not as good as all the hype

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

This low budget romp through the American nightmare is not really a slasher film, though it does see a maniac running around murdering people for no apparent, or perhaps that should be no rational, motive. This guy is eclectic if nothing else: he murders men as well as women, and he uses both weapons and his hands. "Maniac" is set in New York, and as crime buffs may know, a few years earlier a bloke name Berkowitz was running around doing essentially the same thing, though the Son of Sam was positively normal compared with this guy. So what is his problem?It appears to be something to do with his late mother, that and the fact that eventually he attacks the wrong damsel, who gives as good as she gets and then some. It is likely this film was intended as a quasi-serious exploration of madness, but with gore for the sake of it and absent a proper plot, it is nothing more nor less than yet more outpourings of a sick mind, most probably that of its New York born director William Lustig.

With its off the charts creep factor and brutal violence, the low budget 1980 slasher "Maniac" was an early classic in a decade of memorable horror films. What makes this film so utterly disturbing is the performance by Joe Spinell as Frank aka the Maniac. His homely look and doughy physique gives him a very relatable everyman kind of quality. He walks besides you on the street and is unnoticeable in a crowd, but he is completely and utterly insane.Frank Zito lives in a small apartment with a bunch of female mannequins which he dresses up with his victims clothes. As a final touch he scalps his victims and nails the bloody matted hair to the bald mannequins. The creepiest element of the movie is its use of sound. We constantly hear Franks heavy breathing like some obscene phone call. His rambling thoughts are played as a voice-over on a number of scenes. You are literally in the mind of a killer.Like a lot of movie madmen Frank has serious mommy issues. His mother was a prostitute who brought numerous men into there apartment to conduct her business. Frank was also beaten and abused as a child. When is mother dies suddenly in a car accident, it sends Frank over the edge into a madness he will never come back from. His victims are primarily prostitutes who he gleefully strangles and scalps. One day in the park he meets Anna, a fashion photographer, who shows and interest in him. He sees Ana as his one last shot at a normal life. He is a perfect charming gentleman around her, but how long can this last? Apparently not for long as he dispatches one of her models while she's taking a bath in her unlocked apartment. Talk about making it easy for him.The special effects were done by the legendary Tom Savini who has the bizarre job of making his own head explode. He has a small acting part in the film credited as "Disco Boy" along with "Disco Girl" are making out in a parked car when the Maniac starts peeping. He eventually hops on to the hood and shoots him point blank in the face with a shotgun. Savini's head explodes in a gruesome slow motion scene that foreshadows a scene to come in Cronenberg's film "Scanners". Unable the control the crazy beast within Frank loses Anna and falls into a sort of death spiral."Maniac" is truly a carnival of insanity all the up to the gory end.

Horror is most purely about the violent impulse that surges from behind the eyes, the mist it creates; a story can be anything. Here it's the simplest story, man goes crazy in the big city, unable to contain the impulse, the whole seen through his mist. There's a trauma that haunts him we find out, his cramped apartment is the mind then that fixates on memory and dwells among the fragments. The walls are lined with old photos of women, mannequins are scattered around; objects of a dead representation that he hoards unable to let go. Quite a bit more of that story is explained to us later on, not much interesting; Freudian stuff about a mother, a vengeful child who never grew. But there's nothing we can't know by just seeing him pace up and down in his apartment, muttering to himself.There's later a human connection to a photographer girl who snaps a picture of him one day in the park. The scenario is completely forced, a stranger and complete weirdo knocks on her door one day and they're best friends within minutes. It's something a weirdo much like the character would imagine (or write about). But it's an opportunity to get closer to the real source, put our finger on the pulse; she a photographer who also freezes life into image but she's able to let go of it and share it in the open, while it just drives him to madness. We see her fuss with her models during a shoot much like he does with his gruesome mannequins; but her fiction has life, playfulness. There's of course the violence, though it doesn't cut like perhaps it did then. It's still bloody and vivid. But what makes it powerful in its niche is the air of desperation around it, the whole film an internal monologue carving its garbled madness on the body of the night. New York looks suitably barren, from the time before the makeover when people would walk down streets as bleak as in this film to see movies like it in dingy fleapit cinemas down 42nd street. The film is from that time when horror could still unsettle with the thought that somewhere in the same city, deranged souls very much like the character skulked around with a camera having horrible thoughts like this.

(83%) This is likely to get my vote for the greatest slasher movie ever made. It has a very poor image, mainly due to critics over the years claiming it to be more or less worse than Hitler. It is violent, but then it is about a murderer, so what did you expect? Joe Spinell is really damn good playing this very sick, yet very believable killer. The part of this movie that sets it aside from the rest of the pack for me is when Spinell's character forms a relationship with a female photographer that's handled in a completely real and genuine way, mainly thanks to the decent script and good performances, as it then soon becomes clear that this guy is much more than just a brainless, on the loose madman, but something much more dangerous. The stalking scenes in the subway are some of the most intense parts of any movie I've ever seen that along with everything else help make this a highlight amongst all 70's and 80's slasher horrors. A grimy classic.