USA UP ALL NIGHT: The Maddening (1995)

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Maddening was on USA Up All Night on February 28, 1995.

Andrew Neiderman delivers again. Yes, the man who wrote Pin has had another of his books turned into a movie that will surprise you with just how far it pushes things.

Directed by Danny Houston (the son of director John Huston and half-brother of Anjelica) and written by Henry Slesar (2800+ episodes of The Edge of Night) and Leslie Greif, this is a sweat-soaked exercise in rural psychological terror that plays out like a twisted southern gothic nightmare.

The nightmare begins when a young couple, Cassie and David Osborne (Mia Sara and Brian Wimmer), have an intense argument over him spending way too much time away on business trips. The next morning, after David heads off to work, Cassie packs up their five-year-old daughter, Samantha (Kayla Buglewicz), and decides to take her to stay with her sister, Joanne (Marie Debrey), for a few days.

While on the road, they experience car trouble and pull into a seedy-looking gas station tended by Roy Scudder (Burt Reynolds). Instead of actually helping them, Roy secretly rigs their vehicle to break down just a short distance away. Once they stall out, he conveniently drives up behind them and offers to tow them back to his property.

That is when things go completely off the rails. Cassie meets Roy’s deeply disturbed wife, Georgina (Angie Dickinson), who has never been right since the mysterious death of their baby boy, Arthur. Samantha is forced to act as a playmate for the Scudders’ daughter, Jill (Candace Hutson), a terrifyingly unstable child cut from the exact same cloth as her mother. Delusional and living in a shattered reality, Georgina and Jill become convinced that Cassie and Samantha are actually Marlena and Donna, Georgina’s estranged widowed sister and niece.

When Cassie hears Samantha crying, she tries to check on her, but Georgina leads her to the wrong room and locks her inside. The room is totally devoid of any bathroom facilities, forcing Cassie to resort to desperate measures just to survive the captivity. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Joanne panics when Cassie and Samantha never show up, instantly convinced that David had something to do with their disappearance. A local police officer zeroes in on David, completely convinced he murdered his family, aided and abetted by a nosy neighbor who insists David is an abusive husband.

Things escalate into pure savagery at the Scudder home. Roy uncovers a photograph of the real Marlena, remarks on her uncanny resemblance to Cassie and tears it up. Georgina forces Cassie through a twisted, invasive bathing ritual while calling her sis, prompting Cassie to try and fight back with a pair of stolen scissors. Tragically, Georgina overpowers her and chops off Cassie’s hair to make her look even more like Marlena.

David finally tracks his family down after retracing their route and figuring out where they went. But when he arrives at the Scudder property, Roy ambushes him, strangles him with a chain and drops him into a dry water well where the skeletons of past victims lie buried. Inside the house, a drugged and battered Cassie tries to escape, while little Samantha pulls off a clever trick inspired by a story her father told her, turning Jill’s own cruel games against her to secure her freedom. As the walls close in, David manages to claw his way out of the well and sneaks back into the house to rescue his wife.

When the local detective finally pieces together the clues and tracks the credit card trail to the Scudder house, he meets a grisly end at Roy’s hands. But the Scudder household is already tearing itself apart from the inside. Georgina’s fractured mind finally shatters completely as the dark truth of their past comes to light, culminating in a fiery, explosive showdown where the Osbornes must fight for their very survival against a man driven entirely by madness.

In the late 70s and 80s, Burt Reynolds was given a reputation for not caring. Not here. He delivers a chilling, sinister performance that is a fantastic departure from his usual charming hero persona, proving he could play a genuinely menacing villain. And Dickinson is great as the unhinged mother trapped in a permanent psychotic break. It’s like America’s dream 70s couple has fallen apart, the literal perfect ideal rotted from the inside out.

Reynolds apparently kept a photo from the other movie he made with Dickinson, Sam Whiskey, above the bar in his house. It shows a scene of the two in bed, and he added a caption that said, “An actor’s life is pure hell?”

Plus you get William Hickey! This movie is wild, and more people need to see it.

You can watch this on Tubi.