264. Craze

264. Craze (1974)
Director: Freddie Francie
Writers: Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel based on a novel by Henry Seymour
From: Cult Cinema

An antiques dealer starts sacrificing women to a forbidden idol in exchange for supernatural riches.

With a title like Craze, I expected something much closer to Panic or Romero’s The Crazies, ie. a film about a form of murderous madness or paranoia spreading through a population or at least being exercised by a group of people. Instead, this is Jack Palance with a thin porn stache murdering random women.

We open with Palance as the leader of this oddball cult that meets in his basement. A woman “sacrifices” herself to the idol by either pretending to cut her stomach open or by cutting her stomach open (it’s not clear if it’s supposed to be fake or is just a terrible special effect). After the cult leaves, a former member who’d been expelled bursts in, struggles with Palance, and impales herself upon the idol’s claw. Police come to Palance’s store to ask him questions about the missing woman, but he says he hasn’t seen her in months.

Palance runs an antique shop that’s doing poorly. He tells his assistant to sell a desk to an interested party, but they find a hidden drawer full of gold coins. Palance attributes their good luck to the sacrifice he made so, of course, he goes on the prowl to kill other women.

And that’s really the balance of the movie. There’s a bit of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die in the leeriness of Palance’s hunting. First he’s looking to hook up with someone, then kill her, but even that devolves into just Palance finding someone and killing them. The murder sequences don’t have much drama.

While all this is happening, the police keep pursuing Palance, but there’s never any explanation for why. The lead detective is suspicious of Palance and then, after another murder, is still suspicious, therefore he must be the killer. I’m not exaggerating about his logic there. No evidence connects Palance to the murders which only serves as proof for this cop that Palance is the killer.

Palance’s assistant also knows what’s happening, but is sort of caught in the middle. He’s benefiting from what’s happening, which makes him an accomplice, and Palance is threatening him every time the assistant suggests slowing down the killings.

Even that doesn’t make sense. Palance keeps killing and keeps reaping unrelated economic rewards, but he never seems driven to kill out of mania or a sense of needing the money. So the movie lacks any motive force. Eventually, Palance has a fight with the assistant and throws him through a window which leads the police to rush in. Palance faces off against them in the basement by, I’m not making this up, holding an axe and spinning around, until the cop who’d been suspicious of him the entire movie just shoots him. Palance falls upon the idol and dies. THE END.

The sweet release of farts.

It’s boring. Skip it. Yes, there’s some fun to be had laughing at the way Palance looks, but here’s the picture. Now you don’t need to see the movie. The deaths aren’t interesting and there’s no sense of tension at all, neither in the kills or the cops closing in. The kills lack tension because it’s obvious this character was introduced only to be killed and the cops lack tension because they’re never actually closing in. In that sense, it’s pretty similar to the other Jack Palance “thriller” I reviewed in this series, Man in the Attic. That movie also featured little tension and cops landing upon the killer more through luck than through any investigative action on their part. That movie at least let Palance have some character moments, though. This is just boring throughout.