Paul Winters

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Anyone still making a slasher film by 1989 clearly wasn’t in it for the artistic merit of it, and so The Freeway Maniac plays as a sub-example of an insipid subgenre. Barely coherent from the get-go, it has a maniac killer going to work on the set of a cheap science-fiction film being shot in the desert. If, like me, you tuned in for the commentary on the movie industry, you will be sorely disappointed: The film seldom gets out of clichés except when it fumbles them, and there’s very little of value in the result. Badly paced, badly acted and badly directed by Paul Winters (who also co-wrote), it’s truly wretched filmmaking that barely holds together as more than a series of shots featuring actors doing their best with the material. It’s clear that no one in the cast or crew knows what they’re doing here, and trying to criticize the film for its male characters constantly harassing its heroine is sort of missing the bigger picture: The Freeway Maniac is next-to-lowest-grade filmmaking (I’m not giving it the lowest grade only because I know there’s even worse out there), and it’s not even fun for being bad. It’s just bad. It doesn’t even take place on a freeway!