Expected more

Excellent, smart action film.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Psychotic Arthur Miller(James Courtney), who butchered his mother and her lover, escapes an insane asylum(yawn)and becomes the titular character after executing the institutions' many staff members. Beautiful model, Linda(Loren Winters) returns from a trip to find her boyfriend, Mannie(Frank Jasper) screwing around, infuriatingly taking to the road for a spin, getting lost in the country, her car breaking down. Coming in contact with the maniac at an auto shop, Linda narrowly escapes certain death, responsible for his recapture when she hits him with her car, sending him plunging forward. While being transported to a maximum security facility in San Diego, Arthur gets free yet again, this time setting his sights on Linda for revenge. Meanwhile, outside of LA, Linda is participating in a terrible, cheap sci-fi movie called ASSTRONAUTS, which the killer will obviously interrupt. Linda doesn't know that Arthur is on the loose because the director, writer, and her agent conceal this information from her. Arthur pretty much kills everything in sight, those he comes in contact with in the desert while trying to find Linda. Bottom of the barrel slasher flick has thrill-less off-screen kills by way of chainsaw, hammer, and punches among other means for Arthur to dispose of his many victims. Arthur even pounds rattler with a stone, devouring the snake meat! Probably the best scenes are vehicular deaths as one victim is run over by a truck, another by motorcycle. Dull and pointless, I can't see why anyone other than fans of rancid cinema would want to waste quality time on this turkey. Acting and dialogue are good for some laughs. The ending as Arthur finally has Linda in his clutches is as clumsily staged as they come.

Freeway Maniac (1989) ** (out of 4) By 1989 the slasher genre was pretty much drying up and dying off as even mainstream fair like Friday THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN were turning up dead numbers at the box office. A few films still snuck onto video and here's one example that I still have fond memories of renting when I was around ten years old. Young Arthur sees his mom getting nailed on the kitchen table so he takes a butcher knife to her and the lover. Years later he (James Courtney) escapes from the nut house and goes on a killing spree that takes him to an actress (Loren Winters) who stops him and send him back to the nut house. Have no fear as he escapes yet again and goes after the actress who is now making a sci-fi movie out in the desert. I remember renting this thing so much as a kid that the video store owner finally gave me the store's only copy because he said I was the only one who ever rented it. It had been at least fifteen or more years since I last watched this thing but I gave it another viewing and I must admit that I respect this film a lot more now and I understand why I loved it so much as a kid. This film certainly belongs in the group of such films as MANIAC (1934), REEFER MADNESS and TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE as all-time disasters that are so incredibly horrid that you can't help but laugh and be entertained by how bad everything you're seeing is. This movie has an awful production value, a horrid story, horrendous acting, bad special effects and everything else is just as worse. Everything in this movie is so bad that you can't help but laugh at it and just take a look at the first escape sequence when our maniac body slams a guy by jumping off a three or four story building. It's also funny that after each murder sequence we see the dead person lying there yet nearly every time they're still breathing. It looks like someone would have caught this at some point. This film was released by Cannon who were well known for delivering trash and this certainly fits that bill. This isn't as good as some of their other horror films like HOSPITAL MASSACRE but fans of the weird are going to love this. The movie is rather tame in terms of violence, blood and nudity but it makes up for that in the sure brilliance of the awfulness of everything. The body count is pretty high as people just seem to come out of no where for our maniac to slaughter. The title comes from the fact that our killer is constantly having to hitchhike or kill people for their vehicles in order to track down the actress. Fans of art house pictures aren't going to find anything entertaining here but if you love bad movies then this here is certainly one of the all-time greats.

The cover for Freeway Maniac proudly states that it's a 'cult-thriller in the tradition of such splatter hits as The Hills Have Eyes, Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. After reading, I was indeed intrigued as to exactly what that bold statement actually meant? Did it mean that Freeway Maniac was a seminal movie that went on to define an entire genre? Did it mean that there had been hundreds of low-budget Freeway Maniac clones desperately trying to follow in its footsteps? If so, where were they and why hadn't I seen them? The questions were flowing through my mind like the alcohol at a Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan 'patch up our differences' convention.Released at a time when the slasher genre had shredded its final hopes of any credibility, Freeway Maniac was certainly one of the last entries of the eighties to be given considerable funding by a sizeable studio. I struggled to track down any information about the film at all and it is rarely mentioned alongside the more familiar slasher hits.It kicks off gratuitously with a couple making out on a kitchen table. Little do the lovers know that they are not alone and are being observed by the woman's junior son. A sound alerts the couple to his presence and his mother pursues him into his bedroom, where she shouts at him for being such a perverted voyeur. The kid reacts angrily and brutally butchers his mother and her unsuspecting lover with a large kitchen knife. The screen then fades to black and the credits (accompanied by a jazzed-up re-hash of Halloween's theme-tune) begin to roll.Skip a few years and Arthur is still locked up in an asylum for his vicious act from the pre-credits. A new member of staff has joined the complex and his colleague gives him a guided tour of the corridors and their most notorious inmates. On approaching one cell, the orderly informs the new-starter that the guy inside, Arthur – the killer from the opening scene, is by far the most dangerous and vicious patient in the hospital. This fact is proved when he violently assaults the pair and makes a daring escape from the complex, murdering various staff-members on his way.Next up we meet Linda Kinney, a young actress who is just launching her career in Hollywood. Her agent manages to convince her to accept an offer of a casting session with a studio that is producing a low-budget sci-fi flick. Whilst on her way to the location, her automobile breaks down and she heads off in search of help. She eventually finds a remote auto-garage, but unfortunately, instead of uncovering a competent mechanic, she bumps into Arthur on another maniacal rampage. After a lacklustre battle, she manages to defeat the psychopath and her victory sends him back to the security of his institution. Against the odds, she decides to head to the casting for the feature and her choice proves to be a resounding success. Once the producers notice that she is the same Linda that was attacked by Arthur, the David-Hasslehoff-alike psycho from earlier, they decide that her notoriety would make her a bankable cast-member.Some time later, shooting on-site in the dessert begins with typical enthusiasm. Unfortunately, little do the cast and crew know that Arthur has once again escaped and is looking to get even with the actress that he considers to be his nemesis.Don't you just love shoddy low-budget features that attempt in their plot-line to mock the production of shoddy low-budget features? In the case of Freeway Maniac it's not so much the pot calling the kettle black as the pot calling the pot a pot! This effort is criminally bad and lacks everything that makes a horror film even passable. Suspense – zero, gore – zero, shocks – zero, creativity – zero and hope – zero. It's a wayward addition and I just couldn't understand what the producers had in mind when they decided to finance it. Extremely low budget entries can be forgiven for their lack of credibility as they are usually produced on the kind of funds that Cameron Diaz spends on weekly hairdressers. This means that their chances of competing with the more competently budgeted features are resoundingly small. But Freeway Maniac looks to have been quite highly financed, which makes its failure bizarre and totally unforgivable.It boasts one of the biggest body counts that I can remember in slasher cinema, but of the multitude of characters that appear on the screen, I think that only 4 or 5 were given characterisation. The killer is from the Freddy Krueger School of wise-cracking, meaning that he often murders his victims with a sarcastic remark and a cheeky smirk. Whereas Michael Myers looked terrifying in his boiler suit and mask, Arthur sports a hilarious plaid suit combination and boasts a mullet that would shame Richard Marx. The film is comfortably shot and the dessert makes for an exquisite location, but that can't stop Freeway Maniac from feeling like an uninspired mess.All the way through the feature, I just couldn't be sure if this was supposed to be a serious stab at horror or a semi-parody of the lovable genre that it frequents. One thing's for certain however, the next time I see the words 'in the tradition of…' on a box-cover, I'll know that means 'a total rip-off of…'

This movie is bad, but it is aware of how bad it is. At first, it is just hilarious such as when the killer, as a child, stabs his mom's lover in the back with an obviously plastic knife and he clutches his stomach as he falls over dead.Later, it gets a bit more interesting. The killer gets obsessed with this girl and follows her. He gets imprisoned, she lands a role in a movie after she becomes well known due to her victim status. The killer breaks out and follows her to the film set where the producer wants to make a horror/porn film and the director doesn't. This shows the director's awareness of what goes on in the slasher genre and allows some interesting commentary, but it also shows that Freeway Maniac is self aware and intentionally bad. That badness makes this possibly the funniest movie I have ever seen.