Madness

Mattei has the shameless chutzpah to give his film the same name as Georges Franju’s 1960 French genre classic EYES WITHOUT A FACE with its Italian title. Perhaps in the hope some of that movie’s class will rub off on his effort. It doesn’t. The script of MADNESS also shamelessly plagiarises both Dario Argento’s TENEBRE (1982) - with its cod-musing over the role and culpability of horror fiction on real-life violence - as well as Umberto Lenzi’s earlier giallo trash classic EYEBALL (1975). It even throws in a climax that riffs off the then semi-contemporary thriller DEAD CALM (1988). Admittedly, it does have the novelty of an unexpected and hilarious twist at the 30-minute mark. Investigating detective Callistrati (Antonio Zequila) decides that someone who turns up in the killer’s black fedora and garb - and proceeds to attack two of the principal cast (not to mention minutes after the discovery of yet more eyeballs) - is not the real murderer and dismisses it all as a mere coincidence!
 
Although it is difficult to fully judge based on the currently only available version (a heavily cropped VHS dub), the film is pretty threadbare in every department. The amateurish comic art looks like it was done by a twelve-year-old. The press conference is conducted on plastic garden furniture. Even the opening scene of a crowd watching mini go-kart rather than a Grand Prix shows its lack of ambition and scope. It comes as no great surprise that the script was written in a week. Lorenzo De Luca, who penned it, was told it could include anything as long as it would be cheap to shoot. Even most of the music is lifted from earlier Italian horror thrillers.

However, the English dub is a marvel for those of us who enjoy bad dub jobs - with stilted dialogue that often has the last word of a sentence appear what feels like seconds after it should. Perhaps it would play better in its original Italian, but then you wouldn’t get the detective stare into the camera and call the killer a “BASTARD!” every five seconds. The acting veers from check-the-pulse wooden to hysterical teeth gnashing - often in the same scene. The only real surprise is that Mattei - directing here under one of his many non-de-plumes - only throws in one sweaty softcore sex scene. Even though the film opens with a half-decent gore gag - where the killer removes some eyeballs - it isn’t otherwise very explicit. Mattei even throws away an interesting Ancient Egyptian angle to the murders that is mentioned once and never again. The more compelling mystery than the one contained within the film was where this was actually released in English?!
 
Ultimately, MADNESS sadly isn’t consistently entertainingly bad enough to be a veritable trash classic - unlike, say, his ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH (1980). Although the scene where detectives discover a burnt doll in a desk that spews forth 20 seconds of high-pitched gobbledegook for no good reason is perhaps the best unintentionally funny moment in the movie. However, having said that I would love to see all its awfulness in high definition. I’m a glutton for punishment in badly dubbed Italian.