Madman (1981)
(In French, On Cable TV, April 2020) You have certainly heard this one before: a psycho with a knife killing summer camp counselors. Yeah. No clichés are left behind in writer-director Joe Giannone’s Madman, a slashy slasher from the slashiest period: backwoods legend, isolated camp, couples having sex before being killed and one final girl. Sure, those clichés may not have been clichés at the time (remember, this film was released only one year after Friday the 13th and more or less contemporary to The Burning) but even if that’s true, time has not been kind to Madman. It now feels completely generic at the level you’d see from bargain-basement straight-to-streaming releases, undistinguishable from so many movies of the era from the camp-killing premise to the synth soundtrack, the incessant screaming, the muddy nighttime atmosphere and so on. I suppose that Madman gets a place in the movie hall of fame for being the most utterly average of all slashers from the golden age of slashers, but that’s really not much praise.