Summary:
A man struggles to suppress his desire to kill.
My Thoughts:
William Lustig and Joe Spinell came together to create “Maniac”- one of the most disturbing slashers of the 1980s. The original “Maniac” is filled with greasy, sleazy looking locations and an even greasier and sleazier villain; it also features incredibly graphic practical effects from the great Tom Savini (special effects coordinator for “Day of the Dead”, and a number of other gore classics). Though I can’t say I thought the original “Maniac” was a fun movie, it certainly made an impact on me, and I wanted to see how the remake compared.
I think this movie is, at best, an okay update for “Maniac”, but if I’m being honest, I don’t really think there’s a reason to watch this film if you’ve seen the original. The original film is a gross anomaly; Frank Zito (Joe Spinell in the original) is a completely unlikeable, completely revolting mess of a man, and the only reason it’s interesting to watch this person for an hour and a half is because he’s so psychotic. You know that Frank is going to keep killing, but the ways in which he kills are oftentimes so shocking and vile that it makes those scenes stand out vividly. The 1980s were rife with slasher flicks, and I have no reservations saying that “Maniac” is easily one of the most f*cked up. The 2012 update feels remarkably and disappointingly tame in comparison.
There were a few things that this film did right. I thought, for example, that the acting from Elijah Wood (“Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”) was pretty great. I’d never really seen Wood do a horror role other than his small silent role in “Sin City”, where he played the cannibal boy- I thought he was chilling in that role, but he was even more so in this one. I honestly think the performance was wasted on this movie, because Wood was offscreen for most of the movie (stupid POV shots).
I loved the fact that this movie still chose to use practical effects. The general plot revolves around a man who feels impulses to scalp women, and those sequences where the scalping goes on always look pretty great. I do have to mention that Tom Savini’s practical effects, which predated this film by thirty-two years, looked about a thousand times better and gorier than the effects in this movie; just goes to show you can’t beat Savini.
My biggest problem with this movie is it feels super gimmicky. A majority of the shots in this film are POV shots and that drove me freaking bonkers. Pretty much the only time when the camera isn’t POV is when Frank is killing someone; it’s sort of like he’s having an out of body experience when he kills someone- he isn’t completely in control. That idea that Frank’s urges are totally uncontrollable ran heavily through the first film, and I thought that the idea of showing Frank’s inability to control himself this way is interesting in concept, but in execution it gets very old very quickly.
Another thing I didn’t really care for in this movie was the way that we hear Frank talking to himself constantly and the way that Frank’s backstory with his abusive mother is dished out. In this film, all of the backstory seems spoon-fed to the viewer, while in the original film, Frank heard constant whisperings that vaguely hinted at his grim backstory. In the original film there was far more subtlety, we never have the story blatantly laid out for us like it was here.
Verdict:
This is a pretty middling movie. I thought Wood did a great job, and I was happy that there were some great uses of practical effects, but, honestly, this movie doesn’t do much to really stand out from the hundreds of other slasher flicks out there. See or skip this movie; it’s up to you- it won’t make a difference in the long run.
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