Maniac Movie Review

Title: Maniac

Opens: June 21, 2013

Good news for Ariel Castro, accused of kidnapping a trio of young women and locking them up for a decade. Contrary to what his daughter has said, he is not the most demonic person we’ve come across in at least two years. There’s this guy named Frank who kills and scalps loads of women to dress up his mannequins while Castro killed just one fetus. But, oops! “Maniac,” which describes Frank’s hobby, is fiction. But Ariel, rest assured that a horror movie may be made about you. But who’d believe it?

“Maniac” is an obvious remake of the William Lustig’s 1980 pic by the same name, but one might wonder whether the original tale as well as this one was inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion and Galatea” or, going back centuries earlier, by the Greek legend of a Cypriot goldsmith who made a statue of a woman out of ivory, fell in love with it, and kissed the statue, bringing it to life. Frank Zito (Elijah Wood) both recapitulates the Greek legend and is its reversal; that is, he thinks he brings mannequins to life by setting them up with human hair but conversely ends the lives of several women to get that hair.

Frank, who restores antique mannequins, is not unlike Norman Bates. He got a raw deal from his mother who is made out in flashbacks to be a nymphomaniac, bringing pairs of men home and even getting it on with one guy right on the dark street in Los Angeles. All of this is witnessed by her Frank at about the age of seven, too young to be considered a sex object by his mom. Frank is determined to bring his large dolls to life so that he can keep them; obviously a wish to hold on to the most important woman in his life and the one who rejected him. He has a vivid imagination, but one which does not stretch to the limits of the Pygmalion myth. Rather than kiss the mannequins and imagine bringing them to life, he goes out on the mean streets of downtown L.A., tracking down white women in their twenties, killing them (but not always right away) and tearing their scalps from their heads. Despite the 7,000 homeless folks who populate these streets, no cavalry with trumpets blaring arrives to stop the man. After going through a set of bimbos, he meets the one woman who might save him, Anna (Nora Amezeder), who photographs mannequins and sees a soul-mate in the shy Frank.

The trouble with “Maniac” is not the gore. If this is not the first horror/slasher movie you’ve seen, you’re not likely to throw up as you watch the tops of yanked from their owners. You may, like Frank, get a migraine, in your case from Maxime Alexandre’s nervous hand-held camera. But you won’t find much in “Maniac” that’s original or tense. What’s more we already know the identity of the maniac, thereby frustrating any aspect of suspense.

The special effects team does a good job—assuming the women were not in real life actually scalped, with a particularly fine treatment of Frank in the final scene, one which, in fact, is difficult to explain. But though big dolls are used in addition to the live bait, and Elijah Wood plays against Frodo type in his first villainous role, “Maniac” is as predictable as a TV episode of Law and Order.

Unrated. 89 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – C+