Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Michael_Elliott Madhouse (1981) ** (out of 4) Julia (Trish Everly) suffers from various mental issues due to the abuse that she suffered from her twin sister. Years later the sister is deformed with a skin virus but before their birthday someone shows up at Julia's school and begins killing her friends.Director Ovidio G. Assonitis will always be remembered for THE EXORCIST rip-off BEYOND THE DOOR as well as TENTACLES and to a lesser extent for firing James Cameron on PIRANHA PART TWO. Before he fired Cameron he was directing this film, a bizarre mix of American slasher and Italian giallo. I must admit that I wasn't overly familiar with the picture until Arrow Video announced its release and afterwards I'm a bit confused about what I watched.For the most part if you're a horror fan you'll want to check this film out, although it falls well short of what I'd consider a good movie. I'm really not sure what the film was trying to do other than to show off some gory death scenes every fifteen-minutes or so. The story itself is, I think, supposed to be some sort of mystery but it's pretty easy to figure out what the twist is going to be. With knowing the twist, that pretty much takes away any suspense or mystery. Another problem with the picture is the fact that the death scenes are so spread apart. It's too bad there either wasn't much more of a story or perhaps the body count jacked up.I thought Assonitis managed to create a nice setting and there's some nice cinematography as well. The film kept me mildly entertained through the first hour but things just really started to drag during the finale. I won't spoil who the killer is but I must say the murder of the killer is quite excellent. It's too bad the rest of the film wasn't as good. I did also enjoy the subplot dealing with the murderous dog. CUJO didn't have anything on this mutt! Again, MADHOUSE isn't a great movie or even a good one but there are enough interesting moments to make it worth sitting through.

ferbs54 Not to be confused with the 1974 Vincent Price/Peter Cushing movie entitled "Madhouse" (a fun, underrated film, by the way) and certainly not with the 1990 John Larroquette/Kirstie Alley comedy sporting that same name, the 1981 Italian horror outing called "Madhouse" is another story entirely. I say that the film IS Italian, although the average viewer might never realize it. Despite being an Italian production, with an Italian crew and composer, the picture was shot in English, features an American cast, and was filmed in Savannah, Georgia, although the filmmakers could certainly have included more of that city's picturesque charm, had they chosen to do so.In this film (perhaps inspired by Brian De Palma's 1973 classic "Sisters"), the viewer makes the acquaintance of a very pretty redhead named Julia Sullivan (very well played by Trish Everly). A teacher at a school for the deaf, Julia is thrown into something of a tizzy when she learns, a few days before her 25th birthday, that her twin sister Mary has just escaped from the hospital/sanitarium where she had been ensconced for the past seven years. "It's not the dead that scare me...it's the living," Julia remarks early on, and with good reason, as it turns out! Although her hunky doctor boyfriend, Sam (played by Michael MacRae), and her uncle, a priest named Father James (memorably portrayed by Dennis Robertson), don't believe her, she is convinced that Mary, and a killer dog who she has long been the master of, are responsible for some of the horrible things that begin to transpire around her. And as future events prove, Julia is only partially correct in this surmise....Suspenseful and at times shocking, "Madhouse" is well named (the title is much more appropriate than the two other names this film has sported: "And When She Was Bad" and "There Was a Little Girl"), featuring as it does some truly sick and twisted characters. OK, I'm going to spoil things a tad for those who haven't seen the film by revealing that Mary DOES have an accomplice (besides that killer dog!) in her wrongdoing, and the revelation of this character truly is startling. The film dishes out any number of violent set pieces, including three throat-ripping canine attacks (the one in which a cute little deaf kid is murdered is mercifully not shown on screen) and three truly surprising homicides via knife. But surely, the scene that most gorehounds will appreciate the most is the one in which Sam goes up against that killer dog armed "only" with an electric power drill! The house where Julia resides is a beautiful old mansion that is in the process of being renovated, its only other occupant being Julia's ditzy landlady, and this darkened, unfinished abode is a suitable backdrop for some truly maniacal goings-on, culminating in one of the grisliest birthday parties ever shown on film. Director Ovidio G. Assonitis, whose work on the 1974 Devil possession flick "Beyond the Door" had recently impressed me, and who others might appreciate as the director of the 1977 "Jaws" rip-off "Tentacles," does a good job here of ratcheting up the suspense, while composer Riz Ortolani, whose work on such gialli as "Don't Torture a Duckling" and "Seven Deaths in a Cat's Eye" was so integral, provides still another memorable score. Here, the lullaby "Rock A Bye Baby," backed by gorgeous strings, is used to good effect, while electronic bleeps and echoes in other spots add greatly to the eeriness on screen. But best of all, perhaps, is Trish Everly herself, a truly photogenic actress with a winning screen presence. How odd that "Madhouse" seems to be Ms. Everly's only film appearance. With her super good looks and fine acting chops, a career would have seemed assured...at least, as a so-called "scream queen." Wonder what ever happened to her....The further good news regarding "Madhouse" is that it now can be had on DVD from the always reliable folks at Dark Sky, with an excellent-looking print and some fine extras. In one, director Assonitis is interviewed in 2008; if only I could understand more than half of what he is saying! If I'm reading the man correctly, he seems to feel that his best film will always be his next one, and that he is not content with the way ANY of his pictures has turned out. He might be a little too harsh in his dismissal of "Madhouse," however. Despite its low budget, the film is a fairly gripping and memorable affair. I learned on my last birthday that my credit card had been hacked for $1,000, but I cannot imagine a birthday worse than the one poor Julia goes through in "Madhouse"....

Tender-Flesh Red herrings abound in this Video Nasty which was released around the same time as Happy Birthday To Me. They have similar endings and apparently it can't be agreed upon as to which film was released first and who stole from whom. Most people will probably prefer the better known Happy Birthday and will forget this film, but I found it to be one of the better Nasties.Aside from a bogus score, this slasher film is a semi-giallo(OK, not really except for maybe a few scant scenes and you have to pay attention) that has some good moments and, as you might expect, some decent gore. Trish Everly plays Julia, a woman approaching her 25th birthday and her nut case twin sister lives in the mental ward at the hospital. Their parents are dead and the only relative they have left is their uncle, a priest. And, as you'd expect, the director takes the high road and the priest is, of course, involved to some extent in the subsequent murders. Everly, who went on to do nothing after his film, lives in a large house that's been renovated into apartments, and various workers and inhabitants at the home get bumped off. She thinks her sister is planning something for their 25th birthday, and lo and behold, her sister escapes from the mental ward. Her sister, Mary, also has a trained Rottweiler who will kill on command. A surprisingly touching scene shows Julia explaining to the deaf students in her class how a fellow deaf student was killed by the dog. These are real deaf children with varying degrees of speech impediments and other problems, and it brings a tear to my eye. Sniff. But, I digress. Back to the murders. There are actually three killers in this film: two humans and the dog. As others have noted, the dog is the star of the show as he bites throats and rips off hands. Sadly, an obvious puppet is used too often during these scenes as the director obviously didn't know how to handle animal shots.Julia herself is even a suspect, though not outright to the other characters, but to the viewers; her comments in certain scenes make her an unreliable narrator of her past. Be warned if you are an animal or puppet lover: the Rottweiler gets his due towards the end of the film. This is one of the reasons the film made "the list" though there are a few other scenes, such as repeated blows to the back from an axe later on with plenty of chunky goodness to go around.As previously stated, this Video Nasty is some of the better fare on the notorious list and I'll recommend it as a Nasty fan. The film's greatest flaw is the abominable soundtrack. I am rather surprised that Everly never made any other films.

BA_Harrison Madhouse stars Trish Everly as Julia Sullivan, a teacher at a school for the deaf, whose hideously disfigured and sadistic twin sister, Mary, resides in a nearby mental hospital. Four days before Trish's birthday, Mary escapes in order to arrange a special party for her unsuspecting sister...In the United Kingdom in the 1980s, movies released on home video became the target of a hate campaign led by Britain's über-vigilant defenders of moral decency: the press, bored housewives, and Conservative politicians. As a result, a list was compiled of the films they deemed to be most offensive; these titles became known as 'Video Nasties' and were seized from shops before they had a chance to work their evil influence on an unsuspecting public.Ovidio G. Assonitis's Madhouse was one such 'nasty'.Featuring a bloodthirsty rottweiler, a frenzied axe attack that reduces the victim's back to a bloody pulp, and a messy canine lobotomy by electric drill, it quickly found itself added to the list of titles most likely to corrupt and deprave. It didn't matter much to the moral crusaders that the film was also a well-crafted psychological chiller that delivered plenty of atmosphere, memorable performances, and some lovely cinematography; no... this film featured a dog receiving a drill-bit between the eyes, and we can't have people watching that kind of stuff, can we?Two decades on, and Madhouse is now available uncut on DVD; it seems that the people of the UK have since developed to a stage where they are able to handle such horror without it turning them into murderous lunatics (either that, or the authorities have actually realised they were wrong and the film was never that disturbing in the first place). Oh well, better late than never, I suppose...Ironically, Assonitis's film is perhaps a little too slow and lacking in gore for today's casual horror viewer, but for seasoned fans of the genre, it offers plenty to enjoy: there's the mystery of the identity of a second killer (not too hard to guess, but fun nevertheless); a great OTT performance from Dennis Robertson as Father James, Trish's nursery-rhyme singing uncle; a likable heroine; a brief performance from Morgan Hart as very tasty, blonde rottweiler fodder, Helen; and a ghoulish final scene that is remarkably similar to that of a Canadian slasher, Happy Birthday To Me (who stole from whom is debatable, since both films were released in the same year).