O Maníaco das Estradas

This late '80s slasher is perhaps notable in that no actual attacks happen on the freeway ("Hey, a deserted highway is close enough," the director). We start with the genesis of nearly all killers - spying on mom having awkward sex on the kitchen table. It sends poor Arthur into a rage and he stabs them both to death. Amusingly, the mom is killed first in shrieking fashion a room away from her beau and he hears nothing. Flash forward to the present day and Arthur (James Courtney) is housed in a nuthouse. He escapes in grand fashion by bashing a bunch of guards ("No, I'm new here" screams one orderly before getting bashed, as if Freeway Maniac cares about seniority). Cut to poor model Linda (Loren Winters), who has escaped in her own way after she finds her boyfriend cheating on her so she heads into country for a drive. Bad move as her car breaks down and she ends up at a gas station with a perv owner. To make matters worse, Freeway Maniac Arthur has shown up in a stolen car and attacks her. She successfully fights him off and he is re-captured. Her status as serial killer survivor gets her cast in a low budget sci-fi picture (!) and this causes Arthur to escape again and head to the set for his revenge.

Probably the most notable thing about Freeway Maniac is it was co-written by illustrator Gahan Wilson. He also designed the rock aliens for the movie-with-the-movie. He and co-writer/director Paul Winters would reunite for Walking Dead of the West (2013 aka Cowboy Zombies). Winters commits some unfortunate goofs that result in some laughable moments. My personal favorite is the bit where a guy is squashed under a semi truck. It is a great stunt, but the poor fellow is wearing a blue jean jacket while the dummy that gets pulverized is sporting a red flannel shirt. It is the kind of film where people just wander off to get killed (my favorite being the lone set security guard who confronts a chainsaw wielding Arthur and says, "Hey! What are you doing that? That doesn't belong to you. Bring that here right now!"). The sci-fi film setting is interesting, but never used to the fullest extent of satire (I assume that is where they were going with a lecherous producer and barking mad Aussie director). If anything, Freeway Maniac proved to be a great training ground for the hulking Courtney as he would go on to play Michael Myers 30 years later in the new David Gordon Green HALLOWEEN film trilogy. I can only assume this on his resume got him the gig.

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.

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

As a boy, Arthur killed his mum and her boyfriend. As an adult, Arthur (James Courtney) escapes from a mental institution after killing everyone in his path.

Meanwhile, after catching her cheating boyfriend in the act, Linda (Loren Winters) walks out, having no idea what's about to occur. A fight for survival begins when she encounters sinister hillbillies. Said hicks are the least of Linda's problems! Arthur soon arrives to "save" her for himself. Managing to escape his grasp, Linda goes back to her life as an actor.

Arthur will now do anything to relocate her.

THE FREEWAY MANIAC is a high-octane, 1980's hyper-schlock masterwork! Every possible misfire: Visible microphone, heinous "acting", doofus dialogue, clunky set pieces, etc., are here! What should be drawbacks are assets in this criminally inept classic!

The truly sublime idiocy starts when Arthur tracks Linda down on the set of her new sci-fi epic! Pure platinum! Watch this immediately!...

Freeway Maniac (1989)

** (out of 4)

By 1989 the slasher genre was pretty much drying up and dying off as even mainstream fair like Friday THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN were turning up dead numbers at the box office. A few films still snuck onto video and here's one example that I still have fond memories of renting when I was around ten years old. Young Arthur sees his mom getting nailed on the kitchen table so he takes a butcher knife to her and the lover. Years later he (James Courtney) escapes from the nut house and goes on a killing spree that takes him to an actress (Loren Winters) who stops him and send him back to the nut house. Have no fear as he escapes yet again and goes after the actress who is now making a sci-fi movie out in the desert. I remember renting this thing so much as a kid that the video store owner finally gave me the store's only copy because he said I was the only one who ever rented it. It had been at least fifteen or more years since I last watched this thing but I gave it another viewing and I must admit that I respect this film a lot more now and I understand why I loved it so much as a kid. This film certainly belongs in the group of such films as MANIAC (1934), REEFER MADNESS and TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE as all-time disasters that are so incredibly horrid that you can't help but laugh and be entertained by how bad everything you're seeing is. This movie has an awful production value, a horrid story, horrendous acting, bad special effects and everything else is just as worse. Everything in this movie is so bad that you can't help but laugh at it and just take a look at the first escape sequence when our maniac body slams a guy by jumping off a three or four story building. It's also funny that after each murder sequence we see the dead person lying there yet nearly every time they're still breathing. It looks like someone would have caught this at some point. This film was released by Cannon who were well known for delivering trash and this certainly fits that bill. This isn't as good as some of their other horror films like HOSPITAL MASSACRE but fans of the weird are going to love this. The movie is rather tame in terms of violence, blood and nudity but it makes up for that in the sure brilliance of the awfulness of everything. The body count is pretty high as people just seem to come out of no where for our maniac to slaughter. The title comes from the fact that our killer is constantly having to hitchhike or kill people for their vehicles in order to track down the actress. Fans of art house pictures aren't going to find anything entertaining here but if you love bad movies then this here is certainly one of the all-time greats.