(No matter how bad a movie is, that shouldn't give some scissor-happy jerk the right to chop up the video box.)
Craze
1974 – United Kingdom
Director – Freddie Francis
Paragon Video Productions, 19??, VHS
I’ve learned to be wary of films starring Jack Palance, films about witches, and films made in the UK. Rarely do any of these categories deliver on their own but this is the first time I’ve seen them all boldly thrown together. In a basement somewhere Palance leads a black magic ceremony centered on a googly eyed African idol. After some spooky talk, a woman does a little topless hustle in front of the Chuko idol and unconvincingly cuts her stomach open.
After the best part of the movie is over, an older woman shows up to argue about her prior membership in the coven and during a scuffle with Palance is impaled on the idols pitchfork.
Besieged by unpaid bills and debt Palance is at his wits end and at the point of having to close his little failing antique/import business. Just as his pasty British fop of an assistant finds out about the murder and starts spiraling into a whine-fest, Palnce throttles him into silence, and discovers a secret drawer full of gold coins hidden in his favorite desk.
So sweet, this means the sacrifice worked, or at least that’s what Palance thinks. Wasting no time, Palance heads to a local bar, er, Pub and picks up a waxy looking Italian woman, takes her home, gets high, gets laid and when she won’t do a striptease for Chuko he gets chokey.
Rather soonish after that several Oriental chaps show up at his little storefront and eagerly purchase some authentic Ming vases which a previous conversation established as unsellable. Hey the bucks, er, Pounds are just rolling in now! Sweet old Chuko is paying in dividends, and despite his assistants reckless suggestion of a party, Palance decides to invest his newfound wealth in a bottle of cherry brandy which he uses to get a big pasty fat chick in leopard print drunk.
Finally killing his own aunt as a sacrifice, Palance has gone perhaps too far and has to identify her corpse for the police, his grief about as convincing as his intermittent shoddy English accent. A clever fade effect using Chuko’s eyes is used to show how evil he has become while he grins with gluttonous delight as his aunt’s will is read, and then read again thanks to an editing mistake in the film. His assistant starts whining like a pussy again and Palance visits a BDSM call-girl while the assistant visits three double scotches to get his dander up before returning to the shop to confront his boss who, surrounded by angry pale British, finally breaks.
Jack Palance tries to make it through Craze.
This PG yawn fest was pretty much exactly what I expected from any of the aforementioned three film-sinking elements. I had hoped that the combination of the three might result in some fantastic plumbing of the sloppy depths of terrible, but no, it failed even at that. It didn’t help that Palance had a thin little mustache which remided me of Charles Bronson. I love Charles Bronson, I hate Jack Palance.
For some reason beyond my comprehension, the band is about to hit the big-time and all the members are already gearing up for their rockstar stereotype offstage roles as junkie womanizers. OK, not all of ‘em, but we have to listen to the sensitive creative ones yammer on about it for a while. Meanwhile one of their roadies is making himself up to look like one of the band members, he’s really shy (and creepy) and this way he can get laid by girls who think he’s in the band. Everyone else is OK with that, and laughs it off. After a brief and boring show by The Clowns his buddy, Roadie #2 goes off to score some drugs from some girl, who is shortly thereafter stabbed to death by someone dressed like one of “The Clowns.”
Some ninja, knowing the lasting virulence of the magnetic tape format, steal a secret formula recorded on video tape, which it is rumored can give soldiers a morale boost/bloodlust. They bring it to their goofily yellow clad boss, White Man #1. 
Aaron quickly befriends a pint-sized hustlin’ street kid who’s down with all the top Asian gangsta’s in Hong Kong, including Campbell, who’s sleeping with Billys mother. Aaron is repeatedly mugged by Campbells goons, and then there is a dance-club scene with stolen Michael Jackson music.
As WM2 and his imperialist ninja administration team plan the colonial crackdown on the other Asian four fifths of this film, Billy suffers the culmination of emotional trauma at the hands of his
Finally, heaving themselves bodily from behind their fiercely monolithic mass produced oaken administrative desks, the WM scuffle heartily over the videotape and eventually the winner gets a soft-on. 
Behaving like an 80’s slasher movie version of the Scooby Doo gang, we know we’ll get some fluffy “horror, but we’ll also not only get boobs, but (since it’s Italian) also sausage. Here now, the film begins to cycle through it’s basic shot rotation; shot of “scary” rats, people reaction shot, gory aftermath, broken up occasionally with some banal vapid dialogue.
During the first night of Mattei’s requisite synth-goth soundtrack, we get less than frightening death of lovers while at the same time, another member of the group is attacked and gnawed by a few rats and, in a stroke of merciful genuis, his friends set him on fire to ease his suffering, everyone feels bad and is finally, if a little suddenly, terrified of the rats, despite their otherwise unmotivated rodent performance.
Soon the rats have driven a psychological wedge between the group who’s internal rivalry leads them to a near re-enactment of Night of the Living Dead’s climactic survival tactics argument. Nevertheless despite flamboyant, exuberant fearmongering hyperbole, the rats remain unconvinced of their own powers, requiring a scattering of food on the floor to keep them in place for each shot.
