The Freeway Maniac

This is a good slasher film with decent kills and acting. Definitely worth watching.

We launch our story with a camera-eye recollection, wherein a little boy quietly witnesses a sloppy kitchen-table hump starring his slatternly mother and some random strong-arm she likely picked up on her nightly stroll of the docks. He overreacts slightly to this, and proceeds to slay them both.

Flash to present day...our now-adult(and physically very imposing) killer has spent the passing years in a maladministered sanitarium, and is deemed such a 24-karate psychopath that he is feared by the staff and kept in constant seclusion. Following his predictable escape, he stalks a pretty B-movie starlet on the set of an in-production sci-fi epic, leaving a bloody trail of victims in his wake. Will the imperiled girl be saved by her repentant two-timing husband? Probably.

This really isn't a movie so much as it is a noxious deposit of aesthetic waste by-products disembogued by untalented and delusional film-industry parvenus. With that being said, FREEWAY MANIAC is also a priceless paragon of unpremeditated hilarity, one of the cheapest and most inexpedient integrants to the 80s slasher canon. It has a sizable body-count, with several of the murder scenarios curiously inferring a veneration of the killer and a latent applause for his pernicious crusade. Somehow, this antagonist pep-rallying comes off more silly than sick, suggesting a flippant tongue-in-cheek to the entire project.

Individuals of a schlock-mongering countenance will probably squeal with flurried excitation upon viewing this...no-nonsense types, on the other hand, may assent to earning their Hari-Kari wings before the closing credits roll.

5/10

My review was written in January 1989 after watching the film on Media Home Entertainment video cassette.

Previously known as "Breakdown", this threadbare horror pickup from Cannon boasts a couple of unusual names in the credits but flunks out in execution, accounting for its direct-to-video release.

Co-producer Loren Wines toplines as a model who gets a job starring in a low-budget sci-fi flick, "Astronette". She also has a run-in with an escaped looney (James Courtney), who slashed folks in the pic's prolog and keeps getting loose to wreak havoc on or near the freeway.

Filmmaker Paul Winters includes some heavy-handed spoofing of low-budget genre lensing, while his own work is a substandard example of same. Renowned horror cartoonist Gahan Wilson contributed to the ho-hum script and also fashioned a large clam monster for the film-within-a-film that resembles his magazine drawings. Lead guitarist for The Doors, Robby Krieger, delivers some forgettable songs, and such heavyweights as Robert Bloch and Stan Lee figure in the thank-you credits.

It's all a lost cause with amateurish acting, cheapo technical work and little imagination.

Homicidal maniac Arthur (James Jude Courtney) escapes from the psychiatric hospital where he has been a patient since a child (when he murdered his mother and her lover for recreating the table-top shag scene from The Postman Always Rings Twice) and makes his way to the desert where aspiring model/actress Linda (sexy blonde Loren Winters) is filming her debut movie, the woman having escaped the killer's clutches the last time he broke free (security is not the institution's strong point, but the patients do get a daily smoke break with free cigarettes).

Low budget slasher The Freeway Maniac is knowingly dumb, as evidenced by the schlocky z-grade sci-fi movie that Linda is starring in and the fact that Arthur knows how to drive a rig despite being locked up for almost all of his life; as such, it is quite a lot of brainless fun, Arthur more than living up to his title of maniac, the man killing virtually everyone he meets, howling at the moon, and snacking on the rattlers and ants that he catches in the desert. In addition to the movie's many murders, writer/director Paul Winters features lots of crazy stunt-work, with impressive vehicular action, a full body burn gag, and an explosion, all of which keeps the film trundling along at a decent lick.

Unfortunately, the kills in the film are largely free of gore despite Arthur's weapons including claw-hammer and chainsaw - more blood and guts would definitely have helped to make this one a more memorable bona fide trash classic - and the ending, in which Arthur poses as an actor to get near to Linda, is a total mess, the film closing in an unsatisfactory manner with the maniac still at large. Also, it would be remiss of me if I failed to mention that the very lovely Winters doesn't have a shower scene, although there is a strip routine by one of the supporting actresses.

5.5, rounded up to 6/10 for IMDb.

Wow - this film is fun. Inept in every way - our group just LAUGHED at everything. The acting is horrid - the filmmaking is terrible, there are some decent stunts but the script sounds like it was written by drunk 7th graders trying to write a slasher film. The film wastes no time. A little boy kills his slutty mom and her lover with a giant fake knife. And then of course he's put in the nuthouse, where I guess he had a personal trainer and access to a 24 hour gym and a personal hair stylist. And this escaped maniac justa starts killin'. And one bimbo gets away and he must have her - he must kill her. And of course she is cast in a sci-fi film (where the auditions are held in a school auditorium). And the maniac follows her to the desert where they are making the film and starts picking off people one by one. (too bad he didn't strangle the real director of the film). The scene where he kills a rattlesnake and then "eats" it is hysterical. The quickly made prop looks like a Snake Sub - he is so clearly eating bread that has been covered in green food coloring. Actually Rural Dirt Road Maniac is more accurate.