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| From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VXNWSr1UpT4/ TF0n3zWISpI/AAAAAAAAEc0/Wd7SFkPM8T0/s1600/Invisible+Maniac+poster.jpg |
Dir. Adam Rifkin
USA
Film #2 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema Series
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| From http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111110014836/theflophouse/images/4/43/Vlcsnap-2011-11-09-21h46m12s123.png |
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