Hopping back onto dry land, we head into the city for some good, ol’-fashioned slasher action with the slightly infamous Maniac.
We’re not wasting any time here, being thrust almost immediately into our first kill, involving a man murdering a canoodling couple on the beach. Turns out, PSYCH!, ’twas only a dream. Not sure why this guy had such elaborate dreams about this couple, complete with playful banter and references to a set of external backstories, but, hey, not everyone has my painfully dull dreams centering around working retail (sure, they’re surreal, but nothing interesting tends to happen, beyond me getting lost within a byzantine, ever-changing labyrinth of aisles and hallways (paging armchair psychiatrists and psychologists)). Insert titles and such. Then we’re into the real stuff, pretty much straight into the true first kill, of a prostitute during a come-on at a hotel. She’s strangled and then scalped, naturally. Our boy returns to his place, which is loaded with an odd collection of mannequins. Upon one such mannequin he nails his recent trophy scalp. Rinse and repeat, more or less (pun always intended), and you’ve got Maniac. If it helps the character any, we find out he was abused as a child by his mother, who just so happened to turn tricks herself, and this has apparently led him to some major psychosis later in life, manifesting itself in butchering women, mostly prostitutes and those women who have sexually-liberated or -active lives. I doubt that helps any, but ’twas worth a go.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking, that this sounds like some major exploitation trash from the golden age of the slasher flick. And it kinda is. But there’s surprisingly something different about this one. It’s not the really weak excuse for psychoanalysis or any of that rot, it’s all star (and co-writer) Joe Spinell. It’s hard to explain without showing it, but Spinell’s performance is just absolutely spellbinding. He’s more quietly intense than you’d imagine from an early-’80s slasher, and he puts that little extra going on behind the eyes, a bit of subtlety behind the more overt madness, making him really seem like he’s gone off the reservation, kids. Without him really selling this role, the film simply would not have worked one iota.
That said, the film doesn’t fully succeed in my eyes. I dug how it mostly kept to the nuts and bolts of things, keeping the filler to a minimum (that kind o’ stuff can really get irritating when done and presented poorly) and embracing the gut-checking grime and starkness of the situation, both emotionally and visually. Still, many of the scenes go on far too long for their own good, with our crazed boy just left to dick about for several minutes longer than necessary to get the point across. I can’t tell if this was done to pad the runtime or to immerse the viewer in Spinell’s headspace, but regardless there’s a bit of extraneous flab in there. Then there’s the psychology, which, though I’m sure has been accurate to someone at some points in history, is mostly just garbage, a weak attempt to excuse and explain Spinell’s actions. Granted, it’s better that they tried at all, but it just reeks of the usual “women who have sex are bad” trash that creates incels and whatever the hell you would call lunatics like YouTuber Black Pigeon Speaks. We could do with less misogyny, even if the film doesn’t truly endorse said views in either tone or intent: there’s just too much room for misinterpretation, guys.
Maniac is one of those films that’s gotten a bad rap in the past, partially deservedly, but it’s a lot more interesting and effective than most of its contemporaries. It’s worth a go if slashers are your bag (and you somehow haven’t already seen it) or if you wanna see something that approximates the psychology of American Psycho without, admittedly, the broader (and smarter) context and wit. (That may sound like something of a back-handed compliment at best, but I honestly think Maniac is pretty decent.)
Allusions of Grandeur 