Tubi Tales - Maniacs and Madmen

It's the return of everyone's favorite random movie reviews, mine. I have selected from my late night musings, a triple-feature of insane mania, 3 demented stories of mentally disturbed dummies doing fucked up shit.

These are freak films and maniac movies of madness and misery. Enjoy them if you can, study them to learn what kind of people to avoid, and commit yourself if you find them relatable in any way. Or just watch something nice and wholesome like Harold and Kumar.

Just remember, if you ever get lost in the loony bin, let my rational reviews guide you back to the safety of sanity.

The Professor and The Madman

I will watch anything with Mel Gibson in it. Even a movie about a dude inventing the dictionary. If that sounds like the most boring idea for a film ever conceived, that’s because it is, but again, Mel Gibson. He's one of the best maniacs there is, but surprisingly he's not the madman in this one. He’s the professor, Sean Penn is the madman, basically reprising his role as I Am Sam.

I never thought about it before, but i guess inventing the dictionary would be a pretty insane undertaking. This guy spends the whole movie exploring the etymology of every fucking. damn. shitting word you’ve ever stinkin heard of, like solving the biggest puzzle ever conceived. He only manages to get it done with the help of Mr. Full Retard in the mental asylum who has nothing better to do than help out.

They become best friends until Sam cuts his own wiener off and dies. Never make friends with crazy, a timeless moral.

Girl In The Box

This one is really wild. This girl in the 70s gets kidnapped, kept in a box, and used as a BDSM slave for years and years by this dude and his wife, who is strongly implied to be the previous slave, now promoted to mousey partner. Over time she gets broken down mentally and gaslit into thinking she is in fact a runaway slave lucky to have been captured by a relatively kind master, graciously allowing her to earn her place as live-in nanny and eventually second wife.

In the 1970s, you could just do this kind of thing. Flat out steal a person. There were no rules back then and no surveillance state to enforce them. It was a golden age for this nations killers and perverts.

These wackos keep her locked up for a long-ass time, and it becomes a matter of not just physically escaping, but breaking the conditioning enough to even want to. It’s fuckin nuts, but it happened. Yeah, this is one of those true story movies.

Crazy shit like this happens every day. The world is truly a madhouse. In some ways, aren’t we all the girl in the box? No, that’s fucking stupid, the girl in the box is the girl in the box.

My Friend Dahmer

There’s 500 movies about Jeffrey Dahmer, but this is the only good one. It’s based on a graphic novel written by a guy who knew him in high school, so it feels authentic instead of exploitative. It stays within Dahmer’s adolescence, which gives you a chance to sympathize and see a little humanity in him, rather than reveling in every gruesome detail of all the fucked up stinky shit he did later like that yucky Netflix show. 

One could argue that he doesn’t deserve any kind of sympathy, but by depicting his upbringing without judgment or sensationalism, the film is able to pose questions like where exactly did this dude’s brain go wrong, and what if anything could have been done to catch it sooner? Those are at least interesting things to chew on.

It comes off like a sincere reflection of someone who knew the guy before he went full Dahmer. The ultimate moral is that every weird edgy teen is a horrible monster in waiting, and we really should start treating them as such. Put them all in the dungeon under the prison.

If you only watch one movie about Jeffrey Dahmer, make it this one. If you watch every movie about Jeffrey Dahmer, please contact your nearest nuthouse and strap yourself to the crazy chair.