+ Wildest Movie of the Year
 |
| The gritty, awesome poster for Franck Khalfoun's Maniac |
Our title protagonist Frank lives in his LA home behind a mannequin restoration store. He kills women and scalps them, so that he can equip his dolls ...
I give a generous 4 ♥'s for Franck Khalfoun's (P2 (2007)) energetic remake of William Lustig's original Maniac (1980), which especially establishes its effectiveness through the terror and intense repulsion that it instills in most audiences who watch it.
Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)) plays the loathsome lead, and he is really nasty in the part! Just have a look at him here:
The major new element in Khalfoun's Maniac is that it is shot almost entirely in POV [point of view]. This concept is painstaking to accomplish, but very impressively carried out here and at times very uncomfortable to watch, as it feels almost as if we are participating in the maniac's kills.
The murders are incredibly realistically looking and technically astonishing.
But other parts of Maniac do not really add up, for instance; why doesn't anyone ever ask about Frank's lacerated, disgusting hands? And SPOILER the flash-back 'explanatory' scenes of Frank's traumatic childhood are not adequate as a basis for understanding his current blood-lust, as they set out to do. Some kind of physical abuse would almost certainly also have been a part of his experiences. Finally the SPOILER cannibalistic ending of the film is strange in a bad way.
Khalfoun is now in post production with two films; a mystery thriller, i-Lived (2014) and yet another Amityville horror movie entitled, Amityville: The Awakening (2015).
Wood, who is inarguably a scoop for Maniac, has been active in quite a few wild, hair-raising projects recently; namely Brian De Palma's Grand Piano (2013) and the coming Cooties (2014), a highly anticipated horror movie.
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Watch the gruesome trailer for the film here
Cost: Estimated 6 mil. $
Box office: 2.6 mil. $
= Big flop
[Maniac seems to perhaps have fallen into the pit for horror films that we for lack of a better term could call the 'too horrific/revolting/sick bucket', which is only defined by unfair mainstream-feelings, as for instance the at least equally sick Saw horror movie franchise never fell into this category. Being literally inside the head of a brutal serial killer as we are in Maniac was probably, unfortunately, too much for most theaters and audiences, hence the lackluster result.]
What do you think of Franck Khalfoun's Maniac?
If you have seen the original, what do you think in comparison?
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