It may seem grandiose to term such an unassuming, and largely forgotten, film as Madhouse an enigma, but that’s the way it shows up. At some point I’ll have to listen to director Ovidio Assonitis’s commentary on the DVD to learn more of the inside story and what he was trying to accomplish, but I’m almost afraid that what he has to say won’t live up to my own imaginings. (By the way, this is the 1981 release we're talking about, not the Jim Clark/Vincent Price 1974 film; also known as There Was a Little Girl, this Madhouse was one of the original "video nasties.")

On the surface, the film’s story is simple—in fact, too simple. A teacher of the deaf, Julia (Trish Everly) has a bullying twin sister who’s been institutionalized for years… until she escapes, apparently timing her departure to their upcoming, and shared, birthday. But so little effort goes into finding this fugitive—who surely is dangerous to herself if no one else—and the terrorized sister makes such feeble gestures at guarding against a possible visitation, that the movie takes on the abstracted feel of an urban legend brought to life: "Did you hear the one about the crazy sister and the good sister…?"

Of course it could be that the "urban legends" that Madhouse is referencing are simply other movies—a dash of Baby Jane, a pinch of Halloween, and more than a suggestion, with its emphasis on stairs, of Psycho. The film's mean dog is reminiscent of The Omen and, well, if I stopped and thought about it, there are probably even more elements that might seem familiar from landmark horror movies of the preceding two decades. And although Assonitis also made the recently-released-on-DVD Beyond the Door, which is derivative of both Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist as previously discussed, it's way too easy to dismiss him as only a dealer in second-hand horror.

Or, to stick with the fishing analogy, one could say that there’s not the single high concept here that serves to hook the audience. Instead, Madhouse goes after us with an eclectic bag of tricks that make the film seem, if you weren’t generous, undisciplined, but which I experienced as resourceful and disorienting. Which is more than an achievement than it might seem, given how "predictable" its narrative route appears: it’s as if you were to follow a connect-the-dots picture and then when you’re done what you were sure was going to be a duck turns out to be a large feathery mosquito. Yes, there is an unexpected twist—a big one—near the end of Madhouse, but it’s not one of the many that I was trying to be oh-so-clever about sighting in advance. And I’m not sure if it's dramatically satisfying (or even entirely sensical), but I give the film kudos—I just sat there, thinking, "Now where the hell did that come from?" In fact, I’d like to go back and revisit a few key scenes near the beginning to see if I can spot it coming.

With such a funhouse approach to horror—the film combines elements of giallos and Italian horror with American slasher films of the period—the violence in Madhouse takes on an unreal tone. I don’t mean "surreal" because it’s all too straightforward, but rather that the violence is disarming because it’s born from such a childlike sense of malice (there’s no personal or psychological rationale behind most of the killings). There’s a real poetry of the insane here—sometimes clumsy in its execution, but artful more often than not.

Yet despite all these virtues, creeping doubt had me wondering whether I was imposing this nightmarish atmosphere on a work that is perhaps merely disjointed and opportunistic. But then a final epigraph from George Bernard Shaw brought me up short when it appeared on screen. Here it is in its entirety, and don’t worry, reading it will not spoil one iota of the storyline for you: "… life differs from the play only in this… it has no plot, all is vague, desultory, unconnected until the curtain drops, its mystery unsolved."

So that sums up, to a tee, the lingering effects of Madhouse on the viewer: there’s no solid closure or explanation, only an evocation, as the title would imply, of being enclosed inside the place where psychosis dwells.