Il maniaco

Hammer Studios will always best be remembered for the horror movies they made but their ventures into other styles were by no means negligible and this neat little mystery is a good example of the thrillers they embarked upon now and again. Kerwin Matthews is Paul Farrell ,an American stranded in a small French village in the Camargue ,where some four years earlier a young girl had been raped and her attacker murdered by her father ,who is languishing in prison for the crime.The girl works at the hotel/bar where Farrell is staying and she falls in love with the personable young American who in turn is attracted to her mother ,Eve ,played by Nadia Gray.Together Farrell and Eve plot to help her husband escape and flee the country so they can be free to pursue a relationship. The plot goes awry and soon they are coping with a body in the trunk of their car and mysterious activity in their garage .The twist ending is neat and unexpected . The acting is a little under powered but the whole thing is a neat little piece of double bill fodder that will keep an audience diverted till the main feature arrives.

Maniac is one of those rare Hammer films, a truly suspenseful horror. Its wonderful to watch, and so much better in widescreen. The unseen story intrigues, where the visual whets the appetite. A truly twisted story of intrigue and unrequited love, with a macabre twist that could only come from the studio that bred Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as the ultimate horror team.

Although not as good as some of their other work, nevertheless, I was kept guessing as the plot became more complex, and enthralled by the scenery and style.

What is more, it is a contemporary film (well, 1963) and set in modern France, with real French actors!

I'm a fan of Jimmy Sangster's work and after reading a few reviews of this movie here I was anxious to see it. Unfortunately I can't give this one a rave review. The best I can say is that it's not a bad movie and it's worth seeing once. After an intriguing opening the movie proceeds at a snail's pace for the longest time. It is excruciatingly slow. Since the actors involved are all as exciting as cardboard you can imagine how much slower that makes an already slow pace feel. Finally business picks up and then we're bombarded with one plot twist after another, not one of which is particularly impressive. The only twist I didn't see coming was one that was out of left field and there were no clues in the movie beforehand so it felt like a cheat. It's like Sangster knew his twists couldn't match Psycho so he decided on quantity instead of quality. If you're a fan of Jimmy Sangster or Hammer, then check it out but keep expectations low.

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.

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.