Maniacal (2003)

Posted on May 14, 2003 under Horror |

Directed by Joe Castro
Written by Eric Spudic
Starring
- Brannon Gould
- Perrine Moore
- Lee Webb
- Carl Darchuck
- Heather Ashley

Unstoppable…
Relentless…
Merciless…
The driving desire for indie filmmakers to play in the most worked-over genre in film: the slasher flick.

I mean, folks, it’s been done. The straight-up slasher movie has been played out, worn out, burned out, and left for dead. Predictably, though, just like the slasher himself, the genre refuses to completely die, making an eternal nuisance of itself as it keeps popping back up for just one last shock. This resurrection usually happens at the hands (and insistence) of the filmmakers, not the audience at large. We don’t want to see ‘em. But they keep making ‘em.

What this means, naturally, is that the filmmakers make the movie they want to make. Usually, that’s a laudable aim in the arts. But slasher films are also some the most formulaic, incestuously-plotted movies on the landscape, and for the most part, those filmmakers who want to make slasher films these days aren’t doing it because they have some stunning new take or spin on the formula; they simply wish they had made the original wave of slasher flicks, and show it by cobbling together a pastiche of older, better movies.

“Listen, I’ll trade you for the Phillips screwdriver, okay?”

Which brings us to Maniacal, seventy-something minutes of videotape which isn’t a feature film so much as a feature-length confession that somebody saw too damned many slasher movies at an impressionable age. At best, it’s like your child’s crude attempts to draw like their favorite comic book artist. At worst, it’s the same — but it’s somebody else’s kid.

In a quiet California suburb resides a fairly nuclear family. The family patriarch, Garrett Gill (Carl Darchuck), is a brusque drunk who gets his jollies criticizing his mentally slow and follicly challenged nineteen-year-old son Gilbert (Lee Webb). Standing at the periphery of this are the enabling stepmom (Deborah Huber), and Gilbert’s younger sister Janet (Perrine Moore). One evening, after some fairly severe castigation from Dad, Gilbert finally hits the limit after some good-natured teasing from Janet (”Gilbert’s got a girlfriend!”), and finds himself a hammer in the garage. Dad’s already halfway hammered (hah!), so he makes an easy target. And Mom… well, she seems to make a habit of vaguely inappropriate shows of affection for Gilbert, so she gets good and close for Gilbert to beat her head (or a plastic approximation thereof) to a bloody pulp. He then runs out into the street, where Officer Spiegel (composer Michael Nyman) arrests him. Roll opening credits.

Mom forgot to put her face on. (Yeah, I know, I’ve used that line before. Sue me.)

Cut to three years later. Or one year. (The titles say one thing, the dialogue says another. But I’m inclined to believe the latter, since Janet’s supposed to be seventeen by this point, and there ain’t no way I could believe that that actress was supposed to be playing a fourteen-year-old in the pre-credits scenes.) Gilbert’s had the good luck to be placed in the most sloppily-run mental institution in the great state of California, Hitchberg Sanitarium. The halls are full of Bedlam crazies, the staff looks like it consists of two disinterested doctors and two undertrained orderlies, and nobody seems to believe in the idea of locks for the criminally insane.

Today, though, is a special day, because mostly-catatonic Gilbert is going home. For a little while, anyway; Dad managed to survive his beating, and it looks like he’s turned out much less assholesque for the experience. (Would that a good beating with sturdy hardware consistently had that effect on people, because I tell you, if I had a hammer, I would hammer in the morning…) Gilbert’s supposed to come home for the day to spend a little bit of time with Dad and Janet. This, mind you, after he’s killed someone, then spent the ensuing time mostly locked in a rubber room, catatonic (and having visions of his maggoty dead stepmother entreating him for a big ol’ wet kiss). But then again, these are people who think that it’s a good idea for a homicidal maniac to eat unsupervised with a nice pointy metal fork. Gosh, a breakout on the very day he was supposed to go home anyway — what were the odds?

Gilbert manages to leave a trail of bodies (two orderlies and the ward nymphomaniac) as he waltzes out the side door, seconds before Dad waltzes in the front door to pick him up. I guess Dad was trying to fit in with the general security scheme around Hitchberg, because he left his keys in his pickup. Gilbert’s on his way home!

Can you hear Sigmund Freud smirk all the way from the Other Side?

So, what’s up with Janet, our designated Final Girl? Well, she walks to school with her somewhat sluttier girlfriends, D.J. (Heather Ashley) and Brooke (Carol Rose Carver). they meet D.J.’s and Brooke’s boyfriends, plus the new stud in town, Lance (Brannon Gould), who takes an immediate shine to Janet. Everybody decides to skip school, so Dad can’t reach Janet at school with the news that her killer brother is on the loose. And then the timescheme of the day becomes very fluid, as apparently it takes the entire day for:

Gilbert to make it home, put a knife in the family portrait, and unpack some of his dollpart-&-nails “sculptures”;
The guys to visit Saturday Matinee, a horror movie-themed video and novelty store, to pick up some Halloween masks;
The girls to hear that Gilbert escaped from the sanitarium, but to continue with their plans to skip school and get ready for a slumber party at D.J.’s house;
Dad to get home, discover the family photo, and call the sheriff (who just happens to be Officer Spiegel, D.J.’s father, and the only cop in town);
The girls to also head over to Saturday Matinee, this time to buy some previously-viewed horror movies for their slumber party that night (isn’t that more of a “renting” occasion, or am I the last diehard renter left in America?);
Dad to consult with Officer Spiegel and bemoan the fact that he doesn’t know where she is;
Gilbert to show up himself at Saturday Matinee (Man! Who says advertising doesn’t work?), steal a clown mask, and kill the storeowner (David Scalzetto);
A band of neighborhood kids to come up with their own “Gilbert Gill’s come back to kill!” rhyme to terrorize each other with.

By this time, it’s nightfall, and the three boys decide to show up at the slumber party, where the girls have apparently been watching slasher flicks straight since two in the afternoon. (Janet: “Should we be watching all these slasher films with my brother on the loose?”) The genders get down to sex (except for the virginal Janet and the slightly-more-gentlemanly Lance), proving that none of them had the sense to learn from any of the slasher movies they watched. (What, like they couldn’t TELL they were in a slasher movie?) Which means that they’re all widely separated in the bedrooms when Gilbert shows up and starts carving away.

“So — how many times did YOU repeat eleventh grade?”

Boy, it’s a good thing that Sheriff Spiegel finally figures out that Gilbert’s attacking the slumber party at his very own house — and it’s good that Dad is still tagging along, since there don’t seem to be any other officers he can call for backup.

I try to adhere to a policy (a guideline, really) of not blaming a writer for what I see on screen. After all, I don’t know what he was commanded to write, or what got changed after he wrote it. So I’ll just say that the story as it made it to the screen looks like it was put together by someone whose entire understanding of mental health treatment — and human nature in general — was derived from dimly remembered films from the slasher heydays (which, I need not tell you, were scarcely clinically accurate, or dramatically sound). Every character and plot twist is for the storytellers’ convenience. Why does Janet help plan a slumber party on the night that she’s supposed to spend with her brother, whom she hasn’t seen in a year? Why would the intrepid Sheriff Spiegel, seen in the company of a couple of police personnel earlier at the scene of the video store killing, never once think to call in any more officers? Hell, why does a sanitarium caring for the murderously insane have weaker security than my five-year-old’s preschool? Just cuz.

Worse than objective stupidity, though, is wasted opportunity. Think about it: a son murders his stepmother (with whom there’s some latent sexual tension) and attempts the same with his father. A year later, the son is released into the father’s custody for a day trip. Who will be attempting to exact revenge on whom? There’s a good movie to be had there, but Maniacal stays as far away from it as possible, and instead gives us a collection of scenes that couldn’t cause more deja vu if it were the conscious intent. (All of this becomes puzzling as well as annoying when you realize that director Joe Castro also gave us last year’s Terror Toons, which was an inspired twist on the “horny kids being picked off” cliche — in other words, that movie succeeds in all the ways that this one fails.)

Clowns. Ignore ‘em, and usually they’ll go away.

I know, I know. Since Scream, winking, knowledgeable slasher flicks are all the rage. And there are plenty of moments in which the filmmakers throw proof of their slasher street cred at the audience. (The best of these: “Where are your horror movies for sale?” “Last aisle on the left.”) But no matter how well or poorly you feel Scream did in exploiting the conventions of horror films for irony’s sake, Maniacal is lightyears behind it. Rather than an attempt at an intelligent wink to horror fans, it’s a Valentine to the slasher flicks of yesteryear, an imitation whose only value is in the sincerity of its intent to flatter (as opposed to its end results).