Maniac (1963)

Director: Michael Carreras

Starring: Kerwin Mathews, Nadia Gray, Donald Houston, Liliane Brousse

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The maniac stalks his wife ... his daughter ... their lover!

Plot: An American painter has an affair with a bar owner is a French village and agrees to help her murderer husband escape from a prison for the criminally insane.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? Nah.

#18 on Hammer Horror (1957-1976)



MANIAC suffers from being a reasonably engaging thriller all the way until the last ten or so minutes when it falls apart with a contrived, "there has to be a complex surprise ending". The performances are quite nice, though. It's neat seeing cinema's greatest Sinbad doing something different (Mathews was in THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958)). And since the title of the picture is MANIAC, I expected something more in line with that. I guess they were capitalizing on PSYCHO (1960). It's not that bad of a picture but it's too short (86 minutes) and I sure felt unfulfilled by the end, wanting to cleanse my senses with a really good thriller.