Freeway Maniac (1989)
** (out of 4)
By 1989 the slasher genre was pretty much drying up and dying off as even mainstream fair like Friday THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN were turning up dead numbers at the box office. A few films still snuck onto video and here's one example that I still have fond memories of renting when I was around ten years old. Young Arthur sees his mom getting nailed on the kitchen table so he takes a butcher knife to her and the lover. Years later he (James Courtney) escapes from the nut house and goes on a killing spree that takes him to an actress (Loren Winters) who stops him and send him back to the nut house. Have no fear as he escapes yet again and goes after the actress who is now making a sci-fi movie out in the desert. I remember renting this thing so much as a kid that the video store owner finally gave me the store's only copy because he said I was the only one who ever rented it. It had been at least fifteen or more years since I last watched this thing but I gave it another viewing and I must admit that I respect this film a lot more now and I understand why I loved it so much as a kid. This film certainly belongs in the group of such films as MANIAC (1934), REEFER MADNESS and TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE as all-time disasters that are so incredibly horrid that you can't help but laugh and be entertained by how bad everything you're seeing is. This movie has an awful production value, a horrid story, horrendous acting, bad special effects and everything else is just as worse. Everything in this movie is so bad that you can't help but laugh at it and just take a look at the first escape sequence when our maniac body slams a guy by jumping off a three or four story building. It's also funny that after each murder sequence we see the dead person lying there yet nearly every time they're still breathing. It looks like someone would have caught this at some point. This film was released by Cannon who were well known for delivering trash and this certainly fits that bill. This isn't as good as some of their other horror films like HOSPITAL MASSACRE but fans of the weird are going to love this. The movie is rather tame in terms of violence, blood and nudity but it makes up for that in the sure brilliance of the awfulness of everything. The body count is pretty high as people just seem to come out of no where for our maniac to slaughter. The title comes from the fact that our killer is constantly having to hitchhike or kill people for their vehicles in order to track down the actress. Fans of art house pictures aren't going to find anything entertaining here but if you love bad movies then this here is certainly one of the all-time greats.
