This movie is so delightfully strange that I wondered, "Who would have made something this odd and tone deaf?" That someone would be Andrea Bianchi, the director of Cry of a Prostitute, Strip Nude for Your Killer and Burial Ground, three movies that pretty much set the strandard for either sleaze, strangeness or a combination platter of both.

Made for French distributor Eurocine - just like Bianchi's co-directing effort with Jess Franco Angel of Death - this movie piles on the weirdness and the sleaze in equal measures in story that may be about a devil cult that kidnaps prostitutes and tortures them to death to clean them of evil. It's also about the pimps coming to the country to kill the cult and get their ladies back. And it's also about a man coming to save his girlfriend.

Between Bo Svenson, Robery Ginty and Chuck Connors, the actors of this movie are all gruff and weathered. Ginty is the lead villain, a man who uses torture to take the sin out of these women by making them admit that they love Satan, which would seemingly be a good thing, right? Their aims are somewhat confusing.

I also have no idea why Connors is working in a lab across town and teaching Matthieu, a mentally challenged teen, how to speak with the aid of computers. These scenes show all the nuance you'd expect out of a Eurohorror/slasher film made in 1987.

What I do know is that this movie is on Tubi and that means that at any moment, someone unsuspecting could put this on and be confronted by its utter inanity. That alone makes me love this movie, along with a healthy helping of Satanic rituals, outdated computers and a shootout conclusion that wipes out nearly the entire cast.

It's hard to believe that director Andrea Bianchi and his cast were actually working from a script when making Maniac Killer, such is the general slipshod nature of the movie. It bears all the hallmarks of a film made at speed with very little preparation and on the tightest budget possible.

For this bottom-of-the-barrel horror, Bianchi enlisted the dubious talents of three past-their-prime B-movie stars - Chuck Connors, Bo Svenson, and Robert Ginty - all three giving what must be amongst the worst performances of their not-exactly-illustrious careers. Connors plays biochemist Professor Roger Osborne, who is searching for the cure to all the ills of mankind. Svenson is wealthy aristocrat Count Silvano (Svenson),and Ginty is Gondrand, the crazed leader of an Inquisición style murder cult, who has designs on the Count's young wife (he can't be ALL bad though - he owns a cool KISS pinball machine that he lets his henchmen play on).

The real star of the film, however, is François Greze as local village idiot, Matthieu, who roams the countryside collecting animal specimens for use in Osborne's experiments, and who learns to talk with the help of the scientist's array of computers. Greze is hilarious, overacting wildly, his portrayal of the wild-eyed, drooling imbecile almost as memorable as that of Peter Bark in Bianchi's zombie classic Burial Ground. The film's ridiculous highlights see Matthieu trying to describe the abduction of the count's wife with the use of what looks like Photoshop 1 (he may be dumb, but he's got some serious graphics skills),and his explaining of the same to the police via charades (Lionel Blair, eat your heart out).

Other hilarious highlights include several cheesy torture scenes in which topless hookers are menaced by a fat, bald, shirtless guy, who uses pliers and a hot iron to get them to confess to being possessed by Satan, plus a couple of incredibly inept but bloody shootouts in which one of Gondrand's men outguns a gang of pimps and blasts a load of cops.

The film ends with Gondrand getting his comeuppance, stabbed in the back by one his torture victims, at which point Greze delivers the best line of the whole film: "Bad... man... dead. Good". Might get that on a t-shirt.

5/10 - it's lousy film-making, but also fairly entertaining.

I must first say that I was kind of disappointed by the lack of gore in this movie by Andrea Bianchi (director of Burial Ground). Having seen the gorefest that is Burial Ground, I was expecting something along those lines, but it's not. Nevertheless, this movie was entertaining with its bad acting and its plot that barely make sense.

It's the story of a weird cult that kidnaps prostitutes in a small French village, and tortures "inquisition style" in order to purify their souls. But, soon the local pimp and others will seek revenge. It also includes a scientist from California that uses the village idiot to capture small animals to experiment on them.

Entertaining, if you want to laugh at a bad movie.