During an interview held sometime after the release of the 1998, meta sci-fi flick, The Faculty, director Robert Rodriguez stated that he’d love to cast Elijah Wood someday as a psychopath due to those hefty, expressive peepers of his. Fast forward to 2005 and the stetson wearing, guitar twanging auteur got his wish by casting Wood as the bespectacled, cannibalistic serial killer, Kevin in Frank Miller’s mega-noir, Sin City – however, little did we all know that Rodriguez would be impressively one-upped years later thanks to the remake of Willam Lustig’s stunningly sleazy slasher, Maniac.
While Wood might seem like an odd choice to take over scalping duties from the physically different Joe Spinell (the two literally couldn’t be any more different if they tried), the filmmakers strived to fashion a remake the way remakes should be done – keep the same, basic premise, but offer up an entirely different approach to the source material. But does Maniac 2012 manage to be a cut above the original?
Meet Frank Zito, a quiet, solitary man who spends his time in Los Angeles after taking over the family mannequin restoration business. However, if rebuilding clothes dummies from bygone times doesn’t sound odd enough, then Zito has quite a few skeletons in his closet that are about to come tumbling out in ghastly fashion as the recent death of his mother has trigger some alarmingly shocking behavioural patterns.
You see, Frank’s mother was a prostitute and as a young child, he repeatedly witnessed her with her clients and its given him a twisted way of dealing with loss and women in general. Crusing the night streets in search of women who reminder her of his mother, he murders them, scalps the hair clean off their heads and mounts them as trophies on the spare mannequins he keeps in his bedroom in order to recreate the one good memory he has of his childhood – brushing his mother’s hair.
After selecting his victims from either a dating app or just waiting for some woman to take walk home late at night, Frank soon racks up quite a horrific collection, but his urge to kill temporarily fades after meeting Anna, a professional photographer who needs mannequins for an art installation she’s planning. After work side by side with her and sharing the occasion lunch, Frank even starts taking his medication again in order to control his violent urges, but this attempt to revert to sanity can only be a temporary measure and when the urge strikes him once again, Anna is in danger of joining that collection of scalps that’s attracting flies back at Frank’s apartment.
However, what really makes all this death and craziness stick is that we see the entire, sordid adventure play out literally through his eyes.
When news of a Maniac remake was first announced, my first thought was “why bother?”. After all, William Lustig’s staggeringly grimy slasher was an uncompromising slice of 80s, grindhouse trash that featured an uncomfortably vivid performance from an iconic iconically sweating Spinell and jaw dropping gore from Tom Savini. Such a film simply couldn’t be replicated in this day and age, simply because the world it was made it simply doesn’t exist anymore. However, in an attempt to circumvent this, director Franck (P2) Khalfoun and co-writer Alexandre Aja managed to figure out a way to not only keep things appropriately fucked up, but also keep the spirit of the original alive.
While the original tried to put us in the headspace of Zito by having him in virtually every scene, the remake goes one better by literally putting us behind his eyes have having the entire film be from his POV. It’s a remarkable attempt to try an nail the uncomfortable realism of the original which mostly came from Lustig borrowing heavily from the Son Of Sam murders back in the 70s. Techinally, it’s a knockout, with Wood only ever really being present via an appropriately disconnected voice over or the occasional glimpse of him as he locks his gigantic, haunted eyes with ours whenever he chooses to stare at himself in the mirror. Similarly, the violence, so verbosely splattery back in 1980, now has the distinctive, vicious tang of the French extremity that Aja himself not only helped refine with his directorial debut, Haute Tension, but also aided in its arrival in America thanks to his brutal Hills Have Eyes remake. Those integral scalps are agonisingly performed and the sight of them nailed to dummies with Frank trying to shoo the flies away with all the success of King Canute telling the tide to go do one is still an indelible image even after all this time.
However, I must admit that if I hadn’t been familiar with the first film, I’m not sure how much I really would have cared about the new one aside from the technical aspect and seeing Frodo Baggins go full sex-psycho on a bunch of innocent women. As if to prove my point, the incredibly clever nods to the Lustig version are fantastic with one shot almost perfectly replicating the original, infamous poster and another moment seeing someone describing Spinell’s appearance being acts of legitimate genius – however, if you didn’t know it was a remake, the these moments would pass you by without even a glimmer of recognition and this, for some reason, seems to piss me off a little. But that’s just me I guess.
Wood, now quite the crusader for Independent horror, is suitably chilling as Frank, despite never fully embodying the role quite like Spinell, but Nora Arnezeder’s Anna feels way more naturalistic which means the central relationship isn’t quite so weird as the sight of Caroline Munroe relaxing and shooting the shit with a sweaty, poc-marked guy who is obviously three mannequins short of a clothes store. Similarly, the remake also helps that ending – which sees a wounded Zito finally consumed by his insane visions – make far more sense than it once did thanks primarily to that nifty POV gimmick, but while this new version shirks the stalk, kill, scalp pace of Maniac 1.0, you feel like it’s trying to say something relevant, but simply has no idea how to articulate it. At times it feels like it’s trying to sync up Frank’s insanity with almost an extreme, incel-like behavior (Anna’s bullish boyfriend thinks he’s gay while she only sees him as a non-sexual friend), but never really pulls the trigger on this concept to a satisfying degree. Still, at least it didn’t try to make us feel sorry for Frank like a lot of modern redos have tended to do for their murderous villains.
All in all, Maniac is a redux that fulfills the remake brief with aplomb by giving us a whole new take on an established classic; but while I could debate the need for it at all, Khalfoun, Aja, Wood and co. keep things way fresher than a moldering scrap of scalp.
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