 Welcome to today's edition of Frightfully Forgotten, but to start things off, what are we drinking today? Uh, Colonel Ives Wendigo Wheaton. Today we're going to be talking about 1981's Mad Man. This movie was directed by, now we're having a hard time pronouncing this one, so we're just going to kind of go with what we think. Uh, we're thinking it's Giannone. I think it's Guy and Indy. Yeah, it could be. It was also written by him too, and I'm not going to say his name again. Gaylor Ross is in this, and she was in Dawn of the Dead. So Mad Man starts off like a typical campsite slasher. There's a bunch of counselors and their kids, and they're having a fire that night. The head counselor, Max, is telling the story of Mad Man Mars. Mean old farmer who was notorious for getting into bar fights, and he actually murders his wife and children with an axe. The town's folk then take Mad Man Mars, go to hang him. During the hanging, he gets loose, and he just kind of flees into the woods, never to be seen again. And legend has it that if you say Mad Man's Mars name, he'll come out of hiding and come get ya. And one of the kids, Richie, decides to be a little prick about it, and goes up to the house that used to be apparently Mad Man's old house, yelling at it. Come on, Mad Man Mars, come get me, and he throws a rock and breaks a window. You know now, something has been set loose. Damn fool, kids will never learn. The counselors get back to the head cabins, which is beautiful. It's like some mansion. If I'm going to be a counselor, it's going to be a discount. Come across this stump that has this old axe in it, and no one can take the axe out of the stump. It's kind of like a sword in the stone type legend. It's the last night, and Max tells all the counselors he's going to go back to town and play cards, and they have to kind of take care of the kids. There's this chef who's piss drunk. He's polished off a bottle of Jack, and then he goes into the big cooler, and... Yeah. Mad Man kills his poor bastard. Who's done nothing? Absolutely nothing. In the meantime, TP, I don't even know the guy's full name, and Betsy gets into the hot tub, and they get in this hot tub, and they just kind of start turning around in this hot tub. I don't really get what that's all about yet. Chasing each other or something? I don't know. You get in first, and start turning, and I'll get in, and I'll turn to. And it's super long, that's what you do. So by this point, Richie's still missing, so TP wants to go find him. All of a sudden, there's this figure that kind of wraps a noose around his neck and starts dragging him through the woods. The noose gets wrapped around the trunk of a tree, and he gets pulled up. He sort of gets his hands on the rope, and he starts to lift himself back up and grabs the branch. But Mad Man Mars isn't having any of it, and you see him come up and just grab his bell buckle. His neck just snapped. That's the end of TP. One of the other counselors back in the camp, Dave, he goes out looking for TP. Mad Man, who takes the axe out of that stump, he actually cuts Dave's head right off. Stacey, back at the camp, she wants to go looking for Dave. Tells two of the other counselors, Ellie and Bill, that she's going to be going out. She parks the truck, goes into the woods a bit, and finds Dave's decapitated body. And of course, when you know it, the truck doesn't start, right? So she's got to get out, opens up the hood, sticks her head in to start fixing the truck, and Mad Man just comes down and jumps on the hood, and just cuts her head right off. It was big monster feet. Ellie and Bill now, they come upon the truck, they find everything, they go to start the truck, and you hear this kind of clunking. So, alright, Bill's got to go out, opens up the hood, nerd Stacey's head is all inside the hood of the truck. It's all in the engine. He all picks up the head, and while they're driving, Mad Man must have been in the back or something, and he goes and pulls Bill out of the truck. Ellie ends up running back to the camp, throwing everything out of a fridge and hiding in there, and sort of getting away from Mars. She gets out, opens up a door, and boom, right into the chest with that big fucking ax. Betsy is the only counselor left here, so she's getting kind of freaked out, and there's a double barrel shotgun. Just as she gets close to this window, all of a sudden, up pops Ellie. Please help me! Boom! And just blows her away. It's not even Mad Man Mars had killed her. She's the only one left, and she's got to protect the kids, and that's where we're going to end it. If you want to see what's going to happen to Betsy, the kids, keep watching. One of the best things about Mad Man is Mad Man. Mad Man Mars, he's such a good character slasher. He looks really good. His backstory is really cool. He's not really out for revenge. He's just a prick. Exactly. He's just a mean old bastard. It's sort of the myth turned real, which everybody's always afraid of happening. Nobody ever wants these myths or these urban legends to get real, right? Yeah, and you rarely ever see him like... Full on. Yeah, you only see like his hands. Do you see his feet? They're all hairy, like fur like a horse. Fur like a horse? And then a lot of the time you just see him get shadowed, like backlit. Yeah. Or just like a silhouette from kind of running. I find you root for Mars more than the counselors in this. Yeah. Because again, like the writing, maybe it's their dialogue or something, they're kind of shitty. Yeah. They just, they almost piss you off. It's like, okay, you're fucking pissing me off. Just die already. It's time to go. Yeah. Especially TP. Like that, I can't stand that prick. I hate his face. In the opening scene where he's kind of singing in the campfire and he's like kind of in everyone's face and singing the Madman song. It's like, who does that? If I was sitting in a campfire and some guy starts singing to be like, fuck off. I don't want to listen to you sing. A lot of cool shots and angles in this, at the shot of Madman who's holding up Dave. Yeah. Long sequences that lead up to a kill. Okay, it's gonna happen anytime. You're okay. Come on, come on. Pacing the lead up to all the kills is really good. They don't blow their load too soon. The effects are cool and they're extremely simple. When she gets her face blown off there, that's a really good effect. And when TP is hanging, it's really cool too. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. It's like the way he struggles too, you know. Yeah, it's neat. They're just, they're all great and they're all memorable too. Kills in this movie are worth the watch alone. Exactly. When they first wrote this movie, they wanted to do a telling of the urban legend Cropsey. The movie The Burning, which came out also in 1981, beat them to it. Right. So they had to actually come up with a new backstory for the killer in this, which is where they came up with the Madman Mars idea, which I think is pretty damn cool. I'm glad that they're forced to write their own story as opposed to just adopting the urban legend. They forced them to write that song too, right? So they basically created an urban legend. That'll lead us to one final thing we got to mention here. And this one is a spoiler, but it's something we got to mention because it's very rare in horror and slasher movies. Nobody survives in this movie. Yeah. Which is almost unheard of. There's always somebody left. There's another lesson to be learned in some of these slasher movies, like Friday 13th Part 2 and stuff. Always go to town. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because you'll live when you go to town. Yeah. If you're a slasher fan and you like just some cheesy fun, please check out 1981's Madman. And keep drinking. And nobody drinks in this movie either. Except for that chef. Yeah, yeah, true. He's the first one to get it. Yeah, true enough. I'll take another sip here.