Wednesday 2 January 2013

The Pointless of Cinema: The Invisible Maniac (1990)

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Dir. Adam Rifkin
USA
Film #2 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema Series

From http://img11.nnm.ru/3/a/2/3/a/4ed1077af2734e82ed200f36cad.jpg

I was born in 1989. Approaching this - just punting itself into the nineties with a soundtrack that evokes to me a Casio keyboard soundboard, but with traces of the eighties all over it - I am in alien territory. These early nineties lowest-of-the-low budget horror films, usually full of nudity, are strange also-rans in cult cinema for me, in a peculiar decade in terms of fashion, colour palette and entertainment, yet not fully part of it, an era where all culture, like an Ouroboros, ate its own tail, from Quentin Tarantino to Double Dragon (1994). There are many of these films still to see, but the ones I have seen, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, are too weird to live, and too boring to die. The Invisible Maniac is another of these prototypes that was never meant for mass consumption and fails miserably. Mentally distorted by his mother’s words into hating women, while lusting after them, Kevin Dornwinkle (Noel Peters) grows up to be a scientist but has a violent breakdown at a scientists’ convention when his invisibility formula fails to work. Escaping from a mental asylum, Dornwinkle hides himself as a replacement physics teacher at a summer school while improving on the mistakes of his formula. Unfortunately his libido and mental sanity is distorted, beyond a pervert to a lust obsessed fiend, and the students he teaches are pushing him over the edge, making his success with the modified invisibility serum even more useful to him than to merely become the greatest scientist in existence.


From http://www.imcdb.org/i415164.jpg

In a year I finally started viewing Troma films, it’s amazing this wasn’t released by that company, the bright coloured, sparse set located goofiness comparable to those films. Unfortunately, like most of Troma’s films I’ve seen, The Invisible Maniac is also lackadaisical. Immediately against the film’s favour, despite having female nudity in-between for the male (or female) viewer, is that its only after fifty minutes into its eight six minute running time that it starts its main concept proper after far too long a time. There is such thing as drawing out a film to add to the anticipation or dread of the events about to happen, which I will champion when it works perfectly, but it’s shocking to realise fifty minutes went past so quickly but that nothing of worth actually took place in that time. The film starts properly after that time – death after death taking place, people fighting invisible foes, nudity, goofy silliness – but even after it picks up the pace, the film is already damned by how toe curling it is. It is not helped that the students themselves, including one jock that looks like he should be in the teacher’s staff room rather than behind a classroom desk, are completely obnoxious and insufferable. They are callous, mean spirited idiots, and despite being a red hot blooded heterosexual, the titillation is worthless for me because of the film’s tackiness and that, in my personal taste, the actresses playing the students were not attractive to me at all. The female headmistress of the school Mrs. Cello (Stephanie Blake), who promises higher grades to male students, and to be a pig (or admirer of the female form) has lovely soft, big curvaceous breasts, is far more attractive and interesting than the bland Barbie doll, schoolgirl archetypes and looks portrayed in the female students, even if some of her line delivery is so wooden it causes the film’s reality to stop and break in half. Physical attractiveness depends on individual thought, but a common thread of these early nineties B-movies is a limited view on titillation, in the casting of the actresses willing to be naked and the showing of this unnecessary naked flesh, that is exceptionally bland for me looking back at this era, defeating the key enticement to see this film, or even make it, in the first place.

From http://www.also-known-as.net/films/the_invisible_maniac/the_invisible_maniac5.jpg

Pretty much the vast amount of the film is disinteresting. There is a brief moment when two of the students, realising that Kevin Dornwinkle and Mrs. Cello’s physical additions are upstaging them all completely, commit to an utterly ridiculous sex scene. It’s not just the dialogue ‘Without risk, there would be no love’, or a ballad that aspires to be Total Eclipse of the Heart but fails miserably, but that they have sex in the same room, the same proximity, of a freshly dead body, making the ballad’s vague romantic nature even more inappropriate. For the most part thought the titular maniac has to carry the whole film on his transparent shoulders. He cannot save the movies – the students are detestable, the attractive Stephanie Blake is only in the film briefly, the dialogue and look of the film is the usual scrags of z-movies, and the caretaker is made to be mentally disabled in a way that would make the disabled laugh at the film’s creators harshly – but he does his damndest anyway. From using a footlong sandwich in a way that would appal Subway to making awful puns, actor Noel Peters is the only real virtue of the film in terms of cheese. Even his intolerable cackling laugh eventually becomes amusing.

From http://www.also-known-as.net/films/the_invisible_maniac/the_invisible_maniac3.jpg

It is a pretty forgettable film, far too uninteresting for the most part, despite its shining moments, to be worth remembering or beating the drum for. Even then the choice sequences, like the sex scene, could merely be extracted and put up online as clips, defeating the purpose of viewing the rest of the film, stale and dull rather than good fun or a cacophony of ever increasing lunacy like the shining gems of low budget genre films. The good moments are worth seeing, allowing The Invisible Maniac to still cling on by its fingers away from complete damnation, but these small charms cannot stop the rest of the film to be exceptionally pointless to sit through.  

From http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111110014836/theflophouse/images/4/43/Vlcsnap-2011-11-09-21h46m12s123.png

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