Movie review - Maniac

I watched the movie 'Maniac' again this morning, now I'm normally against the Hollywood remakes but this was very well done...even though I almost wrote it off due to the star casting...I mean Elijah Wood..Frodo as a homicidal psycho...WTF????

The two things that set 1981’s MANIAC apart from its murder-movie brethren , Joe Spinell’s performance, and the way William Lustig captured late 1970s Manhattan at its seedy worst can literally never be duplicated, which posed a challenge to anyone attempting an honorable remake. So it’s one of the new film’s achievements that it showcases a very different lead actor and setting while still feeling like the original MANIAC movie.

So a remake of the 1981 original starring Elijah Wood who reveals a whole new side of his talents as the 21st-century Frank, and does so with very limited screen time...could it work??? The gambit here is to present almost the entire story through Frank’s eyes, an extension of the killer’s point of view gimmick (think 1978's Halloween) and slasher-movie's of the early 1980s. Putting the audience in a murderer’s shoes risks identification with his horrible acts, but the approach is defensible in MANIAC because we see everything, not just the moments in which he stalks and slays his prey, which become just part of an overall subjective experience, rather than the only moments in which we are asked to step into the madman’s mind. From start to finish, it’s a portrait of a serial killer told from the inside, not the outside.

That said, watching the almost exclusively female victims panic, plead and scream before being horribly dispatched is certainly unnerving, and the payoffs are as grisly as they were back in 1981, with graphically extreme special makeup by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger (Tom Savini's prodigy) and an abundance of wet, crunchy sound FX. The explicitness of the gore is all here, and of course Frank wouldn’t look away as he perpetrated his foul acts, so neither do we as the audience. One of the few times the camera detaches from his line of sight is during his most savage act of butchery. If MANIAC dares you to keep watching at times, it is well made enough to make you want to stick with it.

With Manhattan no longer the danger zone it was back in Lustig’s day, director Franck Khalfoun shift's the setting to an unnamed city represented by the danker sides of Los Angeles. Skilled cinematographer Maxime Alexandre turns the City of Angels into an urban hell, where the nighttime streets, subway, parking areas etc. are believably deserted and threatening. Though the location is recognisably American, Khalfoun and Alexandre grace the movie with a bleak European look, an atmosphere furthered by the terrific, vintage-sounding synthesizer score.

Moving through it all is Wood, whose brief self-glimpses in mirrors and other reflective surfaces and running voiceovers are more than enough to imprint Frank’s disturbed psyche on our own minds. As unbalanced as we know he is, Wood’s unimposing stature and big blue eyes make it plausible that his soon to be victims don’t initially perceive him as a threat, and one area in which this MANIAC significantly improves on its predecessor is that it’s a lot more credible that this Frank could forge the tentative beginnings of a relationship with a woman, in this case photographer Anna (Nora Arnezeder), who’s fascinated by the mannequins that Frank makes a living at restoring. Their courtship even allows for a couple of moments of genuine humor (“Give me a hand”) that leave's the uneasy certainty that it can’t come to a good end.

While adding such modern references such as the online dating service Frank uses, this MANIAC still feels very much in the rough, gritty tradition of horror films past. There are places when a little more reinvention might have been welcome, yet MANIAC is one of those rare genre remakes that stands as its own movie while recapturing the original’s spirit.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD02QssnO7w