MANIAC (1980)

HORRORS! 'MANIAC' ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU SICK, BUT NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE THEM STOP

Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - February 27, 1981

Author: DESMOND RYAN

By Desmond Ryan

Inquirer Movie Critic

There are a fair number of films that make you want to throw up your hands in despair. Maniac simply makes one want to throw up.

To call this horror film the work of sick and irresponsible perverts is to demean the honor of perverts. In seven years of watching films for a living, I have walked out before the often-bitter end on only two occasions. This review is based on the first 40 blood-drenched minutes, which was as much of this unspeakable and genuinely depraved film as I could stomach.

Anyone ill-advised enough to venture into the presence of this disgusting venture should adopt the tactic favored by the fans of the woeful New Orleans Saints last season. This involved sitting in the stands with the head covered by a large, brown-paper bag, which afforded the double benefit of disguising one's attendance and obscuring the countless errors of the team on the field. For Maniac , it should also help with the nausea to which anyone with a claim to humanity will undoubtedly succumb.

For some time, it has been clear that, having exhausted themselves of original ideas, horror-film directors are now engaged in a blood-slinging contest. The situation in these movies is always the same - a woman alone and in peril is murdered in gruesome circumstances. Sometimes her companion - usually her lover - is done in for good measure.

In the normal run, I would ignore Maniac in the same way that one might cross the street to avoid a dead cat. However, there are aspects of this film that demand denunciation. And because the City Council and the Human Relations Commission are too busy condemning Fort Apache , to worry about what a film like Maniac does to the mental health of the citizenry, the matter has to be raised here.

I call this movie irresponsible for two reasons. First, it caters to instincts and feelings of a baseness that I don't even want to think about. This is not entertainment or the mild titillation of being scared. This is gross pandering. Secondly, the people who made Maniac - its director is a man of 26 named William Lustig - don't seem to know or care about what effect it might have on a sick or deranged mind. I have no way of proving such a connection, but the thought of certain men seeing it and then creeping off to a subway does not sit well with me.

The maniac in this instance is played by Joe Spinell. He has a penchant for selecting victims at random, scalping them and using the hair to adorn mannequins. The credits are preceded by one throat-cutting (woman) and one garroting (man). They are followed by one strangulation and scalping and one shotgun blast at a head. At this point Ileft the screening room and an ashen- faced veteran projectionist.

Beyond the specifics and a ghastly love of detail with which these killings are depicted is a more urgent issue. Maniac is the epitome of the new pornography, propaganda for an attitude about women that is obscene in a manner not found in sex films. Hard-core pornography tends to dominate women, but at least it does not exude the festering hatred of them to be found in Maniac . There is some incredibly twisted Calvinism at work in these films that says that women whose conduct is "loose" should be punished in ever more dreadful ways.

The film is doing well at the box office in New York, which means there are a lot of people who think of this as entertainment. That should terrify and appall anyone who cares about the state of our country. Mr. Lustig obviously does not. His film belongs in an abbatoir, not a theater. Space and the restraints of language imposed by a newspaper prevent me from discussing where he belongs.