Starring Kerwin Mathews, Nadia Gray, Liliane Brousse and Donald Houston
Written by Jimmy Sangster and directed by Michael Carreras
Aside from making bold and colorful monster movies, Hammer also knocked out a bunch of black and white psychological thrillers in the 60s, probably inspired by Hitchcock's output around the same time, notably PSYCHO.
So here comes MANIAC! Although the Hitchcock inspiration is clear here I think the movie owes just as much to the world of noir, specifically the works of James M. Cain like THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE where a femme fatale gets under the skin of a morally gray drifter and together they enter into a life of crime.
That's exactly what happens here -- a drifter inserts himself into the life of an older woman in southern France who also happens to have an attractive younger daughter. Turns out, years before, the daughter was raped, and in revenge, her father, now in an insane asylum, took a blow torch to the rapist, killing him. The drifter gets roped into helping an escape attempt for the revenge killer in an effort to get in good with girls, but not all is as it seems.
At a glance you might get fooled into thinking this is a French new wave film. The cinematography is that stark black and white and the framing and shot composition is more artistic than you'd expect from what might otherwise amount to a pulp story.
Watching the movie unfold, two things made me wonder if Quentin Tarantino's a fan. First, the scene early on in which the father attacks the rapist with a blow torch. Reminds me of Marcellus Wallace specifically saying he's going to get medieval on a rapist, with a blow torch. Then, later, we pause the action long enough for our main characters to do the twist in the middle of a busy restaurant while the other customers look on. The dance scene in BANDE A PART (the film Tarantino named his production company after) has been cited as Tarantino's influence in the past, and that's definitely a classier and more exotic choice, but I feel like MANIAC is the real culprit here, and is more Tarantino's speed, anyway -- exploitation.
So next time we hang out I'll ask him. Yeah, right.
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