Maniac

Like cover songs, remakes are best when they don’t just copy/paste. Think of David Cronenberg turning The Fly into a body horror extravaganza, or updating Scarface from a Chicago gangster to a Cuban drug lord. The bones are there, but the body is new. That’s how you do a remake. A common complaint about remakes is that they always remake good movies, instead of taking another swing at movies that missed. The original Maniac from 1980 was terrible. A low budget gorefest with no story, no likable characters, and no purpose to watch it. This remake takes the mentality of “we can do it better”, and combines it with the principle of doing something different, and wildly succeeds because of it. The original was a low-budget movie saturated in sleaze. The location — 1980 Times Square, with porno theaters and hookers and criminals — was sleazy. The lead, a greasy pig of a man, was sleazy. The movie’s low budget gave it even more sleaze. And it had a prurient nature to it, a near pornographic feel as it reveled in naked women and violence. It was everything critics of slashers hated. So the makes of this remake scrapped all that. Out goes the grime of 80’s Manhattan, in comes 2010’s LA and its superficial gossamer sheen. Out goes a Ron Jeremy lookalike as your lead, and in comes Elijah Wood, making you forget Lord Of The Rings and everything else he’s ever done. Out goes the shoestring budget, in comes production value and actual filmmaking competency. But the biggest change this movie makes is filming 95% of it in the first person perspective. The audience is no longer a passive bystander to the madness of Frank Zito and his unhealthy anger towards his mother that drives him to kill. The audience now IS Frank Zito. This is a bold choice that could put people off, as he is quite irredeemable. But it allows the viewer into his fragmented mental state in a way the original never even tried. By putting you in his eyes, seeing glimpses of him in mirrors, hearing him speak while he looks at his victims and navigates his growing insanity, you feel it deeper. You feel him knowing he is doing wrong, but that an unquenchable compulsion is pushing him past reason, past morality. The few moments the movie takes a third person view (mostly) make sense, but by and large, you see it through his eyes. This is also helped by having an actual actor in the role. Elijah Wood brings a sad, pathetic quality that the original — a fat, sweaty, grotesque beast of a man — could not. It changes the context of murderer Frank Zito from hideous loner lunatic to pathetic man-child. He is noticed by women in a positive way, instead of the original looking exactly like what he is. Elijah Wood brings a disarming nice guy quality to the character, which only makes the psychotic tendencies barely hiding under the surface that much more frightening. When he meets a girl from a dating website, we know he’s cuckoo banana-pants, but there’s no reason for HER to know that. There are still some flaws to be found; there is some CGI used instead of practical effects, and it’s noticeable and bad. They change the ending to have a more drawn-out cat-and-mouse fight between Anna and Frank, but the payoff is also different, and I’m not sure if it’s where it should’ve gone. It makes sense, but it isn’t where you WANT it to go. And that ties into the one flaw this movie can’t fix: this movie is relentlessly, oppressively dark. There is no hope, no light, no message or moral to be found, no greater truth to be had. It’s a character study of a horrible monster. It is not a movie to have fun with. It’s well done, but it belongs in that pantheon of movies like Requiem For A Dream and Kids, where the honesty and brutality make for captivating filmmaking, but not necessarily an entertaining movie. It’s a film you endure, you appreciate, and you vow to never watch again. I’m amazed at how far this is from the original in terms of quality. If you have the stomach, it’s worth seeing. Just … don’t make it a date night.