Maniac (1963)

Powerful

Fantastic!

best movie i've ever seen.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I found this interesting enough at the start particularly with the bold and brave opening but I was soon hearing that good old postman ringing once if not twice and I rather took my eye off the ball as twist followed twist and the leading man switches from daughter to mother and back again and back again. Location shooting effective except the completely wasted finale scenes and the look generally was okay. Certainly it looked better than it sounded. Even on my shiny new Blu-ray the dubbed and undubbed accents were a strain to follow even with the dialogue being somewhat repetitive. The stuff with the blowtorch is fine and perhaps if there had been some more hard hitting sequences instead of all those loving clinches after only a couple of exchanges things might have been more involving, and believable.

Overlong and Overwritten, this is a Plodding and only Occasionally Interesting Psycho-Drama from Hammer Studios. it is Definitely a Lesser Film than the Other Psychological Pictures they made around this Time.After a Lurid and Effective Beginning things become Tedious with some Unnecessary Scenes and the Movie takes the Longest Time Setting-Up the Suspense and the Twist Filled Ending. The Middle Bit with all that Scenery makes for an Atmosphere of Expanse and is there, it seems, to be nothing more than Languishing on Location.The Ending too Suffers from the Ill-Advised and Badly Used Catacombs that do nothing but Distract from the Necessity of Piecing Together the Novel Conclusion. It all is Rendered Rather Routine the way the Climactic Confrontations are Played Out, as is Probably the Case of the Audience by the Time all is Said.

Maniac is one of the lesser known of Hammer's "psychological thrillers" made in black and white around the 1960's. It's not fiendishly clever enough to be really memorable but it does have a few interesting twists. Basically the plot sees Kerwin Mathews stranded in a small French town where he books into a hotel and starts to feel attracted to the owners sexy young step-daughter. Soon after this, he also starts feeling attracted to the more mature but still sexy step-mother as well! Apart form this love triangle, there is a further problem, in that the missing family member in this scenario is the father, who is currently locked up in an asylum for a violent blow-torch murder committed years ago…now but he wants out, and our hero is about to be roped into aiding in his escape! The film doesn't hang together very well for the beginning hour or so, sadly mainly due to Kerwin Mathews' wooden performance. Seeing him flirt with the daughter and then casually drop her and turn to her mother left me feeling quite disconnected from the plot as I found him a very unlikeable character. However when the plot to spring the insane killer gets going, things get to be more fun, and its after this point that a few nice twists start being revealed. I didn't guess the ending, which I am glad to say.The movie is nicely shot, and makes a lot of use of it's location, with some very nice location filming, especially a very odd ruin/cave which features in the finale. Although why it's set in France at all is of no consequence, they really could have used the exact same plot and just stayed put in England. Anyway it's nice to see these old movies again, and luckily this is out on DVD. It's worth a look.

Handsome nice guy American drifter Paul Farrell (a solid and appealing performance by Kerwin Mathews) finds himself stuck in rural France. He seeks room and board in the home of the alluring Eva Bryant (well played with beguiling sexiness by Nadia Gray) and her sweet, but equally fetching teenage daughter Annette (a charming portrayal by the adorable Lilliane Brousse). Paul agrees to help Eva break her dangerously unstable husband Georges (a suitably menacing turn by Donald Houston) out of an asylum. Sound good and exciting? Well, alas this middling Hammer thriller doesn't amount to much because of Michael Carreras' competent, but pedestrian direction and Jimmy Sangster's strangely bland, talky, and uneventful script. The key problem is that Carreras and Sangster let the meandering narrative plod along at too leisurely a pace and crucially fail to generate much in the way of tension or momentum; it's only in the last third of the picture that the story finally starts cooking to some moderate degree with a nifty double twist surprise ending. On the plus side, Wilkie Cooper's crisp widescreen black and white cinematography offers plenty of breathtaking shots of the lovely French countryside scenery and Stanley Black's swinging jazzy score hits the right-on groovy spot. Moreover, the cast do their best with the blah material: Mathews, Gray, and Brousse are all fine in the lead roles, with sturdy support from George Bastell as the no-nonsense Inspector Etienne and Arnold Diamond as affable local constable Janiello. A strictly passable time-killer.