In a time when even the grottiest of films usually come with a comforting veneer of sheen, it’s great to take the time every now and then and immerse yourself up to the eyeballs in the off-putting sleeze of decades gone by. Be it the Times Square trash of Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case, the irredeemable nipple-slicing of Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper, or the sheer magnitude of upsetting content that make up either Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left, Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, or Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik, there’s something about these “forbidden” titles that conjure up unspeakable images so grimy, you can taste it with your eyeballs.
However, standing among the squirm inducing rape revenge movies and surrealistic gore romps, is Maniac, William Lustig’s thoroughly disturbing attempt to render Jaws on land with an outlandishly sweating Joe Spinell essentially playing the shark. While easily as off putting as anything else on this list, what sets Maniac apart from its piss-stained peers is that unlike some of those other titles, Maniac has a pair of formidable secret weapons to offset that uncompromising nastiness – Spinnell’s lead portrayal and the gory masterwork of one Tom Savini.
Whether you like it or not, it’s time to spend some quality time with Italian-American landlord, Frank Zito, who, due to a childhood spend enduring some sort of terrible abuse, has developed a fixation on his dead mother which makes Norman Bates seem like Norman Rockwell. We get an example just how messed up Frank is when we witness him have a nightmare where he sculks up to a canoodling couple and swiftly unalives them with bloodily gusto. However, Zito’s psychological issues don’t stop with sweat inducing night terrors as we then witness him head out into the scummy dystopia of 80s New York and hire himself a prostitute whom he promptly strangles, scalps and mounts her tangled hair on a mannequin that he proudly displays in his room.
As time goes on, we follow Frank as he claims more victims, seemingly unable to control himself in the presence of attractive women as it triggers violent memories of his prostitute mother. But after claiming other victims including a woman having a make out session in a parked car and a nurse who has the world’s most dangerous commute home you could imagine, Frank’s murderous instincts temporarily hit pause when he meets professional photographer, Anna and actually manages to spark up a near-comfortable bond with her where he manages to contain both his rage and the sheets of sweat that usually accompanies it.
But those maniacal impulses are only going hold themselves back for so long, and after blowing of some steam by claiming the scalp of one of Anna’s models, Frank’s hatred of women finally targets the unwitting photographer. But exactly how far does Frank’s insanity truly stretch – I mean, if his reason-erasing rage fits command his brain to see all attractive women as his abusive mother, what else will it make him do?
There had been movies that put us square in the shoes of serial killers before – Peeping Tom and 10 Rillington Place are two noticable examples – and there’s certainly been many after, but there isn’t anything quite like William Lustig’s Maniac. Lustig basically trained himself on the sets of porn movies, which obviously is something of an invaluable bonus when you’re first, proper feature film is about a misogynist lunatic with mother issues so vast they could be seen from space – but while the knack of accurately capturing the sleaze of early 80s New York came as second nature to the fledgling director, what sets Maniac apart is that there’s a real sense of craftsmanship at work here. Obviously it’s a tremendously fucked-up form of craftsmanship, but it puts its shotgunned head and shoulders above the usual fare and a major plus is William Lustig’s focus direction which favours guerilla filming of a city that effortlessly just looks like a claustrophobic hell-hole. Be it a worst-nightmare scenario involving a deserted subway station, or a tense lead up to a spectacular head splatter, Lustig manages to deliver the well-staged kills of a polished slasher film with the same kind of documentary feel that comes with a budget leaner than a starved whippet (he visually references the actual Son Of Sam murders to an uncomfortable degree) and I generally feel that without Maniac, we probably wouldn’t have gotten John McNaughton’s searing Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer.
Next up is the always superlative work of makeup tsar, Tom Savini who was something of a hot streak as the iconic splatter of George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead had led to delivering a bevy of brutalized bodies for Friday The Thirteenth and his work here proves to be a much needed exclamation point to the building tension that acts as a gruesome release. However, despite a convincing collection of scalping, stabbing and garroting, his crown jewel is a scene where a swave lothario (amusingly played by Savini himself) has his skull rearranged in super slo-mo by a point blank shotgun blast.
However, savy direction and superlative gore wasn’t exactly a revelation in 1980 as the slasher craze was about to explode in a crimson wave, but what really separated Maniac from all the other movies about rabid killers is the character of Frank himself.
Joe Spinell was already a highly respected, larger than life, character actor who had scored noticable roles in instant classics like The Godfather and Rocky, but with Frank Zito, he managed to create a genuinely chilling character by calling on his physical attributes to give us a crazed killer who wasn’t just an endless parade of creepy POV shots and a shock reveal – he was the lead character. With his pock-marked skin, hefty build and the ability to be coated in more sweat than the casts of Body Heat, Do The Right Thing and Top Gun combined, Spinell gives Zito layers that your average 80s slayer simply didn’t get and even though some of his performance lapses into caricature (the over the top mouth breathing is a dead giveaway), he is never less than legitimately convincing as a guy who is compelled to murder women and thus is predominantly responsible for how well the film remains as a snapshot of a more lurid time.
Is Maniac vile and offensive to women – well probably, but it’s supposed to be. But on the other hand, while we watch Frank go about his hideous task, we’re never asked to understand, accept or cheer on what he’s doing the way some slashers do and most importantly, his acts are never excused either. Yes, he just simply does what he does because he has no control over his actions, but he also has no intention of even trying to stop them and once his mad-dog psyche finally turns against him in the trippy climax, his victims manage to get some sort of overdue revenge, even if it’s all within Zito’s scrambled brains – and let’s be honest, you can’t really say that about Travis Bickle…
Repellent, sleazy, upsetting. Believe me, these are all major plus points when discussing Maniac.
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