In the abused innocent role, the film does have the advantage of featuring the incredibly lovely Mia Sara. The climactic fight is just over-the-top. On the whole, the film sits just between lurid melodrama and passable suspense with not enough of either to become entertaining. There is a cute scene where daughter Kayla Buglewicz makes an escape by playing on Brer Rabbit’s plea “Please don’t take me into the woods.” There is one good jump twist where Huston suddenly shows that the character of William Hickey’s wheelchair-ridden father who has been constantly taunting Reynolds is only a figment of his imagination. The film develops a passably decent story and gains some effect in seeing its various strands and elements starting to play off. It operates on a level of crude cliché effects – storms and false jumps. Backwoods couple Angie Dickinson and Burt Reynoldsĭanny lacks much in the way of his father’s directorial skill and The Maddening a fairly trashy film. Danny had previously directed the little seen Mr North (1988) and Becoming Colette (1991), although is mostly known as an actor with a long line of credits since the 1990s, including some high-profile roles. The director is Danny Huston, son of director John Huston, known for The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The African Queen (1952). Both give totally over-the-top performances as the psycho white trash couple and this gives the film a lurid fascination akin to the way Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were shown in their faded demented glory in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and a host of imitators.

The casting of Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson, something that would have been a major headline act circa 1978, gives The Maddening a certain novelty. The film taps into the Southern Gothic atmosphere – although does use Florida as its setting, creating an intriguing new possibility of what one might call Tropical Gothic. The Maddening is an imprisonment thriller in the vein of films such as The Collector (1965), The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), Boxing Helena (1993) and Paranoid (2000).

Playmates by Andrew Neiderman