Lunatics: A Love Story (1991)

Lunatics: A Love Story (1991)

W and D: Josh Becker

Here’s a wildly hilarious rare gem to get your grubby hands on…if you can find it…

Ted Raimi (brother of director Sam Raimi) stars as Hank, a poet and reclusive inhabitant of an apartment he hasn’t left in over six months since being released from a mental institution. He is haunted by visions of spiders crawling on his brain and an insane doctor (Bruce Campbell) trying to inject him to stop fighting his fantasies. He is desperate and wants to find love, he calls party chat lines and gets a call from his mother, who tells him his other brother is getting married. Fed up after having another nervous breakdown (featuring rappers rapping at him) he randomly tries to connect with somebody, so he dials a number at random.

Enter Nancy ( Deborah Foreman) whose luck is no better. She lives in the real world but everything she touches is doomed to die or fail. Her boyfriend ( also Bruce Campbell) leaves her with a large rent bill for another broad and also steals all of her money. She too fed up with how life is going runs from it all. So, after shooting a gang member she is on the run and finds herself ina phone booth receiving a call from a distraught Hank.

They decide to meet.

Hank falls in love. And that’s when the comedy really starts. One scene involves him imagining Nancy is someone else, so he punches her in the face knocking her out. It also features awesome stop motion, weird green screen shots and Evil Dead inspired hilarity. She eventually inspires him to leave the apartment, and in a Monty Python fashion, hell breaks loose for Hank. As steps out of his apartment he ‘accosted’ by surgeons, an earthquake happens and garbage truck is a giant spider going after him.

I can’t believe this movie isn’t on DVD yet, considering the hits team Raimi has produced in the last ten years (Spider Man notably) this should have found its audience by now. I absolutely love the movie for its undeniable charm but also its depressing qualities of people who are socially inept trying to reach out to one another. Its very sweet in a way.

Doesn’t hurt that Bruce Campbell has several reoccurring roles neither.

But I am mostly surprised by Ted Raimi’s paranoid romantic, much different from his serial killer in Skinner or his cameo’s in Spider Man. He pulls of a lead role very well and shows he can command the screen acting like a more physical Woody Allen. There are also priceless dialogue exchanges with Hank and Nancy, at one point asks him:

“Have you ever thought about killing yourself?”

His response “No.”

“Then why were you in a mental institution?”

“Because I tried to kill myself.”

I highly recommend it….if you can find it…

Josh Becker also directed episodes of Xena and Jack of all Trades, Alien Apocalypse and also another great indie Bruce Campbell movie called Running Time.

If only they’d release this and CrimeWave on dvd some day….