Bruce Campbell’s Forgotten, R-Rated 90s Thriller Is Pure Cult Paranoia

By Robert Scucci
| Published 7 seconds ago

The beauty of Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi produced films is that you always know what you’re getting into. You get weird characters thrust into even weirder situations, and you have to rely on their charm to carry you through whatever chaotic premise the screenplay lays out. More often than not, outings from this era, like 1991’s Lunatics: A Love Story, are extremely low budget, low brow, and high concept, and you just have to roll with it.

Written and directed by Josh Becker, and starring Ted Raimi and Deborah Foreman, Lunatics: A Love Story centers on agoraphobic machinations, giant spider monsters, call girl hotlines, and misguided romance. Set almost entirely inside a run-down Los Angeles apartment wrapped in tin foil, we catch a glimpse of just how far one man’s mind can spiral when he needs companionship the most, resulting in romantic exchanges that are baffling to say the least.

The Dangers That Await Outside

Lunatics: A Love Story, despite its 87-minute runtime, takes a while to get going. We’re first introduced to Hank (Ted Raimi), a recluse who hasn’t left his apartment in over six months. His neighbors have never seen him, and the mail carrier who stops by daily is irritated because he never comes downstairs to collect his correspondence. The inside of Hank’s apartment looks exactly how you’d expect. His door has multiple locks, and his walls are wrapped in foil.

Though we don’t know the exact reason Hank has become so isolated, it’s established early on that he has nightmares about spiders crawling on his brain, and a masked doctor (portrayed by Bruce Campbell) chasing him with comically large needles filled with mysterious fluids.

Meanwhile, across town, Nancy (Deborah Foreman) faces her own obstacles. She’s dumped by her boyfriend Ray (also Bruce Campbell) and kicked out of the hotel she’s staying at after he steals her money on his way out, leaving her unable to pay for the room. While wandering the streets, she’s attacked by a group of thugs and seeks refuge in a nearby payphone at the exact same time Hank is dialing out to call a sex hotline.

By sheer coincidence, or maybe something cosmic is at play, the payphone rings when Hank dials, and Nancy picks it up. He invites her to his apartment because he needs company. Up until this point, he’s been hallucinating rappers who forcibly scratch beats on his turntable using his face, and intruders trying to breach his front door with a bone saw.

When Nancy takes Hank up on his offer, they finally sit down and talk through their problems, both terrified of the horrors, real and imagined, that await them outside.

One Glaring Problem 

It goes without saying that any fan of Bruce Campbell and the Raimi brothers’ unhinged style of filmmaking will enjoy the creature design and schlocky special effects that Lunatics: A Love Story has to offer. There’s always a manic charm you can get behind if you know what you’re signing up for, and this film is no exception.

Narratively speaking, though, the film falls apart for one specific reason. It takes nearly 40 minutes for our two protagonists to cross paths, meaning there’s very little time for them to establish trust, become friends, and hit things off in a believable way. Given just how unhinged Hank is at the beginning of the film, it’s wildly improbable that somebody like Nancy would not only enter his apartment, but stick around for more than five minutes given how uncomfortable the setting is.

Then again, I’m not seeking out movies like Lunatics: A Love Story for a tight screenplay that makes logical sense. I seek out movies like this because I want to watch somebody go off the deep end while whoever gets dragged into his chaotic life by happenstance tries to make sense of everything. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll have a great time watching Hank finally suit up in his tin foil armor and make his way into the Los Angeles streets, where he hallucinates giant spiders, encounters the gang members tormenting Nancy, and completely loses his mind in the process.

All the elements of an insane, low-budget Raimi and Campbell production are here, and writer-director Josh Becker couldn’t have asked for a better team to help realize his vision, as bootstrapped as it may be. What you get is a fun, quick trip into the mind of a deeply unstable man searching for a romantic partner in his increasingly closed-off life, and it works shockingly well within that framework.

To witness all of the low-budget, genre-bending charm that Lunatics: A Love Story has to offer, you can stream the title for free on Tubi as of this writing.