I clicked on an "article", little more than a list of movies that Gene Siskel walked out on. I knew about a couple of them. There was Disney's The Million Dollar Duck, an inoffensive movie I liked when I was nine. There was nothing upsetting in it, nothing that might cause a mentally unbalanced person to do anything awful. It wasn't war propaganda or sexually perverse. Nothing abnormal or a danger to society. It may have been a little sexist. It probably had an all-white cast but wasn't explicitly racist otherwise. Couldn't Siskel just relax and watch a movie about a duck that laid eggs with yolks made of gold? Is that any worse than the other crap they have in movies? I thought the fact that only the yolks were made of gold gave it scientific credibility.
Well. I looked on streaming video. Found a morally objectionable movie Siskel walked out on, Maniac, about a gross guy who goes around murdering people. It was bloodier and gorier than other such movies. Nothing really going for it. The star was a hemophiliac in real life so the bloodiness of the movie may have had some personal meaning to him. No offense to hemophiliacs. The poor guy died of a heart attack in his 50's.
I can't recommend it. I didn't watch slasher movies back when they were popular, but seeing them now, years later, most of them seem okay. They're about random murders, so the non-murder scenes are sort of laid back. They weren't straining to create an intricate plot. The death tolls were fairly low compared to things made since then.
They stole a scene from If.... In that movie, Malcolm McDowell sat in his dorm with a CO2 pistol shooting darts into the pictures he had taped up on the walls. Joe Spinell did the same thing in this movie, but he had fewer darts. He should have put on safety goggles.
I can't fault Siskel for walking out.
The star said that if you don't like horror movies, don't see it, which seems sensible but not really a defense of its content.
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