Late Night Classics – The Invisible Maniac (NSFW)

There are so many dignified things that I could do with the power of invisibility. Peace treaties could be forged and nuclear weapons could be dismantled, but where is the fun in that? The inner Benny Hill in me would rather look up girls skirts and hang out in a women’s locker room all day than try to be a philanthropist. The ladies might not want to hear that, but in some ways I am still a knuckledragger and I would not be able to resist that temptation.

There is a film that is like one of my wet dreams come true. A masturbatory classic of John Holmes-sized proportions that would make Mr. Skin blush. The movie I am speaking of is Adam Rifkin’s The Invisible Maniac, which is a loving throwback to H.G. Wells with a side order of libidinous imagery that will have you singing morning wood the whole way through.

Jason Bene: It had been a long time since an invisible man film had been done. What made you decide to make one?

Adam Rifkin: The way it all came about was I had been trying to get my movie The Dark Backward made for a really long time. It was the first script I had ever written. I had the opportunity to make a different movie first called Never on Tuesday, but The Dark Backwardwas my passion project and I was dying to get it made. The opportunity to make it came up, which was absolutely thrilling beyond words. John Landis has been my mentor from the time I was very young. I was always a big fan of his when I made my first film Never on Tuesday. I contacted him out of the blue and I asked him if he would watch it because I was a big fan of his and I just wanted him to see it. He was very generous and he invited me to the Universal lot and he screened at the Hitchcock Screening Room. He took me to lunch. He couldn’t have been nicer about it. After that, he was always tutoring and mentoring me. He would read scripts that I had written and he would recommend me to people for jobs. One of the things that he had said to me early on was, “When you are a director, you have very little opportunity to practice.” I thought to myself, “Well, The Dark Backward is such an opportunity for me to make a movie that I really believe could be special.” I want to make sure I am on my game as much as possible.

At the same time one of the other producers [Cassian Elwes] was cranking out lots of low budget movies. Lots of exploitation movies. I said to Cassian, “Let me direct a real quickie. Just for more practice. I want to shoot more film before I do The Dark Backwardjust so that I’m that much better when I get behind the camera.” He said, “Great!” Basically the formula was they cranked those things out in a week. They didn’t care if they were any good as long as they had boobs and blood. That’s all that they needed to make a huge profit. At that time if a movie was basically ninety minutes long and it had some boobs and it had some blood and it was in color, you could make a fortune on the home video market. The casting director [Tony Markes] of The Dark Backward and I came up with this ridiculous idea to do an invisible man movie on the cheap. We just thought it was a really funny idea to film people fighting with an invisible man because we would just have people pretending to take punches and we would put sound effects in. We just thought that was funny.

I had always wanted to do an exploitation movie because I love them. I created the character of Rif Coogan to be my nom de plume. Rif Coogan was going to be my exploitation persona, my grindhouse persona. I banged out the script in record time. We just got it up and going in a matter of a couple of weeks. We cast all of the girls because they were the ones who were willing to do the nudity. We didn’t care that they were bad actresses or good actresses. It was one of the most fun experiences making a movie that I have ever had because the stakes were so low. To me, going in, it was some practice before I got to shoot The Dark Backward. It was an opportunity to create this character and make a exploitation movie. I was sort of hiding behind this fictitious persona, so I didn’t feel that if it was horrible it would hurt my credibility as a serious filmmaker. We just had a blast doing it. It was just all one big laugh. Everybody had fun. That’s kind of how it all came about.

Jason Bene: You wrote a very voyeuristic script where you have this young boy peeping through his telescope and checking out a woman getting undressed. How much of that was influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Brain De Palma’s Body Double?

Adam Rifkin: All of it was. When you are a writer or an artist, or whatever art form you are a part of, you can’t help being influenced by all the things you watched in your lifetime and have liked. Obviously voyeurism is a big thing with me anyway as you can tell from LOOK. It’s a theme that I have always been fascinated by. My favorite Hitchcock movie is Rear Window. Those are just fun things to explore, especially in a movie that is a genre movie. The term exploitation has a negative connotation, but it just means low budget, genre, fun, T & A, and blood. To me, those kinds of movies were always lots of fun. I wanted this movie to deliver on the exploitation promise. I wanted to make sure it delivered on the boob quotient and the blood quotient. I wanted to make an exploitation movie that I would have wanted to see if I stumbled across it at two o’ clock in the morning on cable.

Jason Bene: When Kevin Dornwinkle is a little boy he deals with an overbearing mother who chastises him for being a little pervert for spying. Once again Hitchcock rears his head in the form of Psycho.

Adam Rifkin: Psycho influences everybody. I did a Trailers from Hell where I did a commentary on Deranged, which is basically the Ed Gein story. I said, “Hollywood should erect a statue of Ed Gein.” Ed Gein has inspired so many movies. There is Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Deranged, and just so many more. Some of that influence trickled into this movie as well. We had a blast with all the fun clichés. Of course, he grows up to be a maniac because of his domineering mother who sexually repressed him.

Jason Bene: It was obviously a different time when your picture was made because now it is very hard to get an actress to do nudity. When you made The Invisible Maniac, taking off your clothes was a prerequisite for these kinds of flicks. You have so many shower scenes that I lost count on one hand.

Adam Rifkin: We thought it was funny. If you are going to make a movie called The Invisible Maniac and you are going to crank it out for a few hundred grand, that’s part of the deal. You have to deliver on the exploitable elements.

Jason Bene: I guarantee you that if any guy had the chance to be completely invisible, the first thing he would do is run to a girl’s locker room or the nearest gymnasium. And if they say that they would not do that, then they are full of shit.

Adam Rifkin: Of course!

Jason Bene: You also did a Trailers From Hell commentary on Halloween, and in this movie you have somebody who escapes a State Institute for the Criminally Insane. You and I definitely grew up with the same kind of cinema.

Adam Rifkin: [Laughs] We just wanted to hit every cliché.

Jason Bene: Where did you find Noel Peters, and was the maniacal laugh part of the audition process? He has not done a lot of acting since.

Adam Rifkin: I don’t know where he went since The Invisible Maniac. He had auditioned for The Dark Backward. The role that he auditioned for was one that I had always wanted Bill Paxton to play, and Bill Paxton ended up actually playing the role. Prior to us knowing that Bill Paxton was going to play that role, we auditioned actors for the role of Gus. He auditioned for it and we thought he was hilarious. He was so committed to the performance, which made it so much funnier. He had done the laugh in the audition for The Dark Backward. I didn’t audition him for The Invisible Maniac; we just gave him the part.

Jason Bene: For the breasts you go to Russ Meyer, and for the booty you go to Tinto Brass. I feel like you are the combination of those two filmmakers.

Adam Rifkin: [Laughs] Rif Coogan is the combination of the two.

Jason Bene: How important is nudity in a genre film?

Adam Rifkin:That’s just part of the fun of genre movies. That’s just part of the experience. These are exploitation movies. They’re exploiting elements like nudity and violence. To me, that’s part of the package. I grew up loving these kinds of movies, and when the promise of a movie being exploitative is broken by it not having any violence or not having any T & A, it’s a little bit of a disappointment. When you watch a movie called The Invisible Maniac you don’t give a shit about the story. You don’t give a shit about the characters. Any additional stuff is gravy, but you want the T & A. I remember when I was a kid I would rent genre movies and you would fast forward through half of them so you could go past the boring parts so you can see somebody’s head blown up or boobs bouncing up and down. That’s just par for the course.

Jason Bene: You have quite a few cool death scenes, but I do not think I have ever seen a foot long sub sandwich shoved down someone’s throat and have someone mock the person by saying, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” You made this picture when everything was practical effects. Did you really think you could pull it off?

Adam Rifkin: We knew we could pull it all off because we didn’t care if it looked cheesy. That was part of the fun. We knew that we couldn’t afford to do things really, really well; and we really didn’t care. Tony Gardner did all of the effects and he just had fun and put a bladder on his neck, and when the sandwich went in he inflated the bladder. It was very low-tech, but effective in that B-movie way.

Jason Bene: The only two invisible man films that I can think of since The Invisible Maniac are Memoirs of an Invisible Man and Hollow Man. Paul Verhoeven must have watched you picture a few times.

Adam Rifkin: Not only did he watch The Invisible Maniac, but if you research Paul Verhoeven online he talks about it in many interviews. He says he watched a lot of invisible man movies, but he cites specifically The Invisible Maniac as having been a big inspiration for Hollow Man. When you watch Hollow Man it’s just a giant budget version of the same movie.

Jason Bene: Paul Verhoeven enjoys doing things over the top and I felt like working with a big studio that he held back a little. There is the scene where a girls gets raped by Kevin Bacon’s character and you do not see a thing. Old school Verhoeven would have showed it all. That is what is great about The Invisible Maniac is that it is independent and it does not have that pressure.

Adam Rifkin: For a big studio movie he still delivered some pretty exploitable elements. I thought the effects were pretty good. It is exactly the kind of movie I might have made with the budget that Paul had. I was very honored to read those interviews with him where he talks about The Invisible Maniac. There is one interview with Paul Verhoeven and Kevin Bacon and he is telling Kevin that he’s got to go watch The Invisible Maniac.

Jason Bene: What else can you tell us about The Invisible Maniac that fans might not know?

Adam Rifkin: One of the things about that movie that a lot of people like is the ending song. In fact, there is a video up of it on You Tube. The song was written and performed by ‘Keep Left’, and they were headed up by a guy named Dan Povenmire. He also did the cat and mouse animation for The Dark Backward, but he was also one of the main directors of Family Guy and SpongeBob Squarepants. He now has the most successful children’s animated series on television right now. He is the creator, producer, director, and animator of a show called Phineas and Ferb, which is the biggest animated hit on the Disney Channel. It smokes SpongeBob Squarepants as far as ratings and merchandising sales. You should check it out because it’s a great show.

I should also mention one other thing that makes The Invisible Maniac infamous is that it was the first role for an actress named Shannon Wilsey. She played the beautiful blond high school student who will do anything for an A. After we shot The Invisible Maniac she went on to become the biggest porn star of the 90′s and went by the name Savannah. There was an E! True Hollywood Story that detailed her life and that she killed herself. It was really, really sad because she was really sweet. Believe it or not when we were shooting her first scene where she is naked in a shower she was very nervous about doing nudity. She was absolutely petrified. She asked if she could get drunk. We said, “Sure, why not?” We got her some champagne and she proceeded to get absolutely smashed and threw up all over the set. We weren’t able to shoot that scene that night and we ended up having to shoot it first thing in the morning while she was hung over, which was not nearly as fun as how she wanted to shoot it. She was a very sweet girl and it was very sad when she killed herself.

Jason Bene: What is it going to take to get The Invisible Maniac released on DVD?

Adam Rifkin: Oh man. It’s going to take people writing their Congressman. If the producer knows there is a demand it will happen. If this article generates a lot of comments it will help tremendously toward getting The Invisible Maniac released on DVD and Blu-ray. I met Joey Ramone of The Ramones when I bought a couple of their tracks for my movie Detroit Rock City. He was a great guy and couldn’t have been cooler. When he learned that I directed The Invisible Maniac he acted like a bigger fan of mine than I was of his and The Ramones. He was a huge fan of B-movies.

Jason Bene: I believe rock musicians and genre fans are interlinked. We all come from the same era and grew up on the same stuff.

Adam Rifkin: It’s true and we’re all fans.

Jason Bene: Getting back to the voyeuristic stuff, your Showtime series LOOK is a big hit. For people who have not caught it yet, what are they in for?

Adam Rifkin: For those who don’t know, LOOK is a series about the proliferation of cameras in our culture. It explores the idea that the average American is captured on camera three hundred times a day. That’s just surveillance cameras, that’s not including cell phone cameras, webcams, flipcams – all the cameras that we live in front of every day. The entire series is shot from the point-of-view of all these cameras. It’s based on a movie that I made of the same name called LOOK. It’s on Showtime and it is very much a show about the things that people do when they don’t think they are being watched. It’s all about voyeurism. It’s all about all the things we’re doing every day without realizing cameras are catching us. Everybody has a secret life. Everybody has a side of themselves when they are alone, and a side of themselves they present to the public. Because the entire show is shot from the perspective of these cameras, the viewer is sort of cast as the voyeur. When you watch the show you never lose sight of the fact that you are looking in people’s lives through these cameras, and as a result you feel like you might just very well be complicit in something that is illicit.

Jason Bene: LOOK delivers on the T & A aspects and it is also a really smart show because it hits different points of life for various people. It ranges from a dysfunctional couple to a homeless man. There are brains to go with the breasts.

Adam Rifkin: Thank you. It’s a totally different approach. When I make a movie like The Invisible Maniac I am purposely being exploitative and I am sort of reveling with humor in the idea that this is a total exploitation fest. When I am doing a series or movie like LOOK, to me, it is not about exploitation at all. First and foremost it’s a drama. For people who don’t know LOOK is a drama, but because it’s shot from the perspective of camera that people don’t know or aren’t thinking about the fact that they are there you can’t puss out and not have it be salacious. That’s part of what makes voyeurism intriguing; people doing things that they wouldn’t want you to see. A lot of times when people are doing things that they wouldn’t want anybody to see, they are doing things that are rather scandalous. I have to explore those angles of the human condition with LOOK, but when I say it’s not meant to be exploitative I’m being earnest when I say that. LOOK is very much a important reflection of our times. We live in a surveillance obsessed society. Big brother is all of the surveillance cameras on us every day. Little brother is all of the cameras we have in our pockets, in our homes, webcams and everything like that. Then you have Twitter, Facebook, and You Tube and all these other sort of social media outlets. Any time that the big brother cameras don’t have us under surveillance, we area actively putting ourselves under surveillance by tweeting exactly where we are, what we are doing, and what we are thinking. It’s a very fascinating time and that’s what LOOK is all about.

Jason Bene: I fucking love anthologies! What can you tell us about Chillerama?

Adam Rifkin: I can only tell you a very little about Chillerama right now, but there will be lots to talk about very soon. Me and three of my director friends [Joe Lynch, Adam Green, Tim Sullivan] all love anthology movies. We just thought wouldn’t it be cool to bring back an anthology movie. Wouldn’t it be really, really fun to homage all the fun drive-in movies of the 50′s and 60′s that we grew up watching on television. It’s already been reported who the players are. It has also been reported what the titles are of the individual stories. Tim’s is calledI Was a Teenage Werebear. Adam’s is called The Diary of Anne Frankenstein. Joe’s is called Zom B Movie and mine is called Wadzilla. There is going to be a lot to talk about beyond just those basics very, very soon.

With filmmaker Adam Rifkin’s permission, this retrospective is an official petition to help The Invisible Maniac get released on DVD. What we need from everyone is very simple. Please comment below that you want to see this Late Night Classic get a proper DVD and Blu-ray release. This is a grassroots effort that will really work if fans speak up and demand it.