It's the last night of summer camp, and the counsellors are sitting around the campfire telling scary stories. But the head of the camp tells one story that is suposed to be true, about a farmer known as Madman Marz who went crazy and butchered his family. Marz mysteriously escaped his own lynching and is rumoured to haunt the woods at night, only emerging when someone calls his name - which one of the counsellors does...
Over the years, the modest, basic to the point of being hackneyed even when it was initially released Madman acquired a small reputation of being unjustly overlooked amongst the busily overstuffed slasher movie cycle of the late seventies/early-to-mid eighties. Written by the director Joe Giannone, from a story by him and producer Gary Sales, the film actually now looks indistinguishable from its contemporaries, featuring all the clichés we've come to recognise.
Around this time, big studios and small independents alike decided that, after the success of Halloween, a quick way of making easy money was to collect a bunch of young actors, get them in an isolated situation, turn on the cameras and start bumping them off in a welter of bloody effects, assuming your budget stretched to that. Which is what you get here, with its Friday the 13th-style camp, victims who all, without fail, wander into the woods alone, and the unstoppable killer who stays in the shadows.
Madman does have a few things that mark it out from the rest of the pack. The almost arbitrary reason for the slaughter - calling out the killer's name - seems a little oversensitive on Marz's part and gives the film the atmosphere of the kind of late night urban legend you would hear around a campfire (something lacking in, say, the Urban Legend movies). He does appear to be a big influence on Adam Green's twenty-first century Hatchet series of homages to this eighties material, if that counts for anything with horror fans of that era.
And in a twist suggesting the rules were not quite set in stone, there's no neat ending: the "final girl", that is, the heroine who traditionally survives to defeat the killer, is noticeably poor at carrying out her role. Plus, along with the strangling and axings, there's a novel use of the truck that won't start as a murder weapon, the bit you'll likely remember if you have caught Madman at any point. All that apart, as a horror this was pretty pedestrian, but should provide easy-to-watch thrills for the slasher addicts on a nostalgic bent for a type of shocker now as classic in format as the Golden Age horrors of forty years before it, if not as respectable. Even so, the "if you go into the woods today" tropes do represent a template that has re-emerged down the years since, though did not originate here. Music by the improbably-named Stephen Horelick, and songs by producer Sales.
