Madness

I ordered this film last month from the us because i need to have every backwoods horror film in my video store here in Vancouver ( yes there is still a video store left in this city ). It's a guilty pleasure for me to engage and embrace a new backwoods film regardless if it is horrible. Madness had all the ingredients to be one of the worst backwood horror films of all time ie.. low shoe string budget, horrible acting, Swedish film pretending to be an American film with Swedish actors speaking with a British accent etc etc but instead i watched in awe and suspense one of the best backwoods horror films of the last decade or so. First of all we have an opening that will jade the most jaded horror fanatics. Wow, the start would give Carver's ball crunching scene a run for its money ( well maybe not ).After this we are introduced to the four leads which end of being stranded in the middle of nowhere and than the mayhem ensues and never lets go. The film has a longer than usual running time for films of this ilk but that didn't matter at all. The two main antagonists speak only in Swedish and they are creepy as hell especially the one with the screwed up eye. The bandannas on these two freaks of nature only added to their macabre decor. What makes our protagonists so likable in this film is that they seem to go through just as much grisly chaos ala ash ( Bruce Campbell ) from the first two evil dead flicks. Even though the budget of this film might remind you of some other basement fodder flicks like machined and reborn, this one on the other hand wears its low budget like a decayed badge of honor.... Fantastic stuff and not for the squeamish....

What can I say - I'm a fan of this sort of horror-gore-torture films, and this was right up my alley. It played out a lot like "Carver", another excellent horror movie. There were some original methods used to kill people in the film, and the bad guys were especially gruesome. I guess I'm in the minority when I say I loved this movie, but it just goes to show that there isn't any one style of movie that is right or wrong. If you like the horror-gore genre, I definitely recommend you check this out. If you are more concerned with quality acting, then don't (although I will say that I was so focused on the action that I didn't notice anything wrong with the acting, although the foreign accent did seem a bit odd.)

Madness plays like a student-made homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Hills Have Eyes etc. The acting is so terrible it is unintentionally hilarious, as I doubt any of the cast have any acting skill / experience whatsoever. The plot is basically non-existent and much of the characters actions make no sense at all. The strange thing is that it features Swedish actors playing American characters, who are travelling across backwoods USA, but it is actually filmed on location in Sweden. And the 'bad guys' talk in Swedish whilst the 'good guys' all talk in English with heavy Swedish accents. Rather bizarre.

The violence is pretty brutal and senseless, with some rather effective gore effects (given the shoestring budget), although the violence becomes rather stale, generic and uncreative, with no stand-out set-pieces.

The film does have a kind of lo-fi charm, and probably would have been more entertaining had the film-makers acknowledged this by making the movie more 'tongue-in-cheek' rather than the stark and serious tone they have tried to set. The one redeeming factor is that the whole thing (including writing / directing / shooting / editing / effects) was all carried out by a team of three guys, quite an admirable effort.

Also, it's rather hard to hate on a movie that keeps it's two female lead characters in cheerleader outfits the whole time.

I've searched for it everywhere buh oops...no luck.