Madhouse

1981
Director: Ovidio G. Assonitis
Cast: Trish Everly, Patricia Mickey, Michael MacRae, Dennis Robertson

93 Min. | EF | Englische Fassung

Retrospektive

For seven years, Julie – played by Patricia Mickey – has had no contact with her twin sister Mary. Seven years for the wounds that Mary, who is profoundly evil and filled with an irrepressible hatred of the world, could at least somewhat heal. Now Julie is told that Mary is dying of a degenerative illness. Urged on by a priest, she visits her sister in the hospital and soon finds herself in a nightmare that could cost her and all the people she cares for their life. In England, Ovidio G. Assonitis‘ slasher-movie made the infamous ›Video Nasties‹ list in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, copies of it were seized in Germany. A fate that many horror movies endured. But unlike most of them, it never became a cult movie. Maybe Assonitis‘ handling of genre conventions was simply too radical. A deeply dark conjuration of elementary fears that is unequalled in slasher-cinema into a satiric reckoning with the church‘s bigotry two-thirds into the film, with venomous humor that cuts deeper than the killer‘s knifes.