Review: Neon Maniacs (1987)
By William Pattison
All right we end our series of iconic films that were made
in San Mateo and San Francisco Counties with a film that barely managed to get
finished.
Yes, I’m talking about
that amusing monster mash Neon Maniacs.
This film has an awesome concept. It is about a bunch of
cool individual monsters and killers from another reality that come to this
world to hunt and slaughter. Sounds great. But unfortunately you end up with
money picking asshole producers and you get this sad abused piece of cult
horror. So, much potential but destroyed by the studio..
This production was riddled with issues that nearly caused
the film to not be finished. First off there were originally supposed to be twenty
five of the title creatures but the producers ended up having to cut the number
of creatures in half due to financial issues. Also one of the maniac actors
quit because the production started to cost cut and changed the contracts of
the actors. The production found a replacement for the actor but because the
makeup and costume department had to rework the character to fit the new actor a
bunch of the members of both departments got cut to make up the money. Eventually
the incompentant producers cut so much of the production budget they had to cut
a lot of the origin scenes for the monsters as well as cut out a lot of the
major kill scenes. In the end the film that ended up being produced bore no
resemblance to the original script what the filmmaker intended. The entire
origin of the Maniacs were cut down to a voice over monologue and a guy finding
a bag with Maniac trading cards with the rough hint that the individual
creatures came from the cards themselves, even though later thestory has
something about a bus and a hinted portal. Anyway, as you can guess this film
is a bit of a mess. The creatures are cool and it would have been great if
someone had put out Neon Maniac action figures, with the trading cards of
course. But as a film this piece of San Francisco film history has a shitload
of issues.
His film is a prime example of how fucked up it is to work
with producers who don’t understand film production.
Viewers are lucky they managed to get anything near to a coherent
film in the end. The scenes they managed to shoot had potential but the film is
so Frankensteined together it is loaded with scenes that go against others and
are full of missing info and plot holes.
No good.
In many scenes you see the actors struggling with their
performances.Yet somehow with everything wrong with this film it is amazingly
entertaining in spite of itself. It’s an
interesting hot mess with cool monsters and in the end by some magical bit does
the job. What more can I say???
