Maniac

Title: Maniac
Director: William Lustig
Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Tom Savini
Year: 1980
MPAA: Not Rated
Date of Review: February 27, 2007

Maniac opens with a grisly murder on a beach, where Frank Zito - a schizophrenic serial killer, and the film’s protagonist - kills a young couple having a romantic evening by the seaside. It’s nothing shocking by today’s standards, but it manages to start the movie with a punch, and also begins its 90 minutes of violence, gore and depravity. Every kill throughout the film gets more gruesome - sometimes not visually, but in the tension and the sheer idea of what Frank is doing to these people. The film really doesn’t cover any new ground in the serial killer genre, but it succeeds in being a thoroughly unsettling venture with a main character who is effectively creepy.

Frank is played by Joe Spinell, and at the risk of sounding quite mean, he is a very unattractive man. Not only in the fact that he is overweight, poorly groomed and generally strange looking, but his voice, his mannerisms - even his walk - all add up to a frightening persona. This is both to the film’s advantage, and part of its downfall. In one scene, a beautiful photographer named Anna (played by Caroline Munro - you may remember her as Stromberg’s busty assistant in The Spy Who Loved Me) takes a photograph of Frank talking to a child in the park. Frank sees this, finds out where she lives, and shows up one day, introducing himself as “the guy you one took a picture of in the park”...so of course she invites him into her home, then goes on a date with him. It’s easy to see what the filmmakers are trying to do with this - another serial killer movie which tries to shock the audience with “look how normal these people could be - you could be living next door to a mass murderer!”, but unfortunately Spinell never really turns off the creepiness in Frank, and subsequently it doesn’t seem too plausible that a beautiful woman would ever give him the time of day, let alone invite him into her home without knowing his name.

And while coming to know Frank is a very disturbing experience, you can’t help but feel a little bit bad for the man. He is very sick, of course, but the film also delves into his very lonely (albeit twisted) home life. He has no friends or family, he lives in a single room apartment by himself, and he is never shown by himself without being in a state of emotional distress - Frank is a very sad and lonely man. But that also brings us to his backstory, which is a little muddy. Apparently his mother treated him poorly when he was a child and he sees these brutal murders of women as a way of repaying her for the way he was treated. Unfortunately, this is never made very clear, since the audience only ever hears of it in Frank’s nonsensical ramblings while working in his apartment - and oftentimes he is crying during these short monologues, making it even harder to understand what he is saying. The backstory would have worked much better in one of two ways: if it had been fleshed out and easier to piece together, or altogether dropped so that it seems he is seemingly doing this for no reason. As it is, it tries to add depth to the story but only succeeds in confusing the viewer.

What will undoubtedly catch the attention of most viewers is the gore. Created by special effects and make-up wizard Tom Savini (who also has a small role in the film), Maniac feature the same juicy, chunky, explosive, arterial goreshots you would expect from something with Savini’s name in the credits. Cuts result in gushes of blood, stabs are surrounded by oozing and slurping sounds, and at one point a victim who is shot in the head and explodes from the neck up. But unlike the work Savini did on George Romero’s zombie films, the gore in Maniac can actually be quite unpleasant to look at because of the story’s basis in reality. Of course there are things in the film that would never happen, but there isn’t the constant reminder of the fact that it’s “just a movie” like you would get in horror films dealing with goblins and ghouls.

Maniac is a good but flawed film. Gore afficionados will no doubt love the work presented by Tom Savini - and will also get a chuckle out of his short scene on camera - but others may find that there is really nothing new here to add to the serial killer genre. The story is a blend of several others, sampling especially from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. But while it doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, what it does do, it does well, and would surely be appreciated by fans of the wave of slasher movies in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

7 / 10