Movie Details
| Title: | Delirium | |
| Director: | Peter Maris | |
| Year: | 1979 | |
| Genre: | Exploitation | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 08.07.22 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 08.07.22 | Internet | It's been forever since I watched an exploitation movie. It feels like the few movies I watch these days are new blockbuster comic book fare which I'm never totally in love with. Well, Tarantino started his podcast with Roger Avary and in the latest episode they talk about this movie. They both liked it and went on and on about going in blind so you're not spoiled by any of the turns that the story takes. So to anyone worried about that, I'll just say that I liked it a lot. It's a regional low-budget exploitation movie but the story is surprisingly good. SPOILERS It's ostensibly a kind of maniac killer type movie with this psycho guy on this killing spree and these cops on his trail, but we soon find out that the killer is a viet nam vet who's freaked out connected to a witness that the cops interview because the witness is secretly part of this weird vigilante group that goes after rapists and killers that escape justice by technicalities. The leader of this vigilante group was the killer's captain or sergeant or whatever in Nam and now he's in charge of making all these vigilante killings look like suicide. So the movie is actually a really sound investigation as the cops try to make sense of what they've stumbled upon while the vigilante board tries to cover their tracks with this one guy going nuts and killing a bunch of women. The acting is not great (for the most part) and the score is pretty typical low-budget exploitation fare ("you get one instrument at a time. You want a bass guitar? you get the bass THEN the piano!") and the actual murder scenes don't work on the horror/gore front (except maybe the first one), and there is maybe one or two extraneous scenes put in to meet the 85-minute runtime, but for the most part the scenes play at a normal clip and nothing is too tedious or boring which is usually what happens in movies like this. I was expecting some sort of twist so I had to temper expectations that killer robots wouldn't show up or they'd all be vampires or whatever, but I do like the whole vigilante angle and I actually was engaged with the cops' detective work throughout. It was a nice touch that the autopsies revealed that all the suicides had empty stomachs which makes sense since they were held captive before the kangaroo court sentenced them to death. It's definitely not fair to say that this was "better" than the gigantic slick comic action movies or whatever since there's so much about the production itself that is amateurish, but it does have that charm of a movie out of nowhere that could be about anything... you put it in and roll the dice and sometimes it's boring crap but every once in a while it's pretty good. And this was pretty good. |
