Maniac

Maniac

MANIAC

1980/Director: William Lustig/Writers: C.A. Rosenberg, Joe Spinell
Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Abigail Clayton, Kelly Piper, Rita Montone, Tom Savini

For my article about the William Lustig film Maniac I simply scanned over the disk for some new screen captures and watched a few scenes over to refresh my memory. I will probably rewatch the film in its entirety soon but I have seen the movie a few times in the past and will rely more on my general impressions of the movie from past viewings than from a fresh rewatch. I first rented the film on VHS back when I lived in San Antonio Texas. It was time when I was renting stuff I read from films books I owned, like The Psychotronic Video Guide and my collection of horror books. There was no Internet back then to learn about films. The reason I watched the film was because Tom Savini did the effects and it was a period when I wanted to see every film Savini had something to do with. Sadly the guy now has decided to be an actor rather than a special effects master. In fact even back then he appeared in many of the films he worked on, such as George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Martin. Savini’s make up work on this feature are some of his goriest to be sure. One classic scene is almost universally reviled by critics and it features Savini himself getting his head blown off by a point blank range shot gun blast. It still looks horrible three decades later.

The story is about a lonely and schzoid landlord named Zito who keeps a collection of mannequins in his apartment. He likes to adorn the mannequins with the scalps of real women and then have conversations with them in his bed. He has monologues  with his dead mother who was a cruel, over bearing prostitute. After a while Zito gets bored with his current bed partner and set off to find a new victim. Any film like this requires suspension of disbelief and acceptance of certain implausibility’s. But the relationship that develops between obviously sleazy Zito and photographer Anne is a little too much. Anne accidentally snaps a photo of Zito and while attempting to retrieve the picture, for whatever reason, Zito develops an appreciation for Anne’s work and soon he and Anne are dating and she actually seems attracted to the scum bag in some scenes. Now whether Zito is a twisted serial killer or not is beside the point. It is stretching things a little too much to think hot looking professional photographer Anne would waste much, if any, time on him or give a damn about any of his opinions on her work. The gore sequences are great if you like that sort of things and Spinell is over the top in a fun sort of way but the film lacks any of the wit or humor found in The Last Horror Movie and one wonders if Spinell is trying to deliver a film similar to Taxi Driver in which he a small role.

An interesting piece of trivia is that the song Maniac, used in the film Flash Dance, by Michael Sembello was inspired by the film. It was not, as some sites report, written specifically for the film. Nonetheless the score was disqualified for an Oscar award after it was discovered it was not written specifically for Flash Dance. In fact some lyrics were altered for the Flash Dance version. Here is an example of before and after Maniac lyrics:

Before:
He’s a maniac, maniac that’s for sure,
He will kill your cat and nail him to the door
After:
She’s a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she’s dancing like she’s never danced before

The movie was released without a rating and it is felt it would have received an X rating at the time of its release for its extreme violence. Spinell wanted to do a sequel to the film but died in 1989. It was certainly a film role only he could pull off. However that has stopped Lustig from sealiong a deal in 2009 to do a remake of the film. I just think one Maniac is enough and who in God’s name could ever weep over a mannequin wearing a bloody scalp the way Joe Spinell could?

Last updated: 2010-04-19 10:30:35 by user07

Movie Review - Maniac (1934)

This movie is not to be confused with the 1980's Maniac, Maniac Cop, Maniac Magee, or the bastard son of a hundred maniacs. It is 1934's Maniac, which is also titled Sex Maniac if you care. Obviously, the secondary title can tell you a lot about this movie - except for not. You'd be surprised as to what actually happens in the film, as I was.

Directed by Dwain Esper, whoever that is/was, Maniac uses the old mad scientist formula. I guess it's based on an Edgar Allen Poe story, but I have no idea which one. Maybe it's just a very loose rendition of it. Anyway, Dr. Meerkat - I mean Meirshultz - (played by Horace B. Carpenter) is the scientist who is obsessed with bringing people back to life. Especially beautiful, bosom-endowed women, for some reason. He has a mousy assistant named Don Maxwell (Bill Woods) who was at one time a vaudeville actor and now is good at mediocre impressions. The team use Don to get dead bodies, and when Dr. Meerkat wants to implant a beating heart he's made into a dead body to bring them to life for God-knows-what reason, Don is sent to get the body. He ends up failing, and Meerkat flips out and tries to kill Don, but Don gets the upper hand and murders the doctor. Through the rest of the movie, Don impersonates the doctor. Don's wife comes, who he must have forgot about, to tell him he's inherited a fortune, but Don is too busy going crazy to notice. He also, unfortunately, uses a serum, what the doctor has to animate dead bodies, on a living man, who goes crazy and starts raping a dead woman that the doctor has made come to life earlier in the movie. As you probably know, Maniac Don gets caught.

Right now you're probably saying, "Wait, what?" And you're right, that's exactly what I was saying when I was watching it. The first half of the movie is a pretty logical "mad-scientist" movie. The movie makes use of telling the audience different forms of mania that people can have as psychoses, which is interesting, except they barely go along with what the movie's plot is.


AHAHAHA! I've finally developed a serum for too much facial hair!
The acting is just atrocious. They were trying much too hard to get their parts right, and it's like Bill Shatner taught them how to say their lines. A particular scene where Don injects the serum into the living man could have been disturbing if done right, but the overreactions from the man are just completely laughable.

I wish that the second half of the plot made any logical sense. When Don fails to bring a body home for the beating heart (which we can barely see because the darkness of the night does not allow us to view anything the camera is showing except a dog and a cat fighting and Don's legs running), the doctor totally flips his wig. Chill out man, I'm sure that heart's not going anywhere. You can get one tomorrow or something!

I was really confused with a few things. How stupid are the people in the film's reality? None of them can tell the difference between the original doctor and Don's impersonation of him. Oh, and what's with the crazy dude raping the dead girl? He basically turns crazy, runs amok for a little while grabbing at breasts, and then we see him about to rape a girl. We don't see hide or tail of him again, and his wife, who was very very worried about him about a day ago, now does not seem to care what happened to him. There's another scene where the doctor is randomly feeling up a girl who's like, "Oh yeah sure, I don't care that this guy looks 60 and I'm 19!" These scenes add nothing to the plot, and actually confuse the viewer, and really serve no purpose except to "shock" people.

Plus, the movie barely makes sense at the end. Don starts having tribal visions, he tries to get his newly-found wife to kill another woman, and something about a cat. If you want to see a film that has a terrible plot, terrible acting, and doesn't make much sense, then see this one. The one good thing I will say is that its very short 50 minute running time suits this type of movie well, because it doesn't make you bored, and, even with how utterly catastrophic and disastrous the movie is, it makes you need to keep watching.

This film's perverted, nonsensical, and has the barest minimum for a plot that I've seen. It loosely, LOOSELY I must assert, follows a Poe story, and takes itself too seriously, or maybe not enough. Either way, it would take a maniac to really love this movie - and even I'm not that far gone yet.

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Last updated: 2010-01-17 10:05:01 by user01