Lunatics: A Love Story (1991) As a movie buyer for video stores in the 80's and 90's, we thought we'd come across every single strange, off-the-wall and plain batshit-crazy little film produced throughout those eras.....
Damned if we ever remember seeing or purchasing this one........
And we're not sure if that's because we really never did see, purchase or hear of it.......or if it's because our mind is just so cluttered with movie memories, we forgot it altogether.
We'll cut ourselves a break and say it's the former reason, not the latter......cause we're pretty sure there's no way in hell we'd ever forget this movie if we'd ever seen it or heard of it way back when..... (we'd certainly have ordered up at least one copy for the stores' inventory.)
What we've got here is a fractured romantic comedy liberally peppered with the kind of frenzied fantasy sequences and crazed stop-motion special effects that juiced up the "Evil Dead" trilogy of 'Evil Dead', Evil Dead 2 and 'Army Of Darkness'.....
Monstrous spiders! Throbbing brains! Rappers! Mad doctors equipped with industrial strength hypodermics and power drills! And Mr. Evil Dead himself, the dean of cult movie actors, Bruce Campbell at his most manic!
Oops, we almost forgot....it's a romance.
Presenting our mis-matched couple.....Hank Stone (Ted Raimi), a former mental patient and would-be poet holed up like a hermit in an L.A. slum apartment he's decorated with wall to wall aluminum foil. The foil helps as a deterrent to Hank's periodic delusions that he's being assaulted by the hypo 'n power drill wielding medico.....(who else but Bruce Campbell)
Not far from Hank, the sweetly naieve cutie Nancy (Deborah Foreman, the once reigning princess of 1980's starlets), cast aside and robbed by her creep boyfriend (who else but Bruce Campbell), hits the streets and quickly run afoul of a vicious street gang.
On the run from the gang, Nancy ends up taking refuge with Hank in his foil-wrapped man cave...... a meet-cute which doesn't last long, since Hank's just a tad too eccentric for Nancy, to say the least.
But true love at first sight cannot be denied and the painfully lonely Hank braves re-entering the outside world to go on a search and rescue mission for Nancy as the street thugs close in on her.
And as in every fanboy's wet dream, true love and lunacy triumph, giant spiders die, and evil punks meet the swift end of a baseball bat......
There's no middle ground when we try to recommend a wired-up, nutball movie like this. Either you plug into its hyper wavelength and go along for ride or you shouldn't go anywhere near it.
For fantasy addicts adventurous enough to see all the off-the-rails tropes of an 'Evil Dead' movie applied to a romance, then by all means treat yourselves......
We can safely guarantee you won't see anything like this in "When Harry Met Sally" or "Sleepless In Seattle".
After all, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks never had to fend off a giant stop motion spider.
3 stars (***) As always, beware Bruce Campbell.
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