Census Bloodbath: Marz Attacks

For our podcast episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Joe Giannone

Cast: Gaylen Ross, Tony Fish, Harriet Bass

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The slasher film has always had its flaws, even during the golden years of 1980 and 1981. That’s the nature of a genre built on the credo “if you built it and slop twelve cents of red paint onto it, the box office will come.” But the genre as a whole hit its first big stumbling block in 1982, the year following the slasher’s period of highest quality – and market saturation. It wasn’t enough to be a meat and potatoes hack and slash picture anymore, but producers weren’t quite on the cusp of realizing that.

Enter Madman. Released on New Year’s Day in 1982, it was the second 80’s slasher film to be based on the Cropsey campfire legend (after the superior The Burning), the fourth 80’s slasher film to be set at a summer camp, the ninth 80’s slasher film to take place in the forest, and the fifty-ninth 80’s shlasher film in general. In short, it was nothing special. In long, it was a tedious, wretched exercise in the least interesting slasher tropes meted out in a hideously incompetent manner, redeemed only by an inexplicable profusion of scenes so incredibly strange they can’t help but be arresting.

I don’t know what I expected.

Madman tells the tale of the North Sea Cottages, a forest retreat for gifted children and their not-so-gofted counselors. When the camp director Max (Frederick Neumann) tells a campfire story about Madman Marz (Paul Ehlers), the local maniac what stalks these woods, young douchenozzle in training Richie (Tom Candela) calls out to him, unleashing the dormant menace upon the horny counselors as they celebrate the last day of camp.

The platter of Meat includes Betsy (Gaylen Ross of Dawn of the Dead, under a fake name so she won’t be embarrassed, and keeping a studiously blank face so she won’t accidentally be mistaken for an actress), a translucent blonde who is the main character for some inscrutable reason; TP (Tony Fish), Betsy’s douchey boyfriend, who gags on a hideously pronounced New Yahk accent; Stacy (Harriet Bass), Betsy’s best friend, a horny sweetie who speaks in advice column platitudes; Bill (Alex Murphy), who has an Oates mustache; his girlfriend Ellie (Jan Claire), who has a Hall perm; and Dave (Seth Jones), a blondie with some exciting new ideas from Philosophy 101 class.

It’s pretty routine. The counselors bumble off into the woods alone looking for one another while Madman Marz bumps them off with whatever implements he finds handy. Meanwhile Richie makes himself completely useless and wanders around Marz’s home, watching him drag bodies around without lifting a ginger to help them. Kids these days…

Don’t lynch me for this, but I think I used to own that jacket…

Madman is not the worst slasher I’ve ever seen (Psycho Santa), nor is it the dullest (The Outing), but in fact it’s perhaps even less appealing for not being so hyperbolically bad. It’s so staunchly middle-of-the-road in every aspect that you can’t muster up the energy to hate it, but rather sit through it numbly as shot after shot filters by of one character after another ferreting around in the dark. There are a few instances of quality here and there that patch up the threadbare entertainment value enough that I don’t hate the film to any thorough degree, but it’s an awfully dog-eared entry in the genre, to say the least.

The editing is challenging in the way that digesting a week-old hard boiled egg is challenging: epic length shots of wandering bodies are jaggedly interspersed with rapid-fire close-ups of indeterminate patches of dirt with no discernible geography. It’s like a high school student’s final project where they’re attempting to pull a David Lynch but they fell asleep twenty minutes into Eraserhead. There are some admittedly pretty damn majestic silhouette shots of the killer, but beyond that everything on the filmmaking is basely incompetent.

The gore, usually the saving grace of such subpar backwoods splatter films, is likewise inconsistent. The vast majority of the kills look like a host of particularly dull, all-red Jackson Pollock pieces with two exceptions. When Tony Fish is hung from a tree, his eyes roll back and his face turns purple, in a reliable paroxysm of asphyxiation (which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that he was actually choking himself), and the grand finale in Madman Marz’s house of horrors is reliably gruesome. But it’s all too little too late after 80 minutes of grueling drudgery.

Even the acting, the last bastion of the ironic slasher watcher, isn’t quite vapid enough to mock, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call anybody genuinely good. I have too much respect for the virtue of truth and the purity of my soul to do that. Only Ross is up to anything remarkably inane, looking like she was dumped on set after major dental surgery and was performing through a dopamine haze. And Ehlers is the only cast member that attempts to do anything at all above and beyond the script, barreling around the screen and grunting like a gorilla – an effect which combines with Marz’s inexplicable rat claws to create an utterly baffling effect. But at least it has any sort of impact, which is more than I can say for any of his castmates.

Out of all the slasher villains I’ve seen, Madman Marx is voted Most Likely to Appear in a Production of The Nutcracker.

The one truly, indelibly, unmistakably remarkable thing about Madman is this; it has perhaps the loosest grip on reality of any early 80’s slasher I’ve ever seen. Sure, late 80’s flicks get goofy and gloopy and campy, but that was in the genre’s desperate, decadent phase. Madman is a straightforward, stone-faced slasher packed to the gills with some of the most ludicrous, out of context scenes that have ever been gathered in one place. This is the film’s saving grace.

The film is full of people discovering severed heads in car engines, hiding from killers in fridges, and blowing raspberries at hillocks, all riddled with dialogue pulled from the greatest hits of fortune cookies, like “the biggest test is letting go,” or, “play the game with a fair heart and look on.” But the pièce de résistance is a three minute sex scene in a hot tub where two characters revolve around each other for two full minutes, grinning like idiots and spinning merrily in their orbits while a trashy jazz song penned and performed by the actor himself squeaks and croons in the background before they finally converge and make their way underwater.

You can’t make this stuff up. None of it’s played for laughs, and it’s all mystifyingly riveting. Unfortunately, it’s all sandwiched between those ponderously dull stalk and slash sequences, but if you’re the kind of person that I am, just reading that previous paragraph will give you an uncomfortably nasty itch that only Madman can scratch.

Plus Madman Marz has a ballad. Like Friend Hunter says, you can never go wrong with a ballad.

Killer: Madman Marz (Paul Ehlers)

Final Girl: Betsy (Gaylen Ross)

Best Kill: Stacy is decapitated with a car hood.

Sign of the Times: Seriously. Denim coats lined with white fur were outlawed after 1989.

Scariest Moment: Madman Marz swipes at Dave with an axe after he discovers TP’s body.

Weirdest Moment: I want to frame that Jacuzzi scene and put it on my wall.

Champion Dialogue: “I love to feel the flames devour the wood. Who says there’s no beauty in destruction?”

Body Count: 10

1. Mrs. Marz is axed.
2. Baby Boy Marz is axed.
3. Baby Girl Marz is axed.
4. Dippy has his throat slashed.
5. TP is hung.
6. Dave is decapitated with an axe.
7. Stacy is decapitated with a car hood.
8. Bill has his back broken.
9. Ellie is axed in the chest and shot in the face.
10. Betsy is impaled on a meat hook.

TL;DR: Madman is a dull, threadbare slasher slog redeemed only by a slate of inexplicably bizarre scenes.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1374

Comic Relief

Year: 1982

Director: George A. Romero

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: R

A five part horror anthology series based on the old EC comics like Tales From the Crypt directed by George Romero, written by Stephen King, and made up by Tom Savini, Creepshow is a classic horror fan's wet dream.

EC horror comics used to be all the rage in the 1950s, but declined in popularity due to a moral panic (gee, where have I head that one before?). Naturally, fans were outraged and Creepshow is at heart an enormous middle finger to the people who hoped those tales would never see the light of day again. These five stories and their overarching connecting story are all original stories (well, two of them were adapted from previously published shorts by Stephen King), but not a one of them would be out of place in the popular issues of yore.

Even more direct of a callback than the stories is the format itself. The editing, acting, framing, color design, opening titles, and even the poster are all deliberate homages to that lost style of storytelling. Think what Scott Pilgrim vs. the World did for classic video games, but twenty years earlier.

But let's let this clever, campy, and imaginative film speak for itself as we dive on into the individual stories.

"Prologue/Epilogue"

Cast: Joe Hill, Tom Atkins, Tom Savini

In this brief setup story, Billy, a young boy (Hill, Stephen King's son), is harangued by his father (Atkins) for reading filth like those daggum horror comics. He tosses his son's beloved entertainment in the trash, but a nighttime visit from The Creep allows Billy (and us) to revisit his favorite stories, and when his mail order voodoo doll comes in the mail, he puts it to good use.

As if the entire nature of the film wasn't enough, this segment fully drives in the "screw you, comics-haters" vibe.

"Father's Day"

Cast: Carrie Nye, Viveca Lindfors, Ed Harris

A fairly straightforward piece, this segment details the story of a murdered man returning from the grave on the anniversary of his death to wreak havoc on a party thrown in his honor by his killer and the family members that benefitted from his will. This sequence is the most similar to the slasher craze that had begun but two years before.

"Father's Day" features some of the loopiest comic strip sequences, especially during the flashback to the father's murder in which a car zooms in and out of two panels and images slash across the screen diagonally while framed by vibrant colors. In addition, the night is lit by a sheer blue glow that is reminiscent of the overwhelmingly technicolor masterpiece Suspiria.

The zombie makeup is pretty cheesy, as should be expected of a movie from this time period, but Savini is not one to mess around and details like the gooey tendrils holding the monster's skeletal jaws together are masterful.

"The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"

Cast: Stephen King, Bingo O'Malley

Verrill (King), a young hermit who presumably lives in the Deep South, discovers a meteor that has crashed into his back field and accidentally cracks it open, getting himself covered in a milky secretion. When he imagines the possible outcomes of his discovery, his wacky fantasy life is reminiscent of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. 

Unfortunately, the goo appears to have the adverse effect of turning him into a living plant and he is driven to madness by his transformation and the reappearance of his late father. King proves himself to be a strangely reliable actor, hamming it up in a role that reminds one of Jim Carrey in his prime.

Not to be outdone, this segment is also awash in bright technicolor light, this time green to represent, you know, the plants.

"Something to Tide You Over"

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, Gaylen Ross

Whereas "Father's Day" was more of a slasher riff and "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" had a determinedly sci-fi bent, "Something To Tide You Over" definitely feels more like a precursor to psycho trap movies like Cube, Nine Dead, or the Saw franchise.

This segment is easily the most star-studded with Nielsen (Airplane!, Prom Night, The Naked Gun) playing a madman torturing his cheating wife (Gaylen Ross, who appeared four years earlier in Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead) and her young lover, played by Ted Danson (Cheers, Bored to Death) by burying them up to their necks in the sand and letting the tide wash in.

Naturally, the story doesn't end there as things take a turn for the supernatural, mostly lit in a vivid shade of aquamarine.

"The Crate"

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, Fritz Weaver

A janitor discovers an old crate sealed with chains tucked beneath an old staircase at the university. Its label would imply that it's over 170 years old and may contain artifacts from the Arctic Expedition. When he and a stuffy old professor open it and release the beast inside, his friend Henry (Holbrook) catches wind and must decided whether to detain the beast or utilize its frenzy to get rid of his overbearing wife (Barbeau).

This segment with it's "monster from the arctic" theme would seem to be an homage to John Carpenter's The Thing, released earlier that same year. This idea is cemented in by the crate's label - "via Julia Carpenter" - and the presence of Adrienne Barbeau who had previously worked with the director on 1980's The Fog, 1981's Escape From New York, even appearing The Thing itself in a small cameo.

This segment is the most thematically resonant, with the monster representing Henry's internal desires and rage, augmented by the garish red light that accompanies his dark fantasies and the monster's evil doings.

Tom Savini gets his best work in this segment with a fabulous clawing of a young student's face.

"They're Creeping Up on You!"

Cast: E. G Marshall, David Early

Wow, they really saved all their F-bombs for this one. E. G. Marshall (12 Angry Men) plays a callous businessman whose latest buyout led a rival to suicide. Not at all haunted by this, he is rather more worried about the vermin problem in his pristine penthouse apartment.

Cockroaches appears in larger and larger numbers as he does all he can to squash and spray in between shouting matches with his super. After a citywide blackout, the bugs swarm and overwhelm him in what is, at least to me, the most truly terrifying moment in the film.

Absolutely skin crawling.

Some of Creepshow's segments are more complex than others, but they all maintain the relative simplicity common to comics narratives as they parade a variety of horrors, blaring colors, and talented actors eating it up in supremely over the top campy roles.

Creepshow is horror distilled, perfectly capturing the essence of the childlike wonder of experiencing those EC spooky stories for the first time. The true definition of a cult classic, it's just a whole lot of fun, and the people working on this project were the best and brightest the genre had to offer at the time.

Segment Ranking:

#5 "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"

#4 "Father's Day"

#3 "They're Creeping Up on You!"

#2 "Something to Tide You Over"

#1 "The Crate"

TL;DR: Creepshow is a living comic book and a rowdy and campy horror classic.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1236