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THE MADDENING
Rating: 
USA. 1995.
Director – Danny Huston, Screenplay – Leslie Greif & Henry Slesar, Based on the Novel Playmates by Andrew Neiderman, Producer – Greif, Photography – Nick McLean, Music – Peter Manning Robinson, Special Effects Supervisor – Jimmy Roberts, Production Design – Bobby Amor. Production Company – Trimark Pictures/Greif Company/Charles Finch.
Cast:
Mia Sara (Cassie Osborne), Burt Reynolds (Roy Scudder), Angie Dickinson (Georgina Scudder), Brian Wimmer (David Osborne), Josh Mostel (Detective Chicky Ross), Kayla Buglewicz (Samantha Osborne), Candace Hutson (Jill Scudder) William Hickey (Daddy), Daniel Fetty (Truman), Rett Wedding (Conrad), Marie Debrey (Joanne Rooney), Angela Bomford (Elie Plummer)
Plot: Cassie Osborne is angered when her husband David announces that he has to go away on a further business trip only two days after returning from another. Tired of his perpetual absence, she leaves with their daughter Samantha and sets out to drive to her sister’s place in Tampa. Along the way she stops at the backwoods garage owned by Roy Scudder and he directs her to take a shortcut. But then her car breaks down. Scudder comes by and offers to tow her to his place. But there Scudder’s wife Georgina insists that Cassie is her late sister Marlene and that Samantha is Marlene’s daughter Donna and locks the both of them up. Back home, the frenetic David sets out to find them, while fending off a police detective who suspects he has killed the two of them. Cassie tries to escape, all the while dealing with Georgina’s fraying sanity and Scudder’s increasing sexual intentions towards her.
This is an imprisonment thriller in the vein of films such as The Collector (1965), The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), Boxing Helena (1993) and Paranoid (2000). The film taps into the Southern Gothic atmosphere – although does use Florida as its setting, creating an intriguing new possibility of what one might call Tropical Gothic. The casting of Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson, something that would have been a real headline act circa 1978, gives it a certain novelty. Both give totally over-the-top performances as the psycho white trash couple and this is something that gives the film a lurid fascination akin to the way Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were shown in their faded demented glory in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
The director is Danny Huston, son of the director John (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen) Huston. Danny had previously directed the little seen Mr North (1988) and Becoming Colette (1991). Needless to say, Danny doesn’t have much in the way of his father’s directorial skill. It’s a pretty trashy film. It operates on a level of fairly crude cliché effects – storms and false jumps. The film gains some effect as it develops a passably decent story and in seeing its various strands and elements starting to play off. There is one good jump twist where Huston suddenly shows that the character of William Hickey’s wheelchair-ridden father who has been constantly taunting Reynolds is really a figment of his imagination. And there’s a cute scene where daughter Kayla Buglewicz makes an escape by playing on Brer Rabbit’s plea “Please don’t take me into the woods.” In the abused innocent role, the film does have the advantage of featuring the incredibly lovely Mia Sara. But on the whole the film sits just between lurid melodrama and passable suspense with not enough of either to become entertaining. The climactic fight is just over-the-top.
The film was adapted from a novel by Andrew Neiderman, who also wrote the book that became the basis of The Devil’s Advocate (1997), as well as an entire industry of torrid Gothic potboilers under the pseudonym of V.C. Andrews.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
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