Maniacal (2003)

 

Director: Joe Castro

Screenplay: Eric Spudic

Cast: Perrine Moore as Janet Gill; Lee Webb as Gilbert Gill; Carl Darchuk as Garrett Gill; Brannon Gould as Lance; Heather Ashley Chase as D.J. Spiegel; Jon Prutow as Josh; David Ortega as Dane; Carol Rose Carver as Brooke; Deborah Huber as Nancy Gill; Mike Nyman as Officer Spiegel

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #165

 

No love for Gilbert! [Throws hammer]

Another Joe Castro film, and at this point, I am used to his work to the point that, for this slasher film with a lot of self reflection of the genre, it actually became a humorous experience even if the movie is meant to be taken seriously. Whether time does for all these reviews, this one comes at the point I have covered all the films of his which were released in the United Kingdom in the early days of DVD, which is important for me as, symbolically, the point of the watching experience was to cover these films and ascertain any thoughts. Baring if I can track down other films of his, the point was to assess a filmmaker normally never marathoned like this. I think this as much added to giddiness to a film, honestly, which is not great but I did find fun in.

It has a melodramatic opening - with some Dutch tilts, we have the home of a nasty alcoholic father, a step mother (the actress notably younger and with a greying wig or hair die on), a younger sister who will be the lead, and Gilbert, meant to be nineteen and in this film's ethos not really a considered depiction of learning disabilities and mental health. He is slow, he likes to mangle and melt dolls in his bedroom listening to horrorcore rap, and eventually one night snaps, trying to kill his father with a hammer, managing to with his stepmother with excessive hammer to rubber head trauma, the first in a lot of head related injuries and demolition throughout.

Sent to a mental asylum that would make Samuel Fuller's symbolic one in Shock Corridor (1963) more well run, with deeply unprofessional staff who joke about the cliché in horror films of mental institution inmates going on rampages, Gilbert is left in there for a year until someone made a fatal error to give a man with a history of violence a metal fork. By this point was where the humour was to be found, the tone not as dark and nasty as has been the case for Joe Castro for me thankfully. This has been a side of his, over multiple films, which has been a clear trademark of his which can be appropriate, sometimes black humoured, but also off-putting; here thankfully there was a sense of absurdity and, honestly, charm in that to create this asylum for mental health they just found a blank white walled building and had extras play inmates who wander about, including one female actress to play a nymphomaniac. That detail, an admittedly up-PC term and depiction nowadays, was where the comparison to Shock Corridor actually made sense. The music is so over-the-top and unintentionally amusing too, but not in a mean reaction to the film, just that it lightened the tone considerably.

Worth mentioning is that this was a film I had seen of Castro's a long time back, like Terror Toons but without remember a single thing baring the fact, finding a second hand disc in a charity store, that I hated it. Instead it feels like a film having to come from after both the original eighties slasher boom of the eighties and the late nineties return of the trend in self reflective (or just teen drama centric) films. Castro still has a misanthropic edge, as everyone at times baring the lead female cast can be arseholes, even a group of young children who play the trope of taunting people with chants about Gilbert coming back to get them. At the same time though, the self reflective nature is there as this is a world where everyone can refer to slasher film trivia, and even some deep cuts I have never seen and were not quoted in Scream (1996) either, like Dolly Dearest (1991) and Happy Hell Night (1992).

It does lead to the best moment for me for the film - Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee Horror Shop, a real film store in Los Angeles¹, which here in this time capsule has walls of VHS up to the rafters on display, even though a nearby sign indicates that, at this time period, DVD was already here and ready to kill off the medium outside of avid collectors and a retro trend that would bring the format back as a luxury in the 2010s onwards. The nature of the film is that, in sincerity, some of it is clearly exaggerated too, such as Gilbert being able with his bare hands to rip hearts out, and hopefully for someone even calling their lead character Gilbert in the first place. Jokes like the "Last aisle on the left" pun or Gilbert creating a weapon by duck taping all the kitchen knives to a stick, and only using it once near the end, have a comedy to it that, for moments it feels accidentally silly, I sincerely hope was humoured here. From writer Eric Spudic, who is mostly known as an actor but also wrote a few low budget horror films in the early 2000s, this film is still immensely silly, but is thankfully a nice balm for me in comparison to The Hazing (a.k.a. Butchered) (2003) which was tedious to say the least.

The self reflective nature is the difference between the two films and such a huge improvement. Most of the film is openly riffling on Halloween (1978) for its plot structure anyway in references - Gilbert wearing a clown mask, the lead's best friend DJ (Heather Ashley Chase) being a stand in for P.J. Soles' enthusiast best friend character, that there are three female students as the leads in the first place - so it makes sense just to reference slasher films with a knowing nod. It is Halloween if with more hip hop, all original music created for the film, and with the children being so knowledgeable of horror they say Gilbert is scarier than Pinhead from the Hellraiser series.

In complete honesty, beyond this point it is just the many tropes of slasher films playing out, as Gilbert eventually terrorise the female leads (and three guys) at a slumber party starting in the afternoon. The father, now sobered, who is after his son is like many characters in these films doggedly pursuing the killer. The gratuitous shower scene has probably existed in another slasher film, or horror films which lingered on the actress soaping her chest clearly for a male viewership, and surprisingly has restrain not to just refer to Psycho (1960) either as others have. It does effectively remake a death in Halloween of someone being choked out from the passenger seat of a car, only with exaggeration as strangulation literally turns someone's head purple. The head trauma - squashed, blown off, crushed - is gross and absurd, and in one of Castro's best trademarks, that of his knack of special effects which have impressed me on low budgets, some of them are one takes, where with a little editing technique he can have the actor in shot only to jump to them sans head, which is legitimately impressive as a tiny little editing technique which catches you off guard as they managed to make the transition seamless.

It is cheap and cheerful. Baring an ending which is bleak in context - [Major Spoiler] how many have the killer kill themselves by drinking drain cleaner? [Spoiler Ends] - Maniacal is at this point, in my history with ultra low budget films let alone Castro's, harmless for me personally. It feels, thankfully, a befitting end to the run of films which were released and, through the "Hardgore" DVD sub-label, films I might have spotted on shelves of Poundland in my home place of England even in my neck of the woods. Not a lot of Castro's directorial work, baring a few that popped up on Amazon Prime, have ever come to the UK even among the glut of horror that is released straight to DVD every week at this point.  As a director, I will admit I have struggled with his films at times, but it says a lot about him that I kept to this cycle of reviews. It is also ironic that, if you know of him, it is likely for the Terror Toons franchise, which he is still making films for and has been the project he clearly held a lot of love for. Films like this or The Jackhammer Massacre (2004) have become obscurities, truthfully, although there is that question, as physical media labels have even minded the SOV releases of the eighties, whether one day when I am older Castro's going to have restored releases of his work as people dug up the straight-to-video/DVD films of the early 2000s as I have done. It would be intriguing if it did.

 

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1) The store still lives. As of May 2020 at least, it unfortunately had to move from its original premise, sad especially as one of the most distinct touches it the wall mural of the store name which you see in the film.