(Reviewed by Snake-666) - Mediocre horror.  Legend has it that one night a local farmer went berserk and murdered his whole family before disappearing into the woods forever only to come for those who dare to say his name - Madman Marz. At a nearby summer camp the legend is repeated by a counsellor to the teenagers there and unfortunately one cocky teenager ridicules the story and calls the name out loud.

Here we have a film that if not for the involvement of a character named Madman Marz could easily be one of the ‘Friday the 13th' series. Both films are extremely similar, from premise and characters, to the time of release(Friday the 13th came out one year earlier)! However, ‘Madman' has none of the charm which made ‘Friday the 13th' one of the most popular films of modern-horror. In fact ‘Madman' is rather unfortunately a very repetitive and dull slasher movie with little that actually keeps the viewer entertained. Despite one now infamous scene ‘Madman' is a rather bland directorial debut from Joe Giannone (incidentally it is also his only film as a director) that has somehow managed to attain cult status, despite it's rather low popularity.

The acting is completely sub-standard and generally totally inept, most of the actors in this movie never worked as an actor again, and the others were generally only seen in a couple more B-Grade horror films. Gaylen Ross (credited as Alexis Dubis) is possibly the only actress amongst the entire cast that horror fans may remember (she played Francine Parker in ‘Dawn of the Dead') and even her performance was lacklustre and seemingly unmotivated. Paul Ehlers who played Madman Marz probably put in the best performance and all that was required of him was to lumber around and grunt like a pervert making a prank call! There were some fairly good visual effects but I don't personally believe that was enough to save this film.

I feel that this is one of those films you can skip over and would probably only appeal to hardcore horror fans. Those people who are fans of 80's campsite slasher movies would be better off watching ‘Friday the 13th' (1980) or ‘The Burning' (1981) and giving this attempt a miss. My rating for Madman – 4/10.