, Susan Charney, and Virgil Frye.

Welcome to Camp Hoover, a penitentiary that's soon to be shut down, home to a chain-gang of miscreants, and appears to be nothing more than a fenced-in ranch. To break up the humdrum routine, a group of toughs get their kicks huffing fumes from a canister of formaldehyde and decide to stage a breakout later that night.

Stereotypical "good con" Paul Johnson (Marland Proctor) gets daily bittersweet visits from his woman, Carol (Susan Charney), who also catches the eye of several other prisoners. Paul later refuses to be a part of the jailbreak plot and, as a consequence, gets shivved and severely wounded by loathsome piece of shit and stereotypical "bad con", Braddock (Virgil Frye), and subsequently sits out for most of the movie.

Come nightfall Braddock and his goons escape and for all their hard-work and toil get shot dead by the warden and his guards. The scum are hastily buried in shallow, formaldehyde soaked graves, and through some inexplicable chemical reaction are revived as formaldehyde-craving zombies.



Back at the ranch errr I mean penitentiary, the remaining prisoners are subjected to an irrationally cruel punishment from the Warden for not stopping the breakout. Meanwhile, the gaggle of recently revived ghouls retain most of their faculties, can seemingly talk, and waste little time arming themselves with shovels, rakes, pickaxes, and other readily available tools to break back into the prison for another fix of formaldehyde and wreak bloody havoc upon the living! It all leads to a rather audacious finale in which arch-ghoul Braddock demands the holed-up guards to "show us the girl!" Spotting an opportunity to bring about a final solution to their undead problem the guards devise a means to ambush the lecherous horde.



Well, well, well isn't this a charming little picture, admittedly I lowered any and all expectations (one must with exploitation/drive-in movies of this calibre), but very quickly I got lost in the microcosmic world contained within Garden of the Dead. Not unlike a H.G. Lewis or Ray Dennis Steckler outing, John Hayes manages to construct something out of virtually nothing that manages to be thoroughly entertaining, and with a brisk runtime of 59 minutes, Garden of the Dead moves along at a lightning pace. Characters are mere sketches, or typical prison stereotypes; good and bad cons, warden, sympathetic guard, and a bumbling idiot for comedic relief.



One of the few outbreak/zombie movies made in the wake of Romero's game-changing Night of the Living Dead (1968) and given that in 1972, the standards, conventions, and tropes for what's expected from a zombie film were still being established, much less cemented, Garden of the Dead is very much its own beast. Unbound by any of Romero's "rules", the undead here run, cavort, and stealthily sneak attack their victims. It's made apparent that one of their weaknesses is light and unlike the near un-killable zombie we've come to expect, this horrible lot can be permanently stopped by a close-range shotgun blast.



Garden of the Dead is a horror film with a bit of an ecological/pollution bent with a chemical being the catalyst or cause for reviving the recently deceased as unstoppable marauders. There's also a drug scare angle that's quite typical of the time, in a similar vein to Brad F. Grinter's Blood Freak (1972), it's unique and ironic in the way the dead, escaped drug-addled prisoners, return to life only to break back into jail for more drugs, and mete out some vengeance upon the living along the way. I don't think the irony is lost on anybody that even in death these formaldehyde junkies are fiending for another fix!



Hayes surely gets his money's worth from the fog machine, as there's a bounty of sequences shot against a creeping fog. The cast are largely unknowns, there's even a small cameo from exploitation legend Lee Frost (seriously, when's his retrospective box set coming??), the acting is passable, the effects; horrible, yet utterly charming; Joe Blasco would later go on to do makeup work on two of the Ilsa movies: ...She Wolf of the SS (1975) & ...Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), and Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) & Rabid (1977).

Taking into account that Garden of the Dead was shown as a supporting picture for John Hayes' other 1972 movie, Grave of the Vampire, it's astonishingly good, and given its extremely short runtime it never has the chance for a truly dull moment. It's a trip, just be sure to forget everything you know about zombie movies, if you went into this expecting anything groundbreaking, you would only be setting yourself up to have a bad time with it - instead, allow the images to wash over your retina like the lazy vapours of experimental formaldehyde.

Been a while since I kept this rolling, so here's the first one of year! An early Bill Lustig outing starring Sharon Mitchell & Jamie Gillis, and don't let the title fool ya, this ain't a roughie!