Maniac

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.

When the American painter Jeff Farrell (Kerwin Mathews) dumps his girlfriend in Camarga, France, he meets the eighteen year-old waitress Annette Beynat (Liliane Brousse) in a bar and decides to stay in the town on vacation at a bed and breakfast owned by her stepmother Eve Beynat (Nadia Gray). Jeff feels a great attraction for Annette but soon he is seduced by Eve and has a love affair with her. He learns that three years ago Annette was raped by a man called Janiello (Arnold Diamond) and her father Henri (Donald Houston), who is locked in an asylum, killed the man using an acetylene torch. After visiting Henri, Eve tells to Jeff that he accepts to let her go with him provided they help him to escape from the asylum driving a runaway car to the harbor. Jeff decides to help Henri but soon he is visited by Inspector Etienne (George Pastell) and discovers dark secrets.

"Maniac" is a combination of film-noir with psychological thriller by Hammer having a triangle of love to complete the big picture. The sexual tension between Henri, Annette and Eve is constant and the relationship of Henri with the two women is unusual and strange. The plot has many twists and is engaging. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Maniac"

Maniac is directed by Michael Carreras and written by Jimmy Sangster. It stars Kerwin Matthews, Nadia Gray, Lillian Brouse, Donald Houston and George Pastell. Music is by Stanley Black and cinematography by Wilkie Cooper.

Vacationing in the Carmarque region of France, American artist Jeff Farrell (Matthews) gets more than he bargain for when he becomes romantic interest for mother and daughter Eve (Gray) and Annette (Brousse) Beymat...

Out of Hammer Film Productions, Maniac is one of a number of psychopath themed thrillers that followed in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Filmed in black and white on ___location in Caramarque, the film opens with a tremendous whack as young Annette Beynat is abducted on her way home from school and raped (off camera) by the side of the road. This crime is witnessed by a local man who fetches Annette's father who promptly captures the rapist and gets medieval on his ass with a acetylene torch (again off camera). It's quite an opening, but then the film settles into a leisurely pace for the next hour as Carreras and Sangster build their story in preparation for a big finale. Then things get tricky, and I'm not just talking about for handsome Jeff Farrell...

Realising they have gone for a "major" slow build and are desperate to add some added bite into what was becoming a bona fide sub-genre of thrillers, the makers cram so much into such a short space of time it collapses under its own weight. We know there's going to be a twist, the whole story is geared towards this fact, but they instead keep twisting, and twisting until it no longer becomes interesting. While the actual finale is something of a damp squib. There's a big problem with the ___location as well, Carreras' flat direction is unable to draw anything substantially atmospheric from the locale. True, a chase and reveal at the climax gets a splendid back drop in which to unfold, but it's a rare moment of inspiration and you are kind of taken out of because of piecing together the threads and implausibilities.

It's a very frustrating film, one where the usually great Sangster over reaches himself and Carreras doesn't come up to the standard of Terence Fisher or Freddie Francis. It holds the interest, is decently performed, has good production value and is fleetingly attention grabbing, but this should have been much much better. Both visually and with plot machinations. 6/10

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.

If Hammer movies had been released the same way as vinyl records "Maniac" would be a typical B-side effort; meaning it's an extremely low-keyed, low-budgeted and nearly forgotten little black-and-white thriller that understandably stood in the shadows of the studios' contemporary Grand-Guignol horror productions, like the Frankenstein cycle starring Peter Cushing and the Dracula series featuring Christopher Lee. There are quite a bit of hidden treasures to discover amongst Hammer's modest thriller productions of the 1960's ("Scream of Fear", "Hysteria" …), but sadly "Maniac" isn't the studios' – or writer Jimmy Sangster's – finest piece of work. The film nevertheless opens very promisingly and provides a fairly large number of slick and unpredictable plot twists during the grand finale, but everything in between is dull and incredibly uninteresting. But what a great opening! In the usually quiet and peaceful French Camargue, a father catches the rapist of his 15-year-old daughter in the act and promptly extracts his bloody vengeance with a blowtorch! Hell yes! Four years later, the man – Georges - resides in a mental asylum while his gorgeous wife and astonishing daughter both fall in love with the traveling American painter Jeff Farrell. In return for his wife, Jeff agrees to help Georges escape from the institution and out of the country. But the plan goes horribly wrong and the blowtorch will have to be used some more! The basic plot is ingenious and suspenseful enough, but the 90% of the film revolves on the dire and slowly unfolding triangular relationship between the American, the mother and the daughter. The "maniac" in question also doesn't really deserve to be referred to as a maniac, as he doesn't come across as very menacing and makes a couple of really dumb moves during the climax. Still, the killer's choice of weapon is original and Michael Carreras occasionally generates a tense and unsettling atmosphere. "Maniac" is reasonably interesting material for Hammer fanatics, but not exactly recommended viewing.