‘Madhouse’ (1981) – Ovidio G. Assonitis.

Bloody tales of sinister sibling rivalry abound prolifically in literature, and are far from unfamiliar tropes in horror cinema. What might have been yet another prosaic example of twisted sisters is in truth a dementedly dark, frequently feral trip into the deliriously deranged mind of, perhaps, one of the more maniacal, and spectacularly odd 80s movie maniacs you might not care to remember all too closely!

While it would be fair to say that iconoclastic filmmaker Ovidio G. Assonitis’s fascinatingly strange, appropriately monikered ‘Madhouse’ owed something to similarly screamed slashers it has a uniquely wicked and expressly juicy murder madness all of its own! Madhouse occasionally reaching hyperbolic levels of Giallo-grisly terror-splatter unimaginable in the pop-corny Hollywood horror hokum it so diabolically distances itself from! 

This frequently eye-wateringly gruesome tale of unleavened sibling savagery while being set in sun-stroked Savannah, Georgia is a scalpel-cold, calculatingly crepuscular Giallo nightmare! The fractured familial disharmony fulminating unchecked between the tormented twin Julia (Trish Everly) and her diabolically domineering, almost despotic sibling Mary (Allison Biggers). Now utterly demented, and physically diseased, Mary Sullivan languishes in hospital, spending every pain-wracked moment hatching an uncommonly sordid, elaborately conceived demise! for her greatly despised twin sister Julia! 

There is an especially unsettling coda to Assonitis’s actively malevolent ‘Madhouse’, with much of the persistently unsettling discords coming from ace DoP Roberto D’ettorre Piazzoli. His masterly images and frequently warped anamorphic framing heightening Julia’s already terrifying ordeal. There's another Riz Ortolani creates a delightfully off-beat score, one of his motifs used repeatedly over the gory dog mauling sequences are not entirely dissimilar to the iconic theme he wrote for ’Cannibal Holocaust’. ‘Madhouse’ is insanely creepy, and some of the unhinged violence is stomach-churningly visceral, proffering the jaded gore gourmand no quarter, since Ovidio G. Assonitis’s Freudian frightmare is one especially mean-spirited 80s splatter classic that still delivers an awesome skull-spattering punch! 

‘Mary Sullivan is the original Twisted Sister!’ - Weirdlingwolf.