Madman 4K 1981 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Summer camp for teenagers. The counselors and children sit around a campfire and, as usual, tell scary stories. Max is the last one to speak. He tells them that not far from the camp, beyond the woods, there once lived an ordinary farmer who drank a lot, fought in the local bar, and beat his children and wife. One day he went completely "crazy," took an axe and chopped up his whole family, and then disappeared forever. Max adds that if you say the farmer's name loudly, "Mad Marz," he will appear out of the woods. One counselor jokingly shouts Marz's name, after which everyone retreats to their rooms to prepare for bed.

According to the legend, a maniac shows up at camp and begins killing teenagers one by one...

Review 4K Movie

"Madman, the 1982 slasher, is one of the last successful first-wave slashers. The film is generally based on Friday the 13th (1980), but, unlike those imitators who steal plot lines, concepts and even murder sequences from Friday the 13th (see the slasher-series Sleeping Camp), Mad Men doesn't take so much: only a good basic framework. The film is set, as in "Friday the 13th," at a children's camp on the shores of a body of water. Except that, unlike Friday the 13th, the body of water doesn't play any role in the plot of Mad Men. Here all the events mostly take place in the dark woods surrounding the camp on all sides. Late night is taken as the time of day, and all the action of the movie takes place at that time of day. That is, the film's plot manages to end in one night, one not the best night for the camp counselors.

The atmosphere of the film is sustained, "Madman" intrigues the viewer and keeps the tension throughout the film. The murders in "Madman" are brutal, but mostly of the same type-almost all are done with an axe. Even the modern copycat of Mad Men, The Axe (2006), despite its many flaws, did not suffer from a lack of variety in its murders. And that is the key to the success of a slasher: a variety of murders. The homogeneous murders evoke boredom and spoil the general impression of watching a slasher, if the viewer is a real slasheromaniac who understands the genre.

On the subject of plot. In this respect, it seems as if there are no problems. There are, of course, a couple of uncomfortable questions to the screenwriters about the individual platitudes that plague the plot, but it is not so essential. In general the plot is intriguing and characters are well-described, that makes the audience feel anxious for them. It is true that in certain situations the counselors look "wooden", a kind of "stiffness" that happens to them just before their death. But that's a problem that every slasher suffers from, and it's not considered bad form (among slasher romantics). If all slasher heroes were resourceful and didn't lose their heads when faced with a maniac, then slashers would simply never have murders, and no one would be interested in watching them.

Verdict. Madman is one of the last successful first wave slashers. Its basis was carefully copied from the more successful "Friday the 13th," but the screenwriters, thankfully, went no further than the basics and created their own special slasher with the action mostly taking place in the dark woods. The blood in "Mad Men" doesn't flow like in its copycat slasher "Axe", and the murders are not very diverse. But, nevertheless, I recommend to watch this slasher for true lovers of the genre, at least just to get acquainted with it, as a kind of excursion into the history of the slasher genre.