This is sort of a wreck, but it’s a watchable wreck. I don’t know if I have a lot of deep thoughts about it, but I shall try to wring them out for you. Writing credits belonging to Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, who collaborated on updates of PIRHANA and THE HILLS HAVE EYES, should tell you something about what to expect: A slick and somewhat ridiculous thriller whose main relationship to the source material is its unusually strong violence.
In a genuinely shocking turn, living Precious Moments™ figurine Elijah Wood plays Frank Zito, and--just, hang on. Am I being insanely racist in asserting that someone who looks like Elijah Wood couldn’t possibly play somebody named Frank Zito? I mean, an imposing werewolf of a guy like original maniac Joe Spinell just LOOKS like he might be called Frank Zito, but every time Elijah Wood furrows his brow and whispers that his name is Frank Zito, I crack up. That affected little pervstache isn’t helping matters either. Anyway, Elijah Wood does play Frank Zito, a maniac who somehow sustains himself in Los Angeles by restoring antique mannequins. Almost all I need to say is that he restores mannequins, to let you know that he’s a maniac, but he does ALSO maniacally murder some hot young singles who have dared to mingle with him, all the while hallucinating that his dead hooker mother is making him do it. Yes, where the original MANIAC simply pays a sidelong homage to its predecessor PSYCHO, this MANIAC fully absorbs Norman Bates’ entire MO, just add prostitution. It also takes original MANIAC director William Lustig’s use of internal monologue and drags it to its logical conclusion, placing the entire movie in Frank’s POV, an obvious gimmick that doesn’t have the psychological impact that is probably intended. It is what it is.
Experienced maniacs among you can probably guess that Frank’s life is going to be turned upside down by the appearance of a manic pixie dream girl type, Anna, who pokes her expensive camera lens into Frank’s mannequin-filled life. Spending more and more time with him, she seduces him out of his precious mannequins (well, the ones who don’t already have the scalps of his victims nailed to them) before blowing his mind by revealing that she already has a boyfriend. Frank tries to make the most of the situation by attending Anna’s art show, where he is called a fag by the macho boyfriend, and then mocked by Anna’s mentor, a rich old snob named Rita. Frank follows Rita straight home and gives her the maniac treatment--but you know, this really bothers me. Here I thought we had a pretty safely stereotypical, sexually motivated serial killer on our hands, but now he’s following some old lady around and doing his thing on her just because she was rude to him? That is like, really not very maniacal of him. Not in the traditional sense. One might be inclined to forgive this as an aberration, except that later, Frank describes Rita as “fitting the profile” of the young sex pots who have been turning up dead, accidentally outing himself as a murderer to Anna, and an irritatingly inconsistent maniac to us the viewers.
So, I don’t know. Elijah Wood is fine, I guess. My biggest beef is with Anna, who is destined to cause problems for Frank because she cultivates a hopeful emotional attachment in him, which is the standard, but it SHOULD be that Anna is the innocent victim of Frank’s true nature. We live in a world where “normal” men will suddenly decide that women they desire have been “leading them on” for any reason at any moment; Anna is perfectly set up as an analog for many women who are just going about their business, enjoying simple friendships with their male acquaintances, only to face unsolicited, unfair and often disturbing expectations of sex. We know that Frank is insane, so it shouldn’t be too hard to fit the story into that framework. Unfortunately, Anna is incredibly irritating, and really seems to be “asking for it”. She bullies her way into his life, demands from him these mannequins about which he’s clearly very anxious, and begins taking up all of his time, even going on apparent dates to the movies where she knowingly tells him to stop gazing at her. If Anna is somehow unaware of Frank’s desires, it can only be because she’s almost impossibly infatuated with herself. At her art opening, she has projected her own face onto all of Frank’s mannequins--that’s right, in spite of his reclusive shyness and sexual incompetence, Frank has still managed to meet The Most Narcissistic Woman In LOS ANGELES. She makes it very difficult for us to sympathize with her as a witless little nymph who doesn’t deserve her fate, and very hard to remember that Frank is in fact a maniac with abnormal desires and reactions of which we should not approve. Just because we’re made to literally see the world through Frank’s eyes, doesn’t mean we’re supposed to be sympathetic and undisturbed by his thoughts and choices; the movie should be scary because we’re forced to be so intimate with someone so horrifying. If we ARE supposed to hope that Anna gets maniac’d, then there’s a real problem with the direction of the film, and a real misunderstanding of the nature of the original film.
Anyway, in spite of all this narrative dross, I have to appreciate the look and atmosphere of this MANIAC. I can’t vouch for this personally, but I am totally convinced of the analysis of my friend @ladyphibes, who noted that where William Lustig’s MANIAC successfully immerses the viewer in the grim reality of 1970s New York, Franck Khalfoun‘s MANIAC provides the viewer with an extremely evocative portrait of contemporary Los Angeles, including a fearful west coast skid row that most of us don’t see much of outside of the odd John Carpenter movie. I had a positive reaction to this, and also to the film’s consistently tense, sour tone. It helps support the respectably gruesome kill scenes, which otherwise lose some of their impact to digital effects. So, while the writing and some of the acting leave a lot to be desired, there’s something about the material integrity of MANIAC that makes it possible to remember the movie somewhat fondly. Actually, on the whole, one can make similar assertions about other collaborations from Aja and Levasseur, especially HAUTE TENSION, which is about 99% an excellently perverted high octane slasher movie, and 1% a cripplingly awful twist ending so insulting that you’ll spend the rest of your life wishing you could have one without the other. I know I’ll go on to see more offerings from this creative pair, and in the meantime, I can only hope that one of their endeavors will be to find a director that is the right match for these films.
