Maniac (1980)
Maniac (1980)
This disastrous gem, arriving during the twilight if
the Grindhouse era, represents both why those marginal and exploitive films are
often best left forgotten, but also how they were a fountain of creativity and
courage. This is a truly awful film, except that it again and again it flirts
with being masterful. As bad as much of it is, it nails things down excellently
that no one else had the cahonas to even try before. Either way, its famous for
two things, its explicit violence (still shocking even today) and its lead
performance, which gives us a picture of depravity so real-and-raw seeming, the
explicit violence pales in comparison.
It’s
an extreme-low-budget, post “Halloween” (1978), serial-killer film, so often
referred to as a Slasher. It doesn’t fit my definition of a Slasher, largely
because it ignores that sub-genre's form-and-format and doesn’t domesticate its
sadism. It’s trying to plum the madness of the monster through telling the story from his POV, so it’s
following in the footsteps of “Peeping
Tom” (1960), which was hated when it
was first released, but now considered a masterpiece. But, unlike “Peeping Tom”
is showed no restraint in its brutality and was, in fact, way bloodier than landmark Slasher “Friday
the 13th” (1981), which was an unapologetically stupid
film. This unseemly mixture of seriousness and exploitation makes the movie more
than a little difficult to sit through.
The
lead was Joe Spinell, a successful actor who played small, but prominent roles,
in many of the best films of the 1970s. Many of that generation’s greatest
Directors employed him repeatedly, in a large part because of body -- he was
huge, imposing, seriously overweight, and notably unattractive – but also
because he was ferociously talented. Likely, his appearance brought him greater
success that his substantial talent, but also denied him starring roles (at
least on film, he apparently escaped typecasting on stage far better). This film was his first lead in cinema, he was co-Writer (with C. A.
Rosenberg) and also Produced. Clearly aware of him image, he decided not to make a
Rom-con, but among the cruelest, and most intimate portraits of a Deviant in
cinema history.
Even with his mainstream
successes, Spinell was always on the edge of marginally and especially closely
tied to the Pornographic film industry. He was married to Porn Star Jean Jennings, though they divorced shortly
before filming of this movie began, and the Director chosen for this project, William Lustig, had mostly worked in Porn. This movie’s
extremely small budget came largely from the profits of Lustig’s earlier Porn
film, “Hot Honey” (1977).
The inspiration for this
film was the spree of terror that New York City had just endured because of
Serial Killer David Berkowitz, AKA “The Son of Sam.” Berkowitz had been
captured in 1977, and though the story didn’t follow the narrative of the real
case, the film’s most notoriously bloody scene was wildly excessive reimagining
of a crime Berkowitz actually committed.
After
his arrest Berkowitz proved himself a media-hungry fabulist and exactly how
crazy he actually was still being debated all these decades later. In the
script’s fictionalization of him, Spinell’s
character was named Frank Zito, is
presented as a cripplingly Schizophrenic,
plagued by hallucinations, simmering with rage because of abuses inflicted on
him by his now-dead mother. He’s torn three ways, between longing for female
companionship, a volcanic hatred of women, and a self-loathing greater than his
two other impulses. Spinell presents Frank a sweaty, brutish, socially
dysfunctional, impressively and
authentically repugnant, but surprisingly charming while
he struggled to court photographer Anna
D'Antoni, played by Caroline
Munro (GOD! I used to have such a crush on that girl).
Berkowitz’s weapon of choice was a handgun, so relatively
impersonal, while Frank preferred to get up close and scalped most of his
victims, then stapling the stolen hair to the heads of mannequins as wigs.
The film’s most notorious scene, and most similar to a Berkowitz crime,
involved an exploding head; legendary FX make-up artist Tom Savini had a small
role in the film because he cast his own head for the gruesome sequence and
therefore played the un-named Victim in the lead-up to the kaboom. Unable to
afford fake blood, real blood drained from food leftovers was used. (That scene
caused Critic Gene Siskel to walk out of the theater.)
So, the first half of the film is mostly Frank stalking and
murdering people, with asides of Frank in his apartment demonstrating how badly
his grip on reality has eroded as he weeps, grunts, talks to himself, then
talks to his grotesque mannequins.
When Frank is more lucid, he has ambitions of being an Artist,
which leads him to meeting with Anna. When he first saw her, he was probably
planning to kill her, making their hesitant courtship quite doom-laden.
This improbable Beauty-and-the-Beast match is believable because
Anna has no clue what a Monster Frank is, and Spinell is just that good an
actor. There’s even some chemistry between the beautiful Munro and the
classically ugly Spinell, and the two Actors would work together on two other
films, though neither was any good, nor as controversial, nor as interesting,
as this one.
Much
of it was filmed guerrilla-style because the
production couldn’t afford city permits, and the on-location scenes are the
most captivating in the movie. The head exploding scene was one of these and,
despite the complexity of the set-ups, was remarkably executed in only one
hour. Again because of budget constraints, real ammunition was used in Frank’s shotgun,
so everyone was risking arrest for serious charges -- but at the time, the NYPD
was suffering a serious staffing shortage, and no one got caught.
I should not over-praise this film, it is ugly, though given the
subject how could it not be? Most of the contemporaneous critical ire emerged
from that, as demonstrated by Vincent Canby, “Good sense, if not heaven,
should protect anyone who thinks he likes horror films from wasting a price of
admission on ‘Maniac.’''
The critical ire was not only based on its violent
self-indulgences, but also the films frequent incompetencies. The posturing “gritty
realism” was uninformed (so fake), the script was clumsy, and for every two
scenes Lustig executed powerfully,
there was at least one that would’ve gotten him kicked out of film-school. Stuart Galbraith IV put it
well, “Despite some good direction and a sincere, even daring performance by
character actor Joe Spinell … [the movie] is alternately repellent and boring,
despite the obvious intelligence that went into its making.”
Whatever his failings were here, Lustig proved his worth, and
never had to do Porn again.
The film faced on-and-off censorship. Never being
labeled as a “Video Nasty” under English Law, it was still seized by Police
there. It was dismissed by the Philippine Board of Review for Motion Pictures
and Television with a terse note, "Take this picture somewhere else. Not
in the Philippine — take it to Satan." Some newspapers refused its
advertising. Pornographer Al Goldstein raged about this level of violence was
permitted, while in his films, explicit sex was not. Said Joseph Bensoua, “This
is the kind of trash that makes you want to join the Moral Majority" (a prominent American political organization
associated with
the Christian Right and Republican Party, founded in 1979 and
largely dissolved, due to repeated scandals, by 1989).
The harshest criticism I can give is that it bravely anticipated
“Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (1986), but the latter film, that it
almost-certainly-inspired, was the better, and by a really wide margin.
But the highest (non-excessive) praise comes
from John Kenneth Muir who wrote that it
"positively oozes sleaze and despair, and that's a compliment ... After
watching ‘Maniac,’ you'll want to take a deep breath, maybe even a shower,
but you won't have wasted ninety minutes on something that has no meaning, no
pulse, and no heart.”
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