Maniac (1980) He's a Maniac, And He's Killing Like He Never Killed Before!

A man prowls the New York City streets to find a hooker who promises him the “ultimate“. He takes her to a seedy motel, $35 for the night. The hooker begins to strip, he tells the girl to keep her clothes on. Then they’re on the bed and he climbs on top his fingers lacing round her neck, the man begins to strangle the life out of her. She struggles beneath him. Her eyes filled with panic. It goes on past the point a movie should, it feels real, voyeuristic, and uncomfortable. And this is how we are introduced to Frank Zito and William Lustig’s 1980 film, Maniac.Banned or released heavily cut in some countries, this is a film that has a well deserved reputation of intensity.

Frank Zito was abandoned years ago by his mother when she perished in a car accident. Sure she was an abusive streetwalker with nothing but hate for her son, but a boy misses his mother. So Frank hunts for women, scalps them, and pins their scalps on a series of mannequins. Frank is stalking in the park when he gets his picture taken by Anna D’Antoni, a fashion photographer. He tracks her down, but Frank feels different about Anna. He thinks he may have found the woman who could actually replace his mother.

Frank Zito, his name a tribute to Joseph Zito the director of early slasher The Prowler, could only have been embodied by Joe Spinell. The character actor, who first came to notice as Mafioso Will Cicci in The Godfather, stalks the screen and fills it with equal parts menace and pity. That’s the genius Spinell brought to the role. Not only did Frank Zito seem like one of the most frightening, sadistic creations to come through the screen; he also manages to extract the smallest amount of empathy for his demented sicko. The audience meets a killer, but also a sad, lonely, pathetic man

When Frank Zito meets Anna played by the lovely Caroline Munro, the film makes a dramatic shift. It actually becomes a kind of romance movie for a moment, but because of what we know Frank is capable of, you’ll want to reach though the screen and tell Anna to get away as fast as she can. Anna and Frank make an odd couple, and you have ton wonder how she would fall for a man who looks a bit like a sweatier Mark David Chapman. However, the fact that she does adds to the dreamlike quality of the film. Little things like that make it easier to accept when the film takes some turns toward the nightmarish, with a body rising from the grave and a group of zombies. The supernatural elements which come as something of a surprise are even more jarring because of the work of special effects master Tom Savini.

Tom also puts in a memorable appearance as Disco Boy. As the name implies, Savini is resplendent in his butterfly collared glory. Disco Boy trying to get his groove on with a girl in the back seat of his car when Frank Zito bounds up on the hood and blows him away. The scene was perfectly captured in a grainy slow motion which was only lit the car’s headlights. Disco Boy’s head explodes with such an excess of gore that the dummy used for the head explosion had to be retired, and it had been used in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. Not happy with just merely being the recipient of the double barrels of death, Tom also took it upon himself to deliver the shot to the face. In a gross understatement, he described the experience of executing his doppelganger as “kind of weird”.

Maniac was William Lustig’s first mainstream film after starting his career in adult film helming the titles Hot Honey and The Violation of Claudia. (The latter starred porn mainstay Sharon Mitchell who makes a cameo appearance in Maniac as Nurse #2.) I don’t know if Lustig’s past in blue movies informed the raw, gritty, real style that pervades the film, but Lustig brought to screen a visceral experience where even the film’s more bizarre elements are easily accepted. He also managed to deliver on the script written by Spinelli and C.A. Rosenberg and form an ending which is both satisfying and infinitely debatable.

Maniac is a film which not only contains a bizarre tale; it has a few which surround it as well. The film intended to have a theme song at one time, but it wasn’t used. Instead the lyrics were toned down and when Michael Sembello crooned the hit “Maniac” in the film Flashdance, he was really singing a neutered song about Frank Zito. If that’s not a strange enough connection, try this one on for size. The headless corpse used in the end of the film was also the body used as the lopped off corpse of Betsy Palmer, the one and true Mrs. Voorhees. And of course in true B-movie style, the film was shot with a guerilla attitude. Many scenes, including the spectacular shotgun blast, were shot without permits, and the crew would have to scramble to set up and break down the equipment before the cops arrived.

Spinell would go on to reteam with Mureo for the 1982 film The Last Horror Film, but never managed to capture the fire he had as Frank Zito. When he died suddenly in 1989, he was preparing to shop for investors in a planned sequel. Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie. William Lustig would continue to produce and direct, and he was the force behind the Maniac Cop series as well as the direct to video campy classic Uncle Sam. While some of those films are high water marks in cult horror, Lustig would never capture the raw feeling of his first genre film. Maniac is a film that has a great reputation, but I feel like few people have seen this flick. This is one that fits right in with the gritty horror movement of the early 80’s and deserves to be put up there with the great psychos in film history.

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Eaten Alive (1977) A Killer That's Got Real Bite

The second day of October cometh, and with it, riding along on a fall breeze full of crazy, comes Tobe Hooper’s 1977 film Eaten Alive, not to be confused with the Lenzi’s 1980 Italian cannibal mash-up of the same name. Adding to my own personal confusion, I picked this one up on a cheap DVD under the UK title Death Trap. It wasn’t until I got it home and fired up the good old IMDB (remember the good old days when it was easy to read) to discover that what I had was Hooper’s follow up to his 1974 horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Once more, the director chose a rural locale for his film, but in place of the stark realism of TCM, Eaten Alive is a schizophrenic impressionist nightmare awash with the same layer of dirty that Rob Zombie wishes he could capture on film. Plus, it has a crazy fake gator that takes a bite out of Freddy Kruger and The Phantom of the Paradise.

Hooper’s film begins on a moment that Tarantino fans will be very familiar with, “My name is Buck and I like to fuck.” The line isn’t delivered by a creepy orderly with a Pussy Wagon, but rather by horror icon Robert Englund as the previously noted Buck. Englund’s character is trying to corner prostitute Clara (Roberta Collins, Matilda the Hun in Death Race 2000) and do her somewhere that is very uncomfortable (not in the backseat of a Volkswagen). After causing a commotion, Clara is put out of the bordello, and with no where else to go ends up at the creepy Starlight Motel run by Judd (Neville Brand) , a crazy old coot that keeps a giant African crocodile as a pet. It doesn’t take long for Clara to become croc kibble, and no sooner is she gone than Judd is inundated with guests. First, a family arrives only to have their daughter’s dog gobbled up like an after dinner mint, and then Clara’s dad (Mel Ferrer) and sister (TCM’s Marilyn Burns) start snooping around. Before long Judd has his hands full taking care of all the guests, but with his trusty scythe and hungry croc, he’s going to really cut down on occupancy.

Just like Hooper’s previous film had taken some degree of inspiration from Ed Gein, Hooper mined the legend of Joe Ball, alternately known as “The Bluebeard of Texas” and “The Butcher of Elmendorf”, for Eaten Alive. Ball was suspected of killing as many as 20 women including barmaids, prostitutes, and his own wife before dumping the bodies into a pit of alligators he kept at his saloon, the misleadingly named Sociable Inn, as an attraction. When authorities came to arrest him on suspicion of crimes, Ball committed suicide instead of facing prosecution for the murders. Like Gein, Ball’s crimes served only as a skeletal basis on which the rest of the film was based. The story by writers Alvin L. Fast (Black Shampoo, Satan’s Cheerleaders) and script by TCM scribe Kim Henkel takes Joe Ball as a leaping off point, but Judd has little in common with the serial killer apart for a predilection for carnivorous amphibians

The role of Judd, which required an actor alternately to mutter like a crazy person and swing a scythe around, came to life thanks to Neville Brand. The actor, who started his career in films such as D.O.A and Stalag 17 before being cast time and time again to play Al Capone, made several drive in type pictures in the mid-70’s as well as the TV movie classic Killdozer. He brought a great presence to the character, and was able to carry the long monolog portions of film and make them interesting. The only thing that distracted me about his performance was that he kind of reminded me of Guitar Town era Steve Earl, a fact that won’t bother most viewers. There are several other good character actors in the film, Robert England as Buck, Phantom of the Paradise’s William Finley as the nebbish dad, actor/producer/ex-husband of Audrey Hepburn Mel Ferrer sleepwalking his way though his performance as the concerned father, and eight year old Kyle Richards also appeared the next year in John Carpenter’s Halloween, but the film belongs to Brand. From start to finish, all the horror issues from his character. His leering, erratic performance gave the film an unsettling feel that this was a window into the mind of a human monster.

While much of that was achieved with Brand’s performance, Hooper does a really fine job of maintaining a balance between his archetypical characters and the surreal world he’s created for them. Much of the film is awash in a dusky light that gives the tense set pieces an extra feeling of menace, and the interior of the Starlight Motel looks to be the kind of place that the Firefly family would be hesitant to stay at. Working with cinematographer Robert Carmico, Hooper gives Judd’s world a sense of dread that hides in every shadow. In fact, according to some sources, Carmico might have been a bigger influence on the film. As the story goes, due to disagreements between Hooper and the producers of the film, some of the scenes were actually directed by Carmico.

While horror fans love Toby Hooper for Texas Chainsaw 1 & 2, Salem’s Lot, and Lifeforce, Eaten Alive is often relegated to the same rung as Hooper’s lesser films. I can only assume that is because it doesn’t live up to the expectations of its direct predecessor, Texas Chainsaw. Taken by itself, Eaten Alive is a very interesting mixture of the gritty style of TCM and the surrealistic art house visions of Hooper’s first film, Eggshells (1969). For me, while it took a different route to get there, Eaten Alive achieved the same effect as ‘Saw. It left me feeling entirely creeped out and in no hurry to drive down a country road anytime soon. Halloween is the night when monsters come out to play once a year, but a film like Eaten Alive reminds me that there are monsters all around waiting to have their own brand of fun.

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Falling Down (1993): Crazy Never Sleeps

From the first shot, a intense close-up of teeth that pulls out slowly to reveal the sweaty upper lip, the eyes, and the horn rim glasses of William ‘D-Fens’ Foster, director Joel Schumacher establishes the pressure cooker feeling pervades his 1993 film Falling Down. As he sits in a traffic jam, the inside of his car seems to be visibly steaming with heat as he sits motionless. The world is a cacophony of sound. The air conditioner doesn’t work. The window won’t roll down. A child stares. The sharp, pointed,painted on teeth of a stuffed Garfield doll suddenly become filled with malice. William Foster has had enough, and all he wants to do is go home. So he gets out of his car and begins a journey that will take him far into the depth of Los Angeles and far out of his mind.

These days Joel Schumacher is best remembered as the man who put nipples on Batman, but in the late ’80’s he was on an incredible run of films that conventional wisdom would say started with 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire. If you ask me it kicked off two years earlier with D.C. Cab. I mean that film had Busey in it, and that alone merits it a mention in a post about crazy people in films. After looking at all sides of death with Flatliners, The Lost Boys, and Dying Young, Schumacher turned his eye to the world of the living with Falling Down. The script by actor and occasional screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith was so prescient of the tension building on the streets of L.A. that while the film was being shot, the riots that followed the O.J. Simpson verdict broke out.

After Falling Down came out, Michael Douglas’ performance as the out of work defense worker William Foster became the poster child for the “angry white man”. In many publications his character was cast as the embodiment of the marginalized white male. A man feeling attacked by the wilting economy, his broken marriage, and the perceived infringements of his liberty by government, immigrants, and big corporations. While there is always a fringe element that’s political or moral beliefs stray outside the norm, it always scared me that Foster was sometimes perceived as a heroic character. Falling Down is being included in 30 Days of Crazy not because the world around the protagonist had gone mad, but rather because Foster becomes completely unhinged, disregarding anything but his own rapidly warping moral compass. In simple terms, he was a massive, massive wing nut.

Many of us might have a passing daydream that we could leave our car in traffic, demand that the fast food place serve breakfast after the cut off time, or call shenanigans a construction crew repairing a road that seems just fine. The average person will stay in their car, settle for an apple pie and just call it breakfast, and just find an alternate route around traffic all the while saving up their anger to take out on friends, wives, husbands or other relations like normal people do. ‘D-Fens’ Foster felt that the world had taken everything from him and it was time to take something back. When I watch the news and see some extremist, homegrown or foreign, taking lives to prove their point or moral stance, my thoughts instantly go back to the special insanity exhibited by Michael Douglas’ character.

While Falling Down also features an excellent performance by Robert Duvall as the cop spending his last day on the job following Foster’s bloody path, Duvall’s solid acting is quickly overshadowed by Douglas’ more inspired character and performance. In 1993, Falling Down served as a warning to a world that would see homegrown terrorism and radicals rise up in the next few years during events such as Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Okalahoma City bombing. All of these groups were lead in some way by white American men who felt like their voice had gone unheard and had clearly also gone Kookoo for Cocoa Puffs. Today we live in a world where folks regularly show up at political rallies with a firearm in tow, and people like William Foster that sit in their homes absorbing a stream of politically television designed to feed the ostracized‘s paranoia. Falling Down should serve as more than just a reflection of the early nineties tensions. It is also a warning that there will always be a danger in society lurking as close as the next disturbed person that gets pushed too far.

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