Madman (1982 film)

Madman
2001 DVD artwork
Directed by	Joe Giannone
Produced by	Gary Sales
Written by	Joe Giannone
Starring	Gaylen Ross Tony Fish
Music by	Stephen Horelick
Cinematography	James Lemmo
Edited by	Daniel Lowenthall
Distributed by	Jensen Farley Pictures
Release dates	January 1, 1982 (1982-01-01)
Running time	88 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$350,000

Madman (also known as Madman Marz and The Legend Lives) is a 1982 slasher film written and directed by Joe Giannone.^[1] The plot follows a group of campers who are stalked and killed after summoning an axe-murderer of local legend. Originally based on the upstate New York urban legend of the Cropsey maniac, the film's central premise and main antagonist was changed last minute due to conflicts with The Burning (1981), which was in production at the same time. ^[2]

Plot summary

T.P, one of the senior counselors at a camp, is telling a scary story around a campfire to the young campers and the other counsellors - who consist of Betsy, Ellie, Dave, Stacy, Bill, and Max the late middle-aged head counselor. After T.P. finishes his story, Max begins to tell of a man named Madman Marz, who killed his whole family with an axe, was convicted, hit in the face with an axe, and hung for his crimes, only to break free of the noose and disappear into the woods. Max continues by saying that anyone who says his name above a whisper will awaken him and cause him to come back and kill that person. At that, Richie, a cocky teenager, stands up and screams Madman Marz, throwing a rock into his old house, smashing a window. Max, annoyed at Richie, ends the campfire, sending everyone to their cabins for the night, while he goes into town to retrieve supplies to help tear down the camp, since it was to end the next day. While they go back to the cabins, Richie sees Madman Marz up in a tree, and goes to see if it's really him. Everyone else gets back to camp, and Max and Dave try to retrieve a felling axe that is placed into a log, but it is stuck. The cook, Dippy, comes out, and wishes them all a good night, before Marz comes in and rips his throat out, and grabs the felling axe out of the log.

T.P. tries to get Betsy to go out with him, but she refuses, causing a scene. After the kids have gone to sleep, the rest of the counselors see Max off and go into the rec room to relax. T.P apologizes for being rude to Betsy and she goes with him to have sex in the hot tub, all the while being watched by Madman Marz. After this, Dave is called out to Richie's cabin, and the boys there tell him that Richie never came back, so he goes and informs the others, who are all rejoined up with each other. T.P decides to go and find him, and sets off into the woods, carrying a flashlight. He comes across an opening and calls for Richie, who is busy wandering around the woods looking for Marz. Suddenly, a noose falls over T.P's neck and lifts him up into the air on a tree branch, resulting Marz pulling him down and snapping his neck on impact.

Back at the camp, Betsy and Stacy begin to talk about T.P. Stacy believes that T.P only wants sex, and apologized because he knew he would get some, but Betsy thinks he's a nice guy who really likes her. Realizing that it has been a long time since T.P. left, Dave decides to go find T.P and Richie. Dave ventures out into the woods and comes across T.P's hanging body. Panicked, he runs farther into the woods. Marz is behind him with his axe and begins to chase him. Dave finally falls over a fallen tree branch and is decapitated by Marz' axe. Betsy wants to talk to T.P, but finds out that he's still gone and begins to worry. Richie, meanwhile, is still out in the woods, but is now looking for the road back to camp, or someone to take him back. Stacy decides to take the car down to see where everybody is, suspecting that T.P's playing a trick on them. She gets into her car and drives out on the road, towards the woods by the campfire spot, and Marz's house, where we see him run out of. Stacy begins to look around for Dave, T.P, and Richie, but finds nothing, except an abandoned flashlight in the clearing where the two were killed, only T.P's body is now missing. Stacy begins to look around, and sees blood on the trees and starts to panic, running through the woods, until she spots Dave's decapitated body and head laying on the ground. She stifles her screams and rushes back to her car, and tries to drive away, only to have her engine stall. She opens the hood, not recognizing Marz on top of her car, and he jumps onto the car hood, causing it to slam down on Stacy and beheading her.

Ellie and Bill have gone to have sex in the woods, leaving a worried Betsy back at camp. When she does not hear any word back, Betsy goes into the woods to find Ellie and Bill. Once she does, she tells them that she has to stay at camp to watch the kids and wait for the others to show up, and that Ellie and Bill should go and try to find them. Ellie and Bill get dressed and take Bill's car out to look for the others, while Betsy goes back to camp. While looking through the woods, Ellie sees Marz at Stacy's car, and begins to scream, causing Marz to flee and Bill come up to see what's wrong. She tells him that she saw Marz at Stacy's car, so both of them go up and decide to drive back to camp. The car doesn't start, having Bill exiting the car to see what's wrong. He sees Stacy's head on the engine, causing him to gag and making Ellie to get out of the car, where she screams and Bill discards the head in a cloth. They get back in the car and hurriedly drive away, only reaching the end of the road, when Bill is pulled from the car window by Marz, causing the car to crash into a tree, and Ellie to fall out of the door and into a ditch. She looks up and watches in horror, as Bill's back snapped by Marz, making her run back to the camp.

Betsy is in one of the girl's cabins and does not see Ellie come back and try to find her. Ellie then goes into the kitchen cabin and tries to find Betsy, but with no luck, she goes outside when Marz appears at the door, chasing her through the cabin until she hides in a refrigerator. Once she thinks he leaves, she climbs out and tries to leave, only to have him spring up and hit her with Marz' axe. Betsy finally leaves the cabin and sees Marz running around the campgrounds, causing her to grab a double-barreled shotgun and quietly makes her way to the open-doored kitchen cabin, only to have Ellie at a window, causing her to accidentally shoot her. Realizing that Ellie is dead, she runs and wakes up the kids, telling them to get into the bus they took to get there. They quickly do and she joins them, and begins to drive the bus away from camp, only to have Marz pop up at the door and try to get in. Betsy beats his hand, making him let go and has the oldest boy drive the rest to safety, while she goes to kill Marz and save her friends. She gets out, and follows Marz to his house out in the woods.

Once inside she tries not to make any noise, but makes a step creak, causing him to come at her in the darkness, where she shoots him with her shotgun. He snatches it from her during a struggle, when he hits her in the face with his claw nails, ripping her face open. He then drags her towards the basement, while she tries to get away, shoves her up onto a coat hanger poker, She pulls out a hunting knife and stabs him in the shoulder, causing him to knock over a candle. He presumably leaves after having knocked over the candle. The candle begins to burn everything, including the victims he had killed and the skeletons of his wife and two children. The ending shows Max driving back to the camp and almost hitting a shaken Richie, who now says that Madman Marz is real.

Cast

• Gaylen Ross as Betsy (credited as "Alexis Dubin")
• Tony Fish as T.P.
• Harriet Bass as Stacy
• Seth Jones as Dave
• Jan Claire as Ellie
• Alexander Murphy, Jr. as Bill
• Jimmy Steele as Richie
• Carl Fredericks as Max
• Michael Sullivan as Dippy
• Paul Ehlers as Madman Marz

Production

During fall of 1979, Joe Giannone and Gary Sales, two filmmakers hoping for a break, began to toy with the idea of making their own feature and, realizing that low budget horrors such as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) were clearing up at the box office, decided to follow suit and began discussing potential ideas. Giannone and Sales had met at Richmond College where they had created several short films, which fueled their artistic passion. After witnessing the overnight success of Halloween in 1978 and 1979, they discussed the possibilities of making their own movie based on a boogeyman and looked at their options. Like Carpenter did with Halloween, Giannone and Sales realized that the easiest way to shoot a low-budget feature was to base the story in as few locations as possible. Sales remembered the urban legend of the Cropsy maniac, which he had heard as a child, and suggested it as a possible basis for their story. Enthusiastic, he and Giannone started to develop the idea, which would soon become Madman: The Legend Lives. As Giannone penned the script, Sales balanced his day job working in an office with the quest of finding an investor, using his employer’s facilities as a base of operations. Eight months and over a hundred attempts later, the project attracted the attention of Sam Marion, who immediately sensed the potential when he witnessed the continuing success of Halloween as well as other low-budget thrillers such as Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes.^[3]

By 1980, Giannone and Sales had secured enough financing to enter production. It was during this time that the filmmakers heard about Harvey Weinstein’s The Burning (1981), also featuring the Cropsy maniac. Because the two films resembled each other too much — which would lead to a canceling effect for both projects — Giannone decided to halt production on Madman: The Legend Lives and re-write the script.

The idea of Cropsy was changed to that of Madman Marz, a farmer who had massacred his family before being lynched by an angry mob seeking vengeance for his crimes, yet his presence still haunts the woods near his home. With a script finally done, production was ready to begin. A deal was set in motion in August 1980, with the filmmakers demanding a front of $20,000, with which they used to rent out office space on 7th Avenue in New York under the banner “The Legend Lives.” With the summer drawing to a close and the weather rapidly changing for the colder, it was pivotal that filming commenced as soon as possible. The producers began location scouting, initially settling on a horse riding ranch for children in upstate New York, whose owner had expressed interest in investing money into the picture. When that option fell through, the filmmakers were forced to search elsewhere for a suitable camp, with Giannone’s parents suggesting Fish Cove in Southampton, Long Island, which would provide the director with all of the required locations for the script.

With a location decided, casting commenced with the first role taken being Paul Ehlers as Madman Marz. Ehlers had spent his childhood shooting super-8 James Bond-style shorts and drawing cartoons and comics. In 1979 he had taken a job as an illustrator and had befriended Giannone and Sales, who had begun to seriously consider the film industry as their vocation. His involvement in Madman: The Legend Lives had originally been to help design posters and artwork for the movie, as well as the opening credit sequence. After providing suggestions on possible looks for the antagonist, a cast was made of his head by effects artist Rich Alonzo. As he was describing to the producer and director how the character could behave and move, Giannone and Sales saw potential in him as the titular villain and offered him the part. They had been considering another, much taller actor but were unimpressed with his performance. Ehlers had trained in martial arts for many years and so had the requirements to play the killer.

For the role of Max, the middle-aged head counsellor, they had originally wanted to approach screen legend Vincent Price but, with the movie being non-union, felt that the actor would decline the offer. The only recognizable face to grace the film was Gaylen Ross, who had previously starred in the zombie epic Dawn of the Dead (1978) and would be cast in Madman: The Legend Lives under the pseudonym Alexis Dubin for mysterious reasons. The rest of the cast were made up mainly of first-time actors, as the budget could not stretch to any Hollywood stars (like Halloween had done with Donald Pleasence and Friday the 13th (1980) with Betsy Palmer). With the casting process coming to an end and the actual shoot looming closer, Giannone continued to rewrite the script, which would only serve as with most slashers as a succession of gruesome set pieces, padded out with generic characters and soap opera-style melodrama. And with a Frank Sinatra tour entitled Frank Sinatra: The Legend Lives being produced around the same time, the filmmakers decided to change the name to simply Madman.^[4]

Filming

Principal photography commenced in November 1980 in Southampton, Long Island, for what was to be all night shoots. As the leaves were starting to turn brown and fall from the trees, the production were forced to find as many as possible and paint them green to give the impression that the movie was set in summer. Fish Cove not only provided a large house to film in but also twenty-five cabins that the cast and crew could stay in. As it was out of season, the filmmakers had to hire out the entire camp, meaning that they had the run of the place. For the room and board that the complex offered, the crew was changed only $25 per-head, with the staff having to work nights to accommodate for their guests.

For the opening scene, which sees Max tells the story of Madman Marz around a campfire, actor Tony Fish was given only one night to memorize the song that he sings in an effort to creep out his fellow counsellors, as the prosthetics for Madman Marz were late arriving on set and the director was forced to rethink his shooting schedule.

The effect of Marz crushing his wife’s skull with the axe was achieved by the makeup artists filling a condom with fake blood and then placing a wig over it, so when the blade was struck down onto the pillow blood would explode.

During the production, Ehlers and his wife had been expecting their first child and so Sales had supplied him with a beeper. One night he is informed that she had gone into labor and rushed from the set to the hospital, without changing out of character. Upon arrival, he asked a nurse at reception where he should find his wife and, believing that he had been in an accident, she tried to convince him to make his way to Emergency Room. His son, Jonathan, was born on November 15, 1980.

Whilst on set, Sales spent his spare time shooting production stills for press releases, but this relatively simple task almost spelt disaster for the writer. For a scene where Betsy shoots her friend, Ellie, through a window with a double-barreled 12 gauge shotgun, Sales had been above the camera taking shots himself, when a piece of the breakaway glass fired out and landed between his eyes. Luckily, only being synthetic, the glass did not dig too deeply into his forehead and Sales escaped relatively unharmed.

One night there was a strange figure in the woods that various people had claimed to see and, nervous as to who the intruder could be, Giannone asked Ehlers, who was in full Marz makeup, to head into the tress with his felling axe and look around. He was unable to find anyone and no figures were seen again for the duration of the shoot.

On December 8, 1980, towards the end of the shoot, filming was abandoned for one day when news came over the radio that singer John Lennon had been murdered in New York. This senseless act of violence, carried out by an obsessive fan, took the entire nation by surprise and so as a mark of respect the filming was put on hold for the day. ^[5]

Soundtrack

Original music for Madman was created by Stephen (Steve) Horelick with Gary Sales filling the role as musical director.^[6]

Release

Madman was released in January 1982 and, over the course of the year, became a sleeper hit in the drive-in circuit. The film faced down rival horror films backed by major studios such as Paramount, Tri-star, and Warner Bros., succeeding through word-of-mouth, which was perhaps a movie’s most powerful marketing tool. The film quickly gained a cult following, eventually reaching new audiences on home video, which was a new format at the time. The film's home video success resulted in Madman becoming one of the most treasured gems of the genre’s heyday, and helped shift low-budget horror's eventual move in the mid-1980s from theatrical to home video.^[7]

Over the decades, the film fell into obscurity as dozens of new horror movies were released and old VHS tapes were out-of-print and hard to find. Madman was released on DVD on February 13, 2001, by Anchor Bay Entertainment.^[8] The DVD was non-anamorphic and has since gone out of print, and is sought by horror and slasher film connoisseurs.^[9] The film was again released on DVD by Code Red studios on September 28, 2010. This version is anamorphic and with many extras made by the fans. This version has a weaker print than the Anchor Bay one, and many of the blue hues that made the film so atmospheric are now missing.^[10] On 12 May 2015 the film premiered over Vinegar Syndrome on Blu-ray Disc with the full length documentary film The Legend Lives as extra^[11] and had a special screening on Hudson Horror Show on 13 June 2015 in The Alamo Drafthouse in Poughkeepsie, New York.^[12]

Critical reception

Allmovie called it an "unremarkable slasher film", writing "only genre completists with completely undiscriminating tastes are likely to be frightened or entertained".^[13] Scott Weinberg of FEARnet gave the film a negative review, saying that Madman was "better left in the annals of your vague memory."^[14]

Influence of the film

• New York deathgrind band Mortician used a soundbyte from one of the film's trailers for the song "Madman Marz" on their 2004 album Re-Animated Dead Flesh.^[15]

• A poster for Madman can be seen in Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (2006).^[16]

• This film inspired the CKY song, "Escape from Hellview".

References

External links

• Madman (1982) at the Internet Movie Database
• Madman (1982) at AllMovie
• Madman (1982) at Rotten Tomatoes