All Rise...

Appellate Judge Patrick Bromley wonders where Joe Lombard and Dr. Flem are.

The Charge

Theirs is not a storybook romance.

The Case

When I was a kid, my family would spend New Year's Eve watching movies rented from the local video store. As a young movie fanatic, this was one of my favorite nights of the year; not only was everyone else in my family finally sharing my favorite pastime with me, but I would even get to stay up way past my regular bedtime watching movie after movie after movie. The only downside of this tradition was that we weren't the only household in town to do this, apparently, because most of the good movies were usually taken by the time we made it to the video store to stock up. That meant we were often forced to rent more off-beat titles—the ones that hadn't been snatched up because most people hadn't even heard of them.

One such title was Tibor Takacs' 1989 horror film I, Madman, now out on a special edition Blu-ray thanks to Scream Factory. I was excited to see the movie at age 12 because a) it was horror, b) it had a cool box cover and c) Roger Ebert had liked it. After everyone else had fallen asleep—probably after ringing in the New Year at midnight—I put the movie into the VCR and pressed "play." I was not prepared for what I saw and didn't particularly like it.

Having now rewatched the movie for the first time in over 25 years, I can safely say that I was simply too young to appreciate I, Madman. As an adult, I know that the movie is something special—a wonderful mix of the gothic and the modern, the gory and the psychological. It is atmospheric and often beautifully photographed. More than anything, though, it feels deeply original and unique. There wasn't a lot of that going on in the horror genre in 1989.

The gorgeous Jenny Wright (The Lawnmower Man) plays Virginia, a wannabe actress who works in a book store and discovers two old pulp novels by forgotten author Malcolm Brand (visual effects artist Randall William Cook). The deeper she gets into his second novel I, Madman, about a deranged doctor (also played by Cook in fantasy sequences) creating a mask out of other human faces, the more she begins to suspect that either life is imitating art or that the character has actually escaped from the book and is murdering the people close to her. Is that possible…or is Virginia just losing her mind?

I, Madman is the kind of movie that can only be made by people who love the horror genre and have absorbed a whole lot of it over the years. There are touches of old Universal monster movies, slasher movies, The Phantom of the Opera-style gothic romance, 1950s pulp, '80s practical gore effects, stop motion puppetry—it is, in short, a horror lover's dream. It's a movie that's reminiscent of so many other horror movies in bits and pieces, but taken as a whole feels like nothing else. Jenny Wright, an actress who had a couple of noteworthy genre roles in the late '80s and early '90s (in stuff such as Near Dark and The Lawnmower Man) makes for an especially compelling leading lady, beautiful and romantic but not helpless—she has the curiosity to get herself into trouble but is the only character in the movie who really knows what's going on. Clayton Rohner (Just One of the Guys) registers less as her cop boyfriend but certainly serves a function; if nothing else, his performance acts as a precursor to his turn as a cop once again dealing with something way beyond his pay grade in The Relic.

Scream Factory's 1080p HD transfer of the movie is decent but unspectacular; there's visible specking and debris throughout, but colors hold up well and the image is generally clean. There are two lossless audio tracks offered—a standard stereo track and a 5.1 surround mix—and while both are workable, the surround mix offers slightly more atmosphere and layers Michael Hoenig's score somewhat more gracefully. Either option works; I just prefer one over the other ever so slightly.

Director Takacs and co-star/makeup artist Cook sit down for a commentary track, offering a good amount of behind-the-scenes info and discussing the way they approached their work. It's a solid talk that will reward fans of the movie. A retrospective featurette, "Ripped from the Pages: The Making of I, Madman," contains comments from Takacs and Cook as well as co-stars Clayton Rohner and Stephanie Hodge, plus screenwriter David Chaskin. They touch on what it was like working with one another, their preferred title (the movie was shot under the title Hardcover) and their disappointment at the botched theatrical release. Also included are two trailers for the movie, some rehearsal footage with optional commentary by Randall William Cook and a collection of production stills, also playable with commentary.

Revisiting I, Madman for the first time in 25 years (!!) was such a pleasant surprise and makes a case for why we should give movies a second chance. If I had stuck with my 12-year old perception of the movie, I would have missed out on a title that I know I'll be coming back to again and again in the future. Between the solid supplemental section and a movie that's truly special, Scream Factory's I, Madman is one of the best Blu-ray discoveries of the year.

The Verdict

An underrated gem.

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