We launch our story with a camera-eye recollection, wherein a little boy quietly witnesses a sloppy kitchen-table hump starring his slatternly mother and some random strong-arm she likely picked up on her nightly stroll of the docks. He overreacts slightly to this, and proceeds to slay them both.Flash to present day...our now-adult(and physically very imposing) killer has spent the passing years in a maladministered sanitarium, and is deemed such a 24-karate psychopath that he is feared by the staff and kept in constant seclusion. Following his predictable escape, he stalks a pretty B-movie starlet on the set of an in-production sci-fi epic, leaving a bloody trail of victims in his wake. Will the imperiled girl be saved by her repentant two-timing husband? Probably.This really isn't a movie so much as it is a noxious deposit of aesthetic waste by-products disembogued by untalented and delusional film-industry parvenus. With that being said, FREEWAY MANIAC is also a priceless paragon of unpremeditated hilarity, one of the cheapest and most inexpedient integrants to the 80s slasher canon. It has a sizable body-count, with several of the murder scenarios curiously inferring a veneration of the killer and a latent applause for his pernicious crusade. Somehow, this antagonist pep-rallying comes off more silly than sick, suggesting a flippant tongue-in-cheek to the entire project.Individuals of a schlock-mongering countenance will probably squeal with flurried excitation upon viewing this...no-nonsense types, on the other hand, may assent to earning their Hari-Kari wings before the closing credits roll.5/10

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.

1) Arthur, a seemingly precocious little boy, is caught spying on his Mother and her drunk 'bad guy' boyfriend while having sex. We already have a rip off of a number of films - HALLOWEEN - The Boogeyman (which also ripped of Halloween.) - Nightmare In A Damaged Brain - I could go on and on. He brutally stabs mom and boyfriend to death with a large butcher's knife. Did little Arthur go to elementary school with little Mikey Myers? Did Mikey teach Arthur a few things? Or, did he just try and mimic what he saw Mikey do? I guess cinema and reality are just another form of each other.2) Arthur is all grown up now. He's now a very large, muscular man in which the guards are self aware that he's one of the most dangerous patients in the asylum, but they're more worried about a basketball game to use common sense when opening Arthur's door. Eventually, Arthur murders a few guards and escapes where he goes on a cross country trip to find the actress he fancied for years on television. "For God's sake he can't even drive a car." "Maybe someone around there gave him lessons." 3) The aforementioned actress also has a lot of problems of her own. Her agent wants her to appear in a low budget 'sci-fi, slasher, monster, zombie film. The producer doesn't even know where he wants to go with the movie and has no more money to pay his crew. The beautiful blond actress stops at a gas station where an oversexed middle aged mechanic tries to persuade her into giving in via force. Of course, she resists. A customer pulls in at the right time - The actress runs from the wannabe rapist only to discover that it's a big young man with blood on her face. Old Arthur recognizes her right off the bat. The oversexed mechanic has a change of heart and tries to help the girl, only to be killed by the hands of Arthur. The actress escapes and here we go again.3) Arthur goes cross country - stealing cars, trucks, and eventually an 18 wheeler. (Keep in mind that Arthur has been locked up ever since he was a kid and can somehow drive an 18 wheeler with 16 gears) The movie takes a turn from familiar slasher territory into a semi-action film with TONS of big-muscular stunt men biting the pavement or desert sand by the hands of Arthur.4) We see more of the sleazy producer as we're taken to the movie set - right in the middle of the desert. A great location where no one has to be paid for setting up shop in their location. A paradox of the movie itself. Arthur also steals a motorcycle - kills a bunch of muscular buffoons and finally makes his way to the set where he eventually kills the sleazy producer, dresses up in a monster uniform and does his real life gig in front of the camera un announced. After pretending to be an alien monster, he soon gets a little too rough with the actress and his cover is blown. Arthur gets taken down and the rest is history.

Well, no need to beat about the bush, this is probably one of the worst films I have ever seen. Everything looks so false that it made me laugh (literally)... Most of what happens in this 'film' is simply ridiculous. For instance, in the asylum where the psycho is confined, one of the watchmen is explaining to a new recruit that the cell he is going to open contains the most dangerous madman he has ever seen. However that does not seem to bother him since he opens the door without any caution. Of course the psycho escapes as he was apparently hiding behind the door with a chair !!!(yes this crazy killer has furniture in his room and even a telly !!!) After having murdered one or two guards, the man finally escapes the asylum by jumping from a tower and landing on a guard's belly... That was probably one of the funniest scene from the whole film. Other than that, the film is full of inaccuracies and incoherence: The desert where most of the film within the film is set is probably the most crowded desert I have ever seen (you have of course the film cast and crew, but also campers, a sheriff, a carpenter, an old lady (interpreted by a young woman whose way of acting reminded me of Steve Urkel from Family Matters...), young lovers, and so on); the psycho slaughters half of the crew but no one seems to care for those who have disappeared; the killer kills someone with plastic bear claws !!!; no one notices the killer's presence despite his uncommon lack of ability for hiding, and so forth. In short, this film is a real disaster but as funny as Hell.