Gather ’round the campfire, kiddos and Enemaniacs… This week’s B-Movie Enema review is going to tell you the harrowing tale of Madman Marz!

Welcome back to Camp Crappbuttawipe! This week, we go to 1981 for Joe Giannone’s Madman. This one is a very interesting movie. Madman has a split audience. On one hand, this movie sucks. Well, maybe not so much that it sucks as much as it has a dual legacy. Critics, of course, hated the movie, with some calling it unremarkable or inept. But, it also has a pretty serious cult following. I think a lot of it is because the Madman Marz character has a cool name, and the type of look Madman Marz has seems more reasonable for a killer that lives in the woods and will kill people at a camp or hanging out in cabins.

I think there are a few things that allowed Madman to grow that cult following. For one, it is one of only three films that starred Gaylen Ross. Ross came from good ol’ Indianapolis, Indiana, the home base of B-Movie Enema Industries. While Creepshow and Madman have their fans, I don’t think anyone would say that’s where they know Ross from. No, there is only one movie that you can link Gaylen Ross to, and that’s the greatest horror film ever made, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I already mentioned the character of Madman Marz, with his cool name and cool crazy look.

The third thing that might help this movie be a cult classic is the inspiration for this movie – the legend of Cropsey.

I talked about the legend of Cropsey back when I covered The Burning, a movie I really should have saved for this summer, but… eh… I think that’s one of the things that gave me the idea for this whole theme season. The origins of this movie came from Joe Giannone and Gary Sales back in 1979. It was Sales who remembered the urban legend of the Cropsey maniac. He gave the suggestion for this to be the basis of Madman. But problems happened right as the movie was going into production.

So, not only does Cropsey connect to Madman and The Burning, but when Giannone and Sales were raising money for the movie, they learned about Harvey Weinstein’s script for The Burning. That forced them to make on-the-fly changes to avoid being too close to the same movie and potentially getting involved in some sort of legal battle over the movie’s plot. That’s where things got a little mixed up with how the movie works.

While the fundraising and the rewrites came in the summer of 1980. Then, later in the year, the production was underway. However, filming had to halt for a full day because the set learned about the assassination of John Lennon. So they took a day off to honor him. The movie was released in Albuquerque right before Halloween 1981. However, it wasn’t until it had an autumn 1982 release, followed by a very successful drive-in run, that the movie performed fairly well, even if the numbers don’t look that impressive, making $1.3 million, but against a budget of only $350,000.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this concept before, but Madman was seized by police in Hampshire, England, as part of the whole Video Nasty crap. However, this was one time the Video Nasty police kind of got it wrong. I have no doubt that it probably would have been on the list, but somehow it got missed. While it was seized, it was never officially placed on the Video Nasty list.

One last thing to talk about before getting into the movie proper is that this is not your typical horror movie taking place in a camp setting. Every other movie covered here this summer took place during the actual summer, the season most associated with camping. Madman actually takes place right before Thanksgiving. Yeah, this is a fall camp movie. It’s actually stated that Thanksgiving is just a week away, while also stating this is the end of camp season, with senior counselors and campers having one last hurrah. I have actually never heard of a sleepaway camp happening at any other time of the year than summer. You go to “summer camp,” not “right-before-Thanksgiving camp.”

Anyway, the movie begins as you would expect, with campfire tales. We must be at a camp for the X-Men because the title card said this was a camp for “gifted youngsters.” At least, that’s what I’m going to believe. Anyway, head counselor Max, who kind of looks like Wolverine if he got kinda chubby and jolly in his old age, tells the story of a man who used to live in a dilapidated house just beyond those trees. He was a farmer and very mean. He beat his wife, brutally punished his children, drank, and fought often. On a night like tonight, that farmer went completely crazy.

He went into his bedroom with an axe and chopped his sleeping wife into a dozen tiny pieces. Still feeling the bloodlust that drove him to kill, he went into his son’s room and hacked him into pieces. Then, he silently entered his daughter’s room and hacked her up. He went to the local pub, set the axe on the bar, and ordered himself a drink. When the locals discovered what had happened, ten men jumped the farmer, lynched him in a tree, and one of the men used the farmer’s own axe to gash the side of his face as he hung from a tree. They left him there for dead, hanging in the tree. The next morning, when they arrived to cut down his corpse, the farmer was gone. Also missing are the bodies of his wife and children.

None of the four bodies was ever found. On certain nights, when the moon is full, the farmer is still out there looking for more victims to chop up with his axe or hang from a tree. When one of the campers scoffs at the story’s realism, Max explains that there’s a very specific reason he hasn’t said the farmer’s name to help prop up his story. You see, if you say his name above a whisper, he will hear it, and he will come for those who called out to him. His name… Madman Marz.

A little shithead named Ritchie shouts Madman Marz’s name and throws a rock at the farmer’s house, breaking a window. Max calls out to Marz, saying that Ritchie didn’t understand what he was doing. Max hopes his words were enough to save the kid, but he warns everyone to not walk alone in the woods, or Madman Marz will get them. Max tells the campers that he hopes they liked his little story because it was his little way of saying thanks for a great camping season, before the parents come to spend the final weekend before Thanksgiving with the kids, and he takes off for his winter vacation.

If that’s how he says thanks, I hate to see how he expresses anger or disappointment to the children.

From this point on, we’ll largely be following the senior counselors, T.P., Betsy (Gaylen Ross, but credited Alexis Dubin for union purposes because this was not a union production), Stacy, Dave, Ellie, and Bill. T.P. and Betsy are a couple, but they are on shaky ground. T.P. kind of smothers Betsy. He wants to see her tonight, but she’s not so sure after he scared a lot of the girls she looks after with the story he told them before Max told his Madman Marz story. He knows they don’t have much time left together. She says they have all the time in the world after camp is done this weekend. He doesn’t think she’ll want to see him once they get back to the city.

This little fight is quelled by Stacy, who tells T.P. that he needs to back off a bit and let Betsy have a little more freedom to want to come back to him on her terms. Frustrated, T.P. rounds up his boys to return to the cabin. As he does, that little shithead Ritchie sees something, or someone, in the trees. He breaks off from the other boys to check it out, coming across the house that supposedly belongs to Madman Marz. When Ritchie looks around the interior of the house, it’s clear he is not alone.

Back at the camp, in Betsy’s cabin, Stacy has a heart-to-heart about T.P. Stacy warns that he’s possessive, and maybe that’s not good for her. Betsy doesn’t exactly disagree, but there are things about the guy she likes. Betsy realizes that she’s got conflicting opinions about the relationship with T.P. because he always wants to continue their fling in the city, but she is more than happy to let it just be a seasonal fling each year.

T.P. is an interesting character in a lot of ways. He’s the first person we really get any sense of in the movie. When the movie begins, he’s actually performing a song to tell his spooky campfire tale. So, in one regard, he is dedicated to giving the kids a fun camp experience. In other ways, though, he’s possessive and too narrowly focused on what he wants. He never realized Ritchie, who we still haven’t seen the resolution to his fucking around at Madman Marz’s farmhouse, didn’t return to the cabins. He’s obsessed with Betsy as well as this axe that is deeply embedded in a tree stump. It’s so deep that Max offers $100 to anyone who can free it. He will even help the person unstick it. When he and T.P. fail to free the axe, T.P. isn’t willing to give up on winning this challenge. Max even warns him that it’s dangerous to be so focused on winning a prize because it could change him in ways he won’t like.

In a lot of ways, T.P. is something that I appreciate about Madman. This is an extremely uneven movie, but not because of the characters and the dynamic that T.P. and Max share. What’s interesting is that T.P. is set up to be our hero, but there’s a bit of a twist here that also works in this movie’s favor.

But anyway, let’s get back to Ritchie inciting the coming rampage by Madman Marz. Ritchie is still trailing behind. But, as I said, he was not alone in the house. Something came up out of the house through the cellar door. That something was the large, beastly Madman Marz, who had arrived at the camp and killed the drunken cook, “Dippy,” by slashing his throat with his bare hands.

While in the attic of Marz’s farmhouse, he did hear someone returning to the house and saw someone running off into the woods. Marz returned to the house to store Dippy’s body in his cellar. Marz picked up a noose to set his next trap. Ritchie decides maybe he should leave the house and find his way back to the cabins.

At a dinner for the counselors, T.P. apologizes to everyone for the public argument between him and Betsy. This makes both Betsy and Stacy think that maybe he isn’t such a possessive fella. Betsy and T.P. enjoy some sexy private times in the hot tub while Madman Marz stalks the campsite.

In another cabin, the other four counselors are drunk and/or high and lying in front of a fire in the fireplace. Dave goes on this thing about what he might turn into if he let his emotions override his intellect. He’s kind of playing menacingly with his pocket knife while saying he could do terrible things with their bodies and so forth. It comes off as not really being sure what to do with the cast they have, so they do this scene that kind of goes nowhere, but could have also been kind of interesting if it was allowed to breathe a little more. I’ll have more to say about this later because it kind of sums up my conflicted feelings about Madman as a whole.

T.P. learns that Ritchie has not returned to the boys’ cabin. He decides to go out alone to find the kid. When Betsy sees him off after he says that if he can’t find him quickly, he’ll come back to get Dave and Bill to help him, Betsy also thinks she sees a figure lurking around the corner of the cabins. She ultimately decides that it must just be her eyes playing a trick on her. Madman Marz follows T.P., and when T.P. gets a scent of death in the air, Madman Marz puts the noose around his neck and uses it to string him up in the trees to die by hanging.

Admittedly, this is something that kind of works for me. It’s a subversion of the expectation that the girl who is, ostensibly, our final girl, Betsy, has a love interest who is the second person to be killed by our slasher killer. It’s not entirely uncommon for the final girl’s love interest to be killed, but not so soon. It also sets a tone for the movie that no one is safe. T.P. was basically the #2 in terms of ranking. He was Max’s right-hand man and his most reliable counselor. You also expected him to be capable of dealing with a scary monster man.

Betsy goes to Dave and Stacy and asks Dave to go looking for T.P. He told her he’d be back in ten minutes, and that was 45 minutes ago. At first, Dave doesn’t take her very seriously. He says that there’s a kid who gets lost every year, and they always take at least an hour to find. Even after both Dave and Stacy kind of scoff at what Betsy says about seeing a shape lurking around the cabins, it’s clear that Betsy is worried, so Dave puts on his jacket to go looking for T.P. Unfortunately for Dave, Madman Marz follows him.

Doubly unfortunate for Dave, Madman Marz has the supernatural strength to pull that stuck axe out of the tree stump… with one hand.

Dave follows the same path T.P. went, searching for both T.P. and Ritchie. He finds neither person, but discovers T.P.’s flashlight, then his dead body hanging from a tree. Dave pulls out his trusty pocket knife to defend himself, but, yeah… Madman Marz has that axe and supernatural slasher strength.

Stacy decides to take matters into her own hands. With Betsy safely locked in the office, she finds Bill and Ellie and has them report back to the office as well. Stacy is going to take the truck and drive down to the end of the trail to try to find the missing guys. Naturally, the truck won’t start, so she takes a look at the engine while Madman Marz takes a look at her. Madman Marz is just too late getting to the door of the truck because Stacy drives off before he can open the passenger side door and attack her.

Another one of those superpowers that Madman Marz shares with his slasher brethren is teleportation. Remember, Stacy took off in a truck. You know, a motorized vehicle that goes vroom vroom up to multiple dozens of miles per hour? She drove off to find Ritchie, Dave, and T.P., but Madman Marz instantly caught up to her. That spells doom for Stacy and her sexy curly hair. She finds Dave’s headless body and runs off frightened back to the truck… right where Madman Marz will be waiting for her to have to fix the unreliable truck’s starter once again.

Madman Marz decides, “In for one decapitation, in for two,” and as Stacy is digging around in the engine of the truck, he waits for her to back up just slightly so that when he jumps down on the hood, it cuts her head clean off. Bill and Ellie join in on the search in the woods. They find the truck but don’t see Stacy’s body. The two lovers split up, with Bill going toward that night’s campfire site while Ellie heads off in the other direction.

Ellie spots Madman Marz preparing to take Stacy’s body back to his house. She screams, getting the killer’s attention. She runs into Bill, and he wants to investigate what she saw. They get to the truck and find no hulking killer, no Stacy, and they don’t even see that the truck is bloodied. This is enough for Ellie to realize she must have been seein’ things, and they decide to take the truck back to the office. When Bill tries to start the truck’s engine, it sounds like Stacy’s head gets all ground up, so he takes a look inside to see her head. Once he takes that out of the engine, the truck starts up like a dream.

Buuut before Bill can successfully drive away, Madman Marz grabs him by the face and pulls him out through the window. I think we’re supposed to believe that Madman Marz performs the most epic pro wrestling move of all time to kill Bill, but we only hear some bones crack and break. We don’t exactly get to see what killed the poor dude.

Ellie runs off through the woods. Meanwhile, Ritchie sees the dragging body of one of Madman Marz’s victims and decides to return to the killer’s house. He enters the cellar to find all the dead camp counselors, while Madman Marz tears off through the woods to find Ellie to complete his collection of dead young adults.

Ellie successfully gets back to the camp to try to find Betsy. Unfortunately, she’s got an injured leg, and she’s pretty bummed out about Bill being killed by a hulking backwoodsman. She’s not really going to be too much of a match for Madman Marz when he catches up to her. Oh, and also, he’s still got that axe, and flesh tends to be poor competition for a sharp edge.

That leaves us with Betsy. It makes sense. Gaylen Ross fought zombies in the greatest horror film ever made and survived that, at least to the credits, so it makes sense she’s gonna be the last one left. She realizes things are not going well for her and her friends when she sees Ellie through a window. She calls Max, where he’s hanging out and playing poker with his buds, and tells him he needs to get back as soon as possible.

Betsy then arms herself with a shotgun and decides to take the fight to that motherfucker Madman Marz. She looks through the window where she saw Ellie, and Ellie’s last bit of life causes her to pop up and look back out the window to get a shotgun blast to the fucking face from Betsy. This leads to Betsy telling all the kids it’s time to GTFO. She puts them all on the bus and drives off. But she stops suddenly, stalling the bus when Madman Marz runs in front of it. As Madman Marz tries to get inside the bus, Betsy manages to use the shotgun to hit the killer’s hand until he runs off.

She sees him take Ellie’s body away. Betsy instructs the oldest boy to take the bus and drive straight to the police station while she decides to find the other counselors. She arrives with a shotgun in hand at Madman Marz’s home. She enters the home to ultimately come face-to-gruesome-face with Madman Marz himself. Betsy doesn’t exactly prove herself to be a very capable final girl because 1) she fails to shoot him with the shotgun, 2) he easily disarms her by knocking the gun out of her hand, 3) he slashes her face and drags her to the cellar, where he 4) impales her on a meathook. She manages to use a pocket knife to stab him before she dies, and he stumbles around, knocking a candle over and setting the cellar on fire.

Max, hurrying back to camp, finds a catatonic Ritchie on the side of the road who states that Madman Marz is real.

Oh boy… So Madman. This is a complicated one to really sum up my feelings, because it’s going to be hard to convince you why I think this is not especially good. Let’s talk first about what this movie really has going for it in spades. First, there’s a hell of an atmosphere to it. It’s a camp setting, great. Whenever you have people out in the woods, you hear the wind blowing kind of heavily through the leaves, elevating that atmosphere, double great. It does pull the rug out from under you on some expectations, like the final girl’s love interest being an early kill and the final girl, herself, a victim. That’s pretty unexpected and gets some points for it.

The Madman Marz concept is actually excellent. First, it plays on the idea of something fearsome being remembered and given life through that remembrance. Madman Marz is like the personification of fear itself. Your fear of the legend gives him life and makes him your ultimate doom. You know, that whole “the only thing to fear is fear itself” thing. I also appreciate that you don’t see Madman Marz that much at all. He’s largely seen in silhouette and backlit. So it creates this imposing figure. When you do see him, he’s some kind of perfect amalgamation of a creature, a backwoods yokel, and a zombie. He even has the characteristics, like the missing tip of his nose, that Max said he had in his story.

Are the things I mentioned liking above good enough to give this movie a good grade? For some, probably. And I have no beef with that. For me, though? Not really. There are some things you start to spot while watching this movie that leave you wanting more. It’s kind of the perfect “the sum of its parts is better than the whole” movie. Many scenes drag on for a little too long. Ellie hides in a refrigerator from Madman Marz and emerges believing she’s safe, but it’s like another full minute before he springs the trap on her and attacks. It’s too long. We know she’s doomed; we can get to it a little bit faster. I don’t mind the idea of building that tension, but it builds way too long. The end of the movie feels like the production simply ran out of money, which undercuts Betsy a bit. The characters aren’t given enough time to develop, so we can care a bit more when they are picked off by Madman Marz. Again, going back to Betsy, she’s the lead and is kind of in the movie less than several of the supposed supporting cast.

There is something about Madman that, once it ends, I feel unsatisfied, but I can’t exactly say why in an easy and concise way. I just feel unsatisfied. I don’t have any hate for the movie, and I certainly understand why people love this movie. It’s an easy watch, and it’s not a slog at all. I wouldn’t be upset to watch it again with friends during spooky season.

Now, last week, I was highly unsatisfied with Twisted Nightmare. This week, I’m mildly unsatisfied with Madman. But next week, it’s gonna be pretty rough around these parts at Camp Crappabuttawipe. Easily the worst movie of the whole slate is coming our way, and, trust me, I would not be doing it if it wasn’t for a desire to put to rest an entire franchise once and for all. Yeah, we gotta do 2008’s Return to Sleepaway Camp.

Oh god… Madman Marz, come and save me with a hatchet to my fucking face.