ada the leading man is my tpye

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

adriangr Maniac is one of the lesser known of Hammer's "psychological thrillers" made in black and white around the 1960's. It's not fiendishly clever enough to be really memorable but it does have a few interesting twists. Basically the plot sees Kerwin Mathews stranded in a small French town where he books into a hotel and starts to feel attracted to the owners sexy young step-daughter. Soon after this, he also starts feeling attracted to the more mature but still sexy step-mother as well! Apart form this love triangle, there is a further problem, in that the missing family member in this scenario is the father, who is currently locked up in an asylum for a violent blow-torch murder committed years ago…now but he wants out, and our hero is about to be roped into aiding in his escape! The film doesn't hang together very well for the beginning hour or so, sadly mainly due to Kerwin Mathews' wooden performance. Seeing him flirt with the daughter and then casually drop her and turn to her mother left me feeling quite disconnected from the plot as I found him a very unlikeable character. However when the plot to spring the insane killer gets going, things get to be more fun, and its after this point that a few nice twists start being revealed. I didn't guess the ending, which I am glad to say.The movie is nicely shot, and makes a lot of use of it's location, with some very nice location filming, especially a very odd ruin/cave which features in the finale. Although why it's set in France at all is of no consequence, they really could have used the exact same plot and just stayed put in England. Anyway it's nice to see these old movies again, and luckily this is out on DVD. It's worth a look.

ferbs54 Up until recently, I had been aware of only two films with the title "Maniac": the 1934 camp classic directed by Dwain Esper and the repugnant 1980 picture with Joe Spinell as a deranged mannequin lover. The existence of the British "Maniac," a 1963 product from the great Hammer Studios, thus came as a nice surprise for me. Part of the Hammer "Icons of Suspense" six-film box set, the picture shares a DVD with the studio's 1958 film "The Snorkel," with which it shares many similarities. Both are finely crafted exercises in suspense, shot in beautiful B&W, written by Jimmy Sangster and taking place on the Mediterranean coast. In "Maniac," we meet a hunky-dude American artist, Geoff Farrell (appealingly played by Kerwin Matthews, who many viewers will recall from the Ray Harryhausen films "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" and "The 3 Worlds of Gulliver"), who finds himself marooned in the wild southern region of France known as the Camargue after breaking up with his wealthy girlfriend (Justine Lord, known to this viewer best as Sonia, from my favorite episode of "The Prisoner," "The Girl Who Was Death"). Staying at a small "pension," he gets lustily involved with the attractive proprietress, Eve (Romanian actress Nadia Gray, who I'd only previously encountered in another "Prisoner" episode, "The Chimes of Big Ben"), AND her beautiful young stepdaughter, Annette (Liliane Brousse, who reminds this viewer a lot of the young Marianna Hill). Too bad, though, that the gals' husband/father--a homicidal nutjob who had, four years earlier, grotesquely murdered a man with an acetylene blowtorch(!)--has escaped from his asylum and is now seeking new victims...."Maniac" is surely a film that will keep the viewer guessing, and has been cleverly plotted--perhaps overly plotted--by Sangster. Indeed, there are at least three plot twists in the film, one too many for this viewer, although the story does manage to cohere together. Personally, I preferred the simpler story line and greater suspense of "The Snorkel," but that's just me. To his credit, director Michael Carreras does a fine, imaginative job here, exhibiting a shrewd sense of camera placement; he would go on to helm such Hammer entertainments as "The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb," the shlocky camp dud "Prehistoric Women" and "The Lost Continent." Like "The Snorkel" again, "Maniac" features some beautiful nighttime photography, and its evocation of place is very well brought off, whether the film was shot in France or not (I don't believe it was). Matthews, as usual, makes for an enormously likable leading man, here playing a basically decent person who suddenly finds himself in way deep over his head. Viewers, by the way, might enjoy making a drinking game out of "Maniac," taking a shot every time Farrell does (I counted at least 10 such instances!). The film features an unfortunately weak ending, taking place in what appears to be a deserted quarry of sorts, and, at the risk of belaboring a point, this denouement pales greatly in contrast to the supremely satisfying double ending to be found in "The Snorkel." Still, the 1963 picture remains a perfectly acceptable and riveting entertainment, and easily the best exemplar of the filmmaking craft as compared to those other two "Maniac"s mentioned above!

Woodyanders Handsome nice guy American drifter Paul Farrell (a solid and appealing performance by Kerwin Mathews) finds himself stuck in rural France. He seeks room and board in the home of the alluring Eva Bryant (well played with beguiling sexiness by Nadia Gray) and her sweet, but equally fetching teenage daughter Annette (a charming portrayal by the adorable Lilliane Brousse). Paul agrees to help Eva break her dangerously unstable husband Georges (a suitably menacing turn by Donald Houston) out of an asylum. Sound good and exciting? Well, alas this middling Hammer thriller doesn't amount to much because of Michael Carreras' competent, but pedestrian direction and Jimmy Sangster's strangely bland, talky, and uneventful script. The key problem is that Carreras and Sangster let the meandering narrative plod along at too leisurely a pace and crucially fail to generate much in the way of tension or momentum; it's only in the last third of the picture that the story finally starts cooking to some moderate degree with a nifty double twist surprise ending. On the plus side, Wilkie Cooper's crisp widescreen black and white cinematography offers plenty of breathtaking shots of the lovely French countryside scenery and Stanley Black's swinging jazzy score hits the right-on groovy spot. Moreover, the cast do their best with the blah material: Mathews, Gray, and Brousse are all fine in the lead roles, with sturdy support from George Bastell as the no-nonsense Inspector Etienne and Arnold Diamond as affable local constable Janiello. A strictly passable time-killer.

MartinHafer The film begins with a very sick and brutal murder with a blow torch!! While you could understand why the man killed, how he did it was naturally quite unsettling! Four years later, Kerwin Mathews is wandering about Europe aimlessly when he arrives in a small town in Provence, France. Here he stumbles upon a beautiful pair of ladies who are mother and daughter. What happens next, I really don't want to say as it would spoil the excitement and twists.The early 1960s brought us a lot of films about maniac killers. PEEPING TOM seemed to be the film to start the craze back--debuting just before PSYCHO. PEEPING TOM was probably the best of these films and for about six years afterwords, there were a bunch of similar productions that focused on a mad killer. STRAIGHT-JACKET, HOMICIDAL, DEMENTIA 13, PARANOIAC and HUSH HUSH SWEET CHARLOTTE are among scores of psychopathic killer films.In the middle of this mad killer craze came the film MANIAC. Like the others, it involves a brutal killer who was seen as hopelessly crazy and the film had lots of nice twists and turns to keep the viewer guessing. Compared to these other films, I'd say that MANIAC is about average--very engaging but not among the cream of the bloody crop. Well made--just now good enough to put it among the best of the genre.