tildagravette

If you like leftovers, maybe Madman will be your thing. It tries to do what The Burning and the first two Friday the 13th movies did, but the execution feels lacking and the characters are less compelling even if it's a technically well-made film with some style and nice special effects.

It's your average campfire story come to life involving a deformed psychopath who went insane, murdered his family, and lives on a legend in the woods surrounding a summer camp until one of the kids wakes him up and allows his murderous rampage to resume.

Horror fans might recognize Dawn of the Dead's Gaylen Ross (under a phony name) as one of the counselors and a lot of the photography is nice and slick, but there's a heart that's missing.

A few inventive death scenes and spirited performances save Graduation Day from total disappointment. It gets a lot of the slasher formula right from the tragic prologue, to the neverending list of potential suspects, to the gory murders,to the final girl chase sequence in the last act, but it struggles with everything in between.

It all starts when Laura, a high school track star, dies tragically from a heart issue during a competition. Very soon after, the members of her team begin to die in a variety of creative ways as graduation day looms closer.

It spends a little bit too much time with some characters and too little on some of the more interesting ones. We learn very little about Laura's sister who appears to be the lead of the film and she disappears for large chunks of the run time, as she takes her time getting to the bottom of her sister's death. The film makes time for suspicious janitors, perverted music teachers, and sitcom-y principal/secretary comedy, but it doesn't afford the lead character much to work with.

Rod Steiger and Yvonne DeCarlo are two religious nutjobs who, along with their three middle-aged children who still dress and act like 8 year olds, terrorize a crashed plane full of twenty-somethings who stop by their house in the woods.

It's by the numbers at times and hysterically wild at other times with very strong performances. Steiger and De Carlo go for broke and appear to be having a good time playing such nasty and misguided characters. It's far from a gore fest, so those expecting a traditional slasher might want to go elsewhere, but the last act has got to be one of the least traditional and most surprising of a film of this kind. Once it reaches a certain point, you really have no idea where it's going next.