I'm a fan of Jimmy Sangster's work and after reading a few reviews of this movie here I was anxious to see it. Unfortunately I can't give this one a rave review. The best I can say is that it's not a bad movie and it's worth seeing once. After an intriguing opening the movie proceeds at a snail's pace for the longest time. It is excruciatingly slow. Since the actors involved are all as exciting as cardboard you can imagine how much slower that makes an already slow pace feel. Finally business picks up and then we're bombarded with one plot twist after another, not one of which is particularly impressive. The only twist I didn't see coming was one that was out of left field and there were no clues in the movie beforehand so it felt like a cheat. It's like Sangster knew his twists couldn't match Psycho so he decided on quantity instead of quality. If you're a fan of Jimmy Sangster or Hammer, then check it out but keep expectations low.

Maniac is directed by Michael Carreras and written by Jimmy Sangster. It stars Kerwin Matthews, Nadia Gray, Lillian Brouse, Donald Houston and George Pastell. Music is by Stanley Black and cinematography by Wilkie Cooper.Vacationing in the Carmarque region of France, American artist Jeff Farrell (Matthews) gets more than he bargain for when he becomes romantic interest for mother and daughter Eve (Gray) and Annette (Brousse) Beymat...Out of Hammer Film Productions, Maniac is one of a number of psychopath themed thrillers that followed in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Filmed in black and white on location in Caramarque, the film opens with a tremendous whack as young Annette Beynat is abducted on her way home from school and raped (off camera) by the side of the road. This crime is witnessed by a local man who fetches Annette's father who promptly captures the rapist and gets medieval on his ass with a acetylene torch (again off camera). It's quite an opening, but then the film settles into a leisurely pace for the next hour as Carreras and Sangster build their story in preparation for a big finale. Then things get tricky, and I'm not just talking about for handsome Jeff Farrell...Realising they have gone for a "major" slow build and are desperate to add some added bite into what was becoming a bona fide sub-genre of thrillers, the makers cram so much into such a short space of time it collapses under its own weight. We know there's going to be a twist, the whole story is geared towards this fact, but they instead keep twisting, and twisting until it no longer becomes interesting. While the actual finale is something of a damp squib. There's a big problem with the location as well, Carreras' flat direction is unable to draw anything substantially atmospheric from the locale. True, a chase and reveal at the climax gets a splendid back drop in which to unfold, but it's a rare moment of inspiration and you are kind of taken out of because of piecing together the threads and implausibilities.It's a very frustrating film, one where the usually great Sangster over reaches himself and Carreras doesn't come up to the standard of Terence Fisher or Freddie Francis. It holds the interest, is decently performed, has good production value and is fleetingly attention grabbing, but this should have been much much better. Both visually and with plot machinations. 6/10

Handsome nice guy American drifter Paul Farrell (a solid and appealing performance by Kerwin Mathews) finds himself stuck in rural France. He seeks room and board in the home of the alluring Eva Bryant (well played with beguiling sexiness by Nadia Gray) and her sweet, but equally fetching teenage daughter Annette (a charming portrayal by the adorable Lilliane Brousse). Paul agrees to help Eva break her dangerously unstable husband Georges (a suitably menacing turn by Donald Houston) out of an asylum. Sound good and exciting? Well, alas this middling Hammer thriller doesn't amount to much because of Michael Carreras' competent, but pedestrian direction and Jimmy Sangster's strangely bland, talky, and uneventful script. The key problem is that Carreras and Sangster let the meandering narrative plod along at too leisurely a pace and crucially fail to generate much in the way of tension or momentum; it's only in the last third of the picture that the story finally starts cooking to some moderate degree with a nifty double twist surprise ending. On the plus side, Wilkie Cooper's crisp widescreen black and white cinematography offers plenty of breathtaking shots of the lovely French countryside scenery and Stanley Black's swinging jazzy score hits the right-on groovy spot. Moreover, the cast do their best with the blah material: Mathews, Gray, and Brousse are all fine in the lead roles, with sturdy support from George Bastell as the no-nonsense Inspector Etienne and Arnold Diamond as affable local constable Janiello. A strictly passable time-killer.

This was one of two Hammer thrillers (even if it was watched on a "Fantasy" day) that had eluded me thus far; for the record, the remaining title – CRESCENDO (1970) – has, controversially, just been released on DVD-R as part of Warners' U.S. exclusive "Archive Collection". While MANIAC has a reasonable reputation, I have to say that I was ultimately let down by it and I would place the film in the lower rank of the studio's efforts in this vein. Its main fault, basically, lies in a not very interesting plot (courtesy, as were many of these outings, of screenwriter Jimmy Sangster): besides, it tries – but fails – to recapture the sense of eeriness inherent in a remote seaside location (in its case, the Camargues) already seen in the much superior TASTE OF FEAR (1961) and THE DAMNED (shot in 1961 but only released 2 years later). That said, characterization is quite well rounded: Kerwin Mathews, infrequently seen in a modern-day setting, makes for a surprisingly effective lead (in fact, he had previously starred in Hammer's splendid adventure film THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER [1962]); Nadia Gray is sultry and conniving, Liliane Brousse her ingenue – but no less sexy – stepdaughter (who gets raped in the film's very opening sequence!). Coming into play during the latter stages is Donald Houston as the titular figure, though he proves to be someone other than who the audience had been led to believe; therefore, we have a number of nice twists (and implied violence) here…but, then, end up with a rather ordinary mystery – actually anticipating a number of gialli in this regard! Unfortunately, my enjoyment of the film was further dampened by all kind of technical problems (after the picture in the copy I acquired initially failed to visualize) – with stretched image (fixed by altering the TV setting to 16:9), fuzziness, combing (the latter also causing the audio to drop out a couple of times) and lip-synch issues all rearing their ugly head throughout the viewing!