Now, the other important fact about Madhouse that we we need to get pinned downright at the start is that it has some other titles, which is important in part because when one hears about a slasher or slasher-like film from the 1970s or early ’80s that has several titles, one should pretty quickly arrive at the question, “oh, it’s Italian, isn’t it?” And in fact Madhouse is Italian, directed by one of the biggish-name producers in ’70s Italian horror, Ovidio G. Assonitis, though it was filmed in English, on-location in the United States. It was even released in Italy with an English-language title, There Was a Little Girl, and oh how I struggled with whether I was going to bother calling it Madhouse at all, because There Was a Little Girl is both a lot more distinctive and also just, like, better. But let’s not bury the lead: we have in front of us an Italian slasher movie, and while one must be wary of making broad sweeping claims, my experience with Italian slashers has been generally positive: they don’t have the creativity and willingness to explore the edges of the form the way that Canadian slashers do, but they’re generally loopier than Hollywood slashers permit themselves to be, much less self-conscious about being seedy trash and therefore more bombastic and fun about it. And I found this to be true of Madhouse even thought it is, to a degree I found surprising, not particularly seedy or trashy at all. Indeed, the film itself seems to think that it’s a good deal trashier than is actually the case, with only a small amount of gore and no sex or nudity at all, which feels downright criminal for an Italian genre film, particularly one from this especially sleazy epoch in the history. Even so, the film has a distinctly leering sensibility in the way it hungrily stages suspense scenes, acting like it supposes itself to be all tawdry and lurid and exploitative in how it’s deploying that killer dog; there’s a thick application of violent atmosphere surrounding all of its setpieces, as well as many films that aren’t setpieces, a kind of tonal hamminess that is so at odds with the prim elegance of how the actual instant of death is often staged that the film ends up somewhat convincing one that it’s more brutish than is actually case. It’s an interesting effect, and I can’t think of very many movies that do the same thing.
It also helps the movie to strike its tone of feeling nastier than it is that the single nastiest thing we ever see happen onscreen occurs right at the start, as the punctuation mark on an enjoyably peculiar and mysterious opening credit sequence: a male voice recites “Rock-a-Bye Baby” with eccentric pauses, almost like ragtime down as spoken word poetry, after which the score picks up with a fully orchestrated version of the same nursery rhyme. And as the music plays, a tiny indistinct image in the middle of the otherwise black frame grows closer and closer, until we can clearly make out that it shows two little girls, one sitting in a rocking chair and the other one pushing the rocking chair. I cannot speak for every viewer, but I was pretty happily discomfited by every aspect of the experience – that jaggedy half-sung recitation as the very first thing the movie asks us to deal with is a nice way to put a viewer immediately off-balance and one the defensive – and was therefore completely primed for the slow-motion inevitability of the horrific, dreamlike violence that happens next: the little girl pushing the chair starts smashing a rock into the face of the other little girl, or anyway a mannequin covered in meat and stage blood that subs in for the second little girl at the first opportune moment for a cut. The horror of it is that it’s simply not at all rushed, and the victim doesn’t put up any kind of fight; it’s just a slow, constant pounding, delivered with intense force, as that poor mannequin grows less and less legible as a human face. It’s not at all clear while watching if it’s a memory, a flashback, a dream, a vision, or some place-setting bit that’s not connected to the rest of the movie at all (it eventually becomes mostly clear that it’s a memory), and it’s just a very nice, rattling way to stumble into a movie before it’s altogether clear what that movie is. And then comes a title card that reads, in context, like a terrifying threat: “November 6. Five days before Julia’s birthday.”
And then we meet Julia (Trish Everly), and at least some things immediately start to become more concrete and less abstract, and I would say “and the story begins”, but one of the other effective peculiarities of Madhouse is that it doesn’t ever quite get around to having a “story”. Basically we just hang out with Julia for a few days while she gets really stressed out due to a pair of connected events that both happen on November 6. First, her uncle, a Catholic priest named James (Dennis Robertson, doing what feels like it has to be a deliberate Roddy McDowall impersonation), has inveighed upon her with smiles and merciless targeted moral guilt to meet with her twin sister Mary (Allison Biggers), who has been living in a mental institution for some years, and is rapidly deteriorating from a terrible skin disease. Julia has been very happy to have Mary out of her life for years and years, ever since the horrible thing that Mary did to her when they were children, which was apparently not ever quite substantiated, given James’s lightly censorious implication that Julia made up a reason to hate her sister and has been letting it consume her ever since. This despite Mary being in a madhouse. Anyway, Julia very reluctantly let her uncle badger her into making a visit, which goes pretty awfully: the disfigured Mary, speaking in a hostile gurgle, immediately starts to whisper threats before physically pouncing on Julia, and it becomes immediately clear that whatever James might think, Julia’s old stories are right on the money. The second very bad thing that happens is that Mary escapes from the institution, and as far as Julia is concerned, that can only mean one thing: her sister is going to hide in her house and menace her for days until trying to kill her on their shared birthday, possibly while leaving a trail of dead bodies of people close to Mary on the way
Spoiler alert: it does in fact mean this thing. And this is where Madhouse gets a little weird and interesting, because nothing really happens. Julia just sits pensively, jumping like a nervous cat at every single random squeak in her dark house – given that these are almost all caused by Mary or her demonic Rottweiler, Julia is perfectly justified in her jumps – while not actually trying to leave. All she does is grumpily inform uncle Father James that Mary is so a dangerous maniac, while confiding in her psychologist boyfriend Sam (Michael MacRae) about all the trauma she still feels from her childhood. Meanwhile, Mary kills several Julia-adjacent people, sometimes with the dog, sometimes with her own hands and a knife: Julia’s apartment handyman Mr. Kimura (Jerry Fujikawa), Julia’s friend Helen (Morgan Hart), who was staying over for emotional support, Julia’s cat, Julia’s favorite student at the school for the deaf where she works, a little boy named Sacha (Richard Baker). Other than Sacha, all of the deaths manage to go sufficiently unnoticed that Julia has no particular cause to escalate from a dull throb of wariness to a bright flush of panic, so she just lingers in that same state of muted paranoia for the whole duration of the film.
On paper, and even somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain while I was actually in the midst of watching it, this sounds quite dull and aimless; just a meandering slow-burn mood piece without any of the exploitation elements that make slasher films trashy fun. Actually watching it is quite a different thing altogether, to my surprise: there are many reasons I love Italian horror, but “slow-burn mood piece” isn’t really the reason at all. Nor, for that matter, is “notably free of exploitation elements”. So kudos to Assonitis for having such a deft control of tone and rhythm to make this live up to such a challenge: not a bad achievement for the filmmaker probably best known to American cinephiles as the man responsible for the way that James Cameron’s ostensible directorial debut, Piranha II: The Spawning, turned out, and second-best known for directing 1977’s Tentacles, among the most notorious of all Jaws knock-offs. Indeed, Madhouse is so good at things I had not the slightest expectations for to be good in a film that could be described by any part of “a gore-light Italian slasher pretending to be an American movie” that it has convinced me that I need to revisit Tentacles. This is not just a good movie, it’s good in ways that specifically point back to back to a firm directorial hand with a keen sense of how this will all come together. It can be as simple as the way Everly’s lead performance is situated within the rest of the ensemble: whether because she wasn’t a particularly gifted actress (this was her only theatrical feature), requiring the film to compensate for her, or because Assonitis deliberately guided her towards something more neutral and quiet, she makes Julia a pretty empty protagonist, very little more than a pensive mood and a tendency to stare at the world nervously. In concert with the film’s general lack of narrative drive, that should be deadly, but instead it makes the film much more about the sensations pinging their way at Julia, making her a receptacle for an unending stream of looming, threatening stimuli. And while Everly is extremely bland, on purpose or not, the rest of the ensemble is sometimes very garish and hammy indeed, especially Robertson and Edith Ivey, playing Julia’s absurdly caricatured Southern landlady Amantha, an escapee from a parody of Tennessee Williams setting up shop in a slasher movie for no obvious reason. And those two characters get a lot of screen time: the scene where Mary stalks and kills Amantha is by far the longest protracted sequence in the whole movie, like practically a whole damn reel to itself, so we get to just marinate in Ivery’s nutsy swanning about as she blasts the paint of the sets with her country-fried accent.
Basically, the whole movie feels loopy: loopy because of the actors, because of the incredible heavy-handedness of the tension in the camerawork and music despite there being nothing onscreen suggesting we should be tense at all, because the Rottweiler is made up to look so befouled like a hellhound with the blood of a thousand martyrs caked on its angry muzzle. Despite none of the content being particularly outrageous, the film feels extremely intense throughout. Even its grace notes are intense: the way that one death is staged as a silhouette is both somewhat restrained but also really stylish and in-your-face about its restraint; elsewhere, the film deals with Sacha’s death by making an enormous show of not showing it, first by really pumping the off-screen dog growls, and then elliptically cutting to the same location some hours later as the boy’s body is being delicately placed in an ambulance, disorienting and re-orienting the viewer in the way that feels like it’s screaming at us about how kind it was to spare us such a horrific image. The whole movie feels overcranked like that, and swirling around Everly’s meek Julia, it feels like the movie itself is attacking her. And so her constant throb of paranoia feels justified less by the plot, than by the formal execution of the movie that seems hellbent on amplifying that paranoia. It’s really quite a nifty way to approach an otherwise undistinguished slasher movie scenario, making it a psychological thriller as much as a horror movie, and I’m thoroughly impressed that Assonitis and his crew took the care to make what looks like a purely mercenary project turn out to be so much more evocative and interesting than that.
Body count: 7, as well as one cat and one dog, but the most effective and horrifying of act of simulated violence is the opening scene that doesn’t result in a dead body.
Nastiness Rating: 3/5, a little Nasty. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that it made the DPP’s hit list mainly because at one point a deaf little boy is killed by a dog, but it happens so elliptically and quietly that I cannot imagine taking the slightest offense unless you are so monomaniacally opposed to children dying in movies that you probably shouldn’t have access to them. On the other hand, the Rottweiler’s eventual demise is actually pretty gross, and I believe the DPP was also very much on the hunt for harm to animals being shown in graphic detail, and if that was the secondary reason, they have a point.
*Nor any of the many other films by that title, but “the Video Nasty, the Vincent Price horror comedy, the Kirstie Alley slapstick comedy, or the ghost story with Natasha Lyonne” covers, I would imagine, close to 100% of the options people have in mind when they namedrop a film called Madhouse without further context.
