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[BD Review] Pretend You’re a Serial Killer Again and Again with the Must-Own ‘Maniac’ Blu-ray
William Lustig’s Maniac is a gritty classic shot guerilla-style on the sleazy streets of pre-Giuliani NYC. What made the movie resonate above the scum is the great Joe Spinell’s portrayal of Frank Zito. Spinell played the titular maniac with a tremendous amount of vulnerability and loneliness. Sure he stalked, scalped, and murdered a buncha women, but he wasn’t some squawking criminal getting off on all this violence. You really felt sorry for the pathetic bastard.
For their remake, director Franck Khalfoun (P2) and writer Alexandre Aja (High Tension) made their Frank Zito even more empathetic by casting a hobbit and shooting from his POV. Nearly the entire film is shot through his eyes, giving the film a wholly unsettling, voyeuristic feel. While no one may have wanted a remake of Lustig’s classic, Khalfoun’s Maniac is the rare case in which the original is improved upon to a certain degree. And IFC’s given it a terrific Blu-ray release, complete with commentary and a comprehensive behind the scenes.
The Maniac remake follows essentially the same story as Lustig’s film, only through the maniac’s eyes. Remember the video for Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up?” It’s kinda like that – POV with glimpses of reflections in mirrors and hands entering the frame to do horrible things. Elijah Wood (The Good Son) plays Frank 2.0, a lonely mannequin enthusiast who, behind his unassuming facade, is also a compulsive killer of women – savagely murdering and scalping them. Then he staples their hair onto mannequins and has one-sided conversations with them. I’ve been there, bro.
A lot of people remarked that seeing the film play out in first-person put the the audience in the killer’s shoes and really allowed us to feel what it’s like to be Frank. I just thought it was cool. After 90 minutes, I couldn’t relate to Frank or understand him, but I did enjoy the film. Maybe it’s my aversion to pretty boys, but I felt more empathy for Spinell’s Frank. Wood’s performance is mainly dialogue with a few moments of on-screen time. The adolescent-looking actor does a great job conveying menace through his panting and one-sided whispers. Like I mentioned though, I failed to feel any sympathy for him.
Regardless of my lack of feelings for Wood, the POV is effective and Maniac is a remake worthy of the title. Technically, it’s bonkers. After watching the behind the scenes you appreciate the filmmaking feats even more. It’s clear that Khalfoun understood Lustig’s source material and used it to create something fresh for a modern horror audience hungry for something more.
Side note: there’s a nice, subtle nod to Spinell when Frank 2.0 sits down to eat with a woman he met online. When she describes what she thought he’d look like, she states “fat, black hair, greasy skin” – which perfectly describes Spinell.
A/V
Maniac is presented in 1080p HD in 2.35:1 widescreen. The film was shot with Red Epic cameras and the transfer is consistent with strong detail. Much of the film was shot at night, and the Blu-ray offers strong contrast. The blood red splatters (of which there are numerous) really pop against the otherwise bland colors.
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track really helps puts us inside Frank’s ear drums – especially during his migraine bouts where ringing noises go berzerk around the channels. We hear what he hears and his dialogue is appropriately louder than others’. Rob’s electronic score is reminiscent of old horror scores from the ’70s. On the Blu-ray, the music pumps with the clarity.
Special Features
The audio commentary features Khalfoun, Wood, and executive producer Alix Taylor. The trio offer a disappointingly unenthusiastic track. They present some insight into the character of Frank and deliver some fun shooting stories, but there’s really nothing gripping about the commentary.
The behind the scenes, on the other hand, is really interesting and insightful. It runs about an hour long, in which the cast and crew cover a lot of ground. The BTS contains a lot of on set footage that provides technical appreciation for how cinematographer Maxime Alexandre pulled off the seamless POV work. There’s also deep looks at the special effects, gore wizardry, and the casting of Elijah Wood (Radio Flyer).
The disc also contains 4:00 of deleted scenes, which include someone being pounded with a bat off-screen and Wood’s hands braining hair.
Oh hey, what else is this inside the Blu-ray package? It’s an insert reprinting a review from our very own Brad Miska!
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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