I, MADMAN – Another VHS era horror flick that passed me by, and in fact I’d forgotten it ever existed until I spotted it online the other day. ‘I, Madman’ takes its cue from the ontological sketchiness of many of its eighties ilk, movies that force us to ask – is this happening for real, or just in the mad part of someone’s head? You can see shades of that in everything from ‘Videodrome’ to ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’. Its central device is that a second-hand bookseller can’t tell the difference between her pulp-fiction infused imagination and the world around her; when a bunch of murders happen, they open the door on whether the culprit might somehow be a disfigured villain from a trashy fifties horror novel. It doesn’t blast you, there’s no wham bam horror histrionics on show, but there’s something hugely enjoyable about the way it fuses a kind of smoky, measured noirishness with post-Freddie prosthetic grot. Tibor Takacs, he of ‘The Gate’ and its sequel, has crafted a nicely stylised little find, one that should be better known.
CURSE OF THE SCREAMING DEAD – It is quite a task to find anyone who will go on record with a semblance of a good word about ‘Curse Of The Screaming Dead’. Its saving grace is that it is meant to be slightly less rubbish than its prototype and companion here on this recent VS release, ‘Night Of Horror’. There’s no getting away from the fact that long stretches of ‘Curse Of The Screaming Dead’ are sit-throughs of the most tedious kind, but a barrel scraper such as myself can glean at least some amusement from this lopsided movie’s eccentricities. The first forty or fifty minutes, which is mostly made up of hippies getting lost in the wilderness and talking about it endlessly, still feels, through an inspired disaster of poor construction and worse editing, as if it’s beaming in from several different time / space zones simultaneously; a backwoods genre regionalist’s attempt at a Cubist collage, if you’re as charitable and unrealistic as I am. Then the zombies rise, and the surprise is that they are satisfyingly gross and bring with them the gift of disgusting entrail-yanking gore. The splatter is delivered with a kind of over-the-top brutal ASMR slurping sound effect that might leave you feeling quite haunted. Too little, too late? A question unanswerable by the vast majority, who more than likely will have switched off long before the ‘payoff’, if they ever switched on at all. There’s no point me trying to sell it – it’s shite. If you’re an early eighties regional horror completist, or are enamoured of the occasionally transporting effects of ultra-incompetent filmmaking, or are a masochist, or are Frankie Teardrop – you probably know what you think of it already.
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