Maniac (1962)
The rape of his teenage daughter instigated a violent, maniacal retribution on the perpetrator for which Georges (Donald Houston) was incarcerated in an asylum for the insane. When a stranger (Kerwin Mathews) enters a quiet, French town and is seduced by a sensuous married woman (Nadia Gray) he unwittingly finds himself at the centre of a storm of sex and murder for which he has been carefully groomed to take full blame.
An reasonable Hammer programmer which crawls along to begin with following a rape / revenge pre-credits sequence but picks up in it's final third with a twist you won't see coming.
Kerwin Mathews fresh from his Harryhausen exploits makes for an affable lead, (although the way he flirts with the daughter (Lilianne Brousse) before swiftly moving on to her mother comes over as decidedly strange, if not predatory) and Nadia Gray a fiery femme fatale. Even though it was filmed in black and white, it's sun baked French coastal setting firmly removes it from Hammer's Technicolor Gothic horrors of the period. Although more thriller than horror, Maniac certainly veers into frights with the blow torch sequences, but is never as chilling as Psycho (1960) the Hitchcock film on whose coat tails this B-movie definitely rides.
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