MOVIE REVIEW - ‘I, Madman’: Stylish Horror

For its title maniac, the stylish horror thriller “I, Madman” (citywide) has an apparently dead pulp writer who was prone to acting out the gruesome violence of his lunatic characters, and who is apparently brought back to life by the imagination of a young woman who finds his novels in a used book shop.

Apparently because the script provides little in the way of reason or explanation for any of the weird stuff going down; the villain may be nutso, but the screenplay is feeling a little mad itself.

Nonsensical and silly as “I, Madman” often is, die-hard genre fans may want to seek it out because Canadian director Tibor Takacs (whose only previous feature was “The Gate”) has a real sense of style that pulls you in and makes you pay attention even when the story disappoints. The scenes from the bad novels that the heroine fantasizes herself into take place in the ‘50s, but even when the action shifts back to the ‘80s, her seamy Hollywood apartment building and other locales have the same unsettlingly nostalgic feel found in “Blue Velvet.”

Lovely Jenny Wright (“Near Dark,” “Valentino Returns”) is well-cast as the nervous young woman who sets the gore in motion; when we first see her in a slip, she looks remarkably like the recent blond, ‘50s-ish incarnation of Madonna. Her policeman boyfriend, Clayton Rohner, with his 5 o’clock shadow, looks a lot like unshaven Tom Neal in the 1945 “Detour.” Together, they visually complement the excellent, period-style photography by Bryan England and production design from Ron Wilson and Matthew Jacobs, all of whom, you suspect, may have studied David Lynch.

In the last five minutes, “I, Madman” (MPAA-rated R for gore, sexuality and language) goes really loopy, with the mad killer from one novel doing battle against a stop-motion animation “Jackal boy” from the other as the terrified lovers look on. By that point, all subtlety, sense and good taste are long gone, and you either go all the way with its tongue-in-cheek craziness or you don’t, depending probably on your stomach’s fortitude and your lungs’ immunity to the dust of trashy, forgotten old novels.