(Originally posted July 17th, 2007)
Ray Dennis (The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies) Steckler directs and stars (under his usual pseudonym “Cash Flagg”) as Mort “Mad Dog” Click, a vicious killer. A prostitute calls him a “weirdo” and he replies, “You don’t say!” and kills her. Meanwhile a trio of madmen escapes from the nuthouse and terrorize a couple. One guy uses an axe to decapitate people. In the film’s best scene, he picks the dandruff off his axe after he uses it to cut a guy’s head off. They then terrorize a movie star and his wife in a diner. When the couple fights off the psychos, Click then shows up and stalks them. Click kills a bunch of cops and escapes on horseback but is gunned down. The black and white photography is great, but the movie’s not in the same league as Steckler’s other classics like Incredibly Strange Creatures…, Rat Pfink a Boo-Boo, and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. With Liz (Desperate Living) Renay and the usual Steckler stock players Carolyn Brandt, Titus Moede, and Atlas King. I think the narrator was Coleman (Beast of Yucca Flats) Francis.
AKA: The Maniacs are Loose! AKA: Mad Dog Click. AKA: The Monsters are Loose.
JANUA-RAY NOTES:
1) My assumption in my original review was correct, that is Coleman Francis as the narrator. You have to wonder if he wrote his own narration as lines like, “Joe is caught in a world of ‘non-reality’” sounds like something right out of The Beast of Yucca Flats.
2) As with the other films in the box set I’ve seen so far, the print looks excellent.
3) Director Signatures: Like Wild Guitar, this starts out with some great footage of Hollywood Boulevard at the time. The opening credits sequence uses the same typeface as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? and similarly ends with a zoom-in on Cash Flagg’s eye. As in The Incredibly Strange Creatures, it also has a long, drawn-out chase scene in the third act.
4) Steckler’s Stock Player Round-Up: Atlas (The Incredibly Stranges Creatures) King, Arch Hall, Sr. (playing himself!), Titus Moede, Carolyn Brandt, producer George Morgan, and of course, the ever-present Cash Flagg.
5) Shameless Self-Promotion: A poster for The Incredibly Strange Creatures can be seen hanging in the diner.
6) Gangster moll-turned-B-Movie actress Liz Renay went on to work with Steckler’s Wild Guitar co-star Arch Hall, Jr. in The Nasty Rabbit and Deadwood ’76.
7) The main problem with The Thrill Killers is that it feels like parts of two movies Frankensteined together to make an uneven whole. It wouldn’t be a big issue had the two sections been equally entertaining. As it is, the scenes of Steckler stalking his victims are a lot more entertaining than the ho-hum stuff with the trio of escaped axe murderers. (That, and the final chase scene goes on FOREVER.) Steckler did a much better job bridging two separate stories and styles later on with the immortal Rat Pfink a Boo-Boo.
8) Don’t get me wrong. There is some good stuff here. The sequence where Flagg smacks the prostitute around in time to the flashing lights outside his hotel room is well done. It’s a shame that kind of snappy editing is largely absent elsewhere in the film.
9) The Blu-Ray contains an alternate cut called “The Maniacs are Loose”. It’s basically the same movie, but with a “maniacs are in the theater” gimmick similar to Incredibly Strange Creatures where people in masks would run into the audience at certain times. This version has a color opening sequence starring “The Amazing Ormond” (from Ron Ormond’s Please Don’t Touch Me) who uses a Hypno-Wheel (again, similar to Incredibly Strange Creatures) to hypnotize the audience into thinking they will see maniacs among them in the theater. Then, at certain times of the movie, the Hypno-Wheel will flash on screen, signaling when the maniacs will terrorize the audience. Ultimately, The Thrill Killers isn’t much with or without the gimmick.
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