It's southern France. Annette's father does an evil act and gets locked in an insane asylum. American painter Jeff Farrell stops at the local hangout and his woman is not happy. She takes off with the car leaving him alone. He rents a room from Annette's stepmother Eve Beynat and falls for her.

This b/w Hammer film looks better than most. Southern France looks great. It starts by suggesting shocking brutality. It leaves the movie a little unbalanced. With that kind of brutality, the atmosphere needs to be moodier and spookier. Mostly, it's like a flat little romantic melodrama. Quite frankly, it's a romance novel before the second half turn. It has some elements of a good thriller. The acting is fair for the most part especially for a B-movie.

Kerwin Matthews an American expatriate painter is essentially bumming his way across France when he encounters a mother and stepdaughter Nadia Gray and Lilianne Brousse. He starts getting interested in Brousse, but then Gray turns on the charm because she has plans for Matthews.

She wants Matthews to help her break her husband out of an insane asylum where he's been incarcerated for several years after killing someone and judged insane. So he's had the padded jail cell, but all I can say is that Gray has her own reasons for wanting her husband and they have nothing to do with what she tells Matthews.

I had a lot of trouble with this one. Primarily with the character of Matthews who in his salad days usually played honest and sincere men. But never outright fools as he is here. Granted Gray is one attractive woman, but I think most of us would have been out the door in three seconds flat when she mentioned a prison break for her husband. And the reason Gray tells Matthews she wants to bust him out wouldn't fool the horniest male teenager.

Donald Houston plays a guard at the asylum who has an agenda of his own. Hardly the best from Hammer Pictures.

Maniac is one of the lesser known of Hammer's "psychological thrillers" made in black and white around the 1960's. It's not fiendishly clever enough to be really memorable but it does have a few interesting twists. Basically the plot sees Kerwin Mathews stranded in a small French town where he books into a hotel and starts to feel attracted to the owners sexy young step-daughter. Soon after this, he also starts feeling attracted to the more mature but still sexy step-mother as well! Apart form this love triangle, there is a further problem, in that the missing family member in this scenario is the father, who is currently locked up in an asylum for a violent blow-torch murder committed years ago…now but he wants out, and our hero is about to be roped into aiding in his escape! The film doesn't hang together very well for the beginning hour or so, sadly mainly due to Kerwin Mathews' wooden performance. Seeing him flirt with the daughter and then casually drop her and turn to her mother left me feeling quite disconnected from the plot as I found him a very unlikeable character. However when the plot to spring the insane killer gets going, things get to be more fun, and its after this point that a few nice twists start being revealed. I didn't guess the ending, which I am glad to say.

The movie is nicely shot, and makes a lot of use of it's location, with some very nice location filming, especially a very odd ruin/cave which features in the finale. Although why it's set in France at all is of no consequence, they really could have used the exact same plot and just stayed put in England. Anyway it's nice to see these old movies again, and luckily this is out on DVD. It's worth a look.