shill: noun, 1. an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others.
Fellow IMDb members (if there are any real ones on this page), try this experiment. Click on the name of the person posting all the exuberant, ecstatic reviews and check how may other movies they've reviewed or discussed or even seen. The answer in every case: 1. This one. "Mad Song", or as I shall petition IMDb to change its title to "Mad Shill" because there are certainly some swindlers in support of this movie.
Before I even get to my review of the film, which I had typed up before even coming to this page and seeing this insultingly juvenile display of self-promotion by those whom I can only assume are the director and/or his girlfriends, I would like to pose the question: How bad does a film need to be to warrant a whole bunch of phony IMDb accounts to pad its ratings?
The answer is in my review below.
This movie was so irritating I actually shut it off 4 minutes before it ended because I wanted to leave with some shred of dignity. My original title for this review was going to be "Attack of the bad 90s clichés" because that's what it felt like. Imitating but not quite matching many of the now-dated 90s movie gags, "Mad Song" failed to achieve an identity of its own and instead came across as someone's attempt to copy other films.
In particular, this movie tries hard to be a sexy thriller like Basic Instinct (1992) or Sliver (1993), but there's nothing thrilling about it, and the sex scenes make about as much sense as a bad porno but without the nudity. We do get a few flashes of meaningless full frontal female nudity (an extra walking around in the background of a scene), and the actors are certainly doing their best to seduce each other in every damn dialogue (very tiresome, if not silly), and the lead female does wear a micro miniskirt in every scene that was probably stolen from Ally McBeal's dressing room in 1997, but other than that there's really nothing either sexy or thrilling about the production.
I give the director points for having an extreme visual style with some surrealistic edits that kept my attention. But after a while, with no thematic substance to hold it all together, the film devolved into something like an MTV video that goes on 90 minutes with the song looping over & over. That's certainly one way the Mad Song will drive you mad.
Now let's get to some of those clichés I mentioned earlier. We have (1) the creepy talk show stalker straight out of Oliver Stone's "Talk Radio". We have (2) the milfy housewife/mother who has an unerring capacity to boff every male (and maybe a few females) that she finds herself alone with for more than 30 seconds, like in, I dunno, "All Ladies Do It" (1992). We have (3) a little girl peeing on the floor like in The Exorcist (ok that one goes way back to 1973). Then we have some miscellaneous clichés that are so cliché that nobody knows where they originated, like a creepy girl wearing a hood... who has absolutely nothing to do with anything, or like a cheeseball goth-wannabe rockstar glam girl (transvestite?) who's supposed to be there to make things sexy I guess but again she has absolutely nothing to do with anything, or the WORST cliché which is the titular "Mad Song" that supposedly holds some ethereal significance to the story, but really it's just annoying.
I saved myself 4 minutes, but you can be even smarter by saving yourself the full 97 and skip this movie.
In closing, let me just say to all you IMDb folks, regardless of if you agree or disagree with me or find me insufferably boring or whatnot, I want to stress that at least I'm a real person who likes to write real reviews for real movies. And that's a lot more than I can say for the other dozen shill reviewers on this page. What an insult to IMDb, really.
