Maniac remake (TRAILER)

[drizzle]

trailer is promising enough to warrant its own thread

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seems like the frodo casting was fairly inspired

[Spartan]

Posted it in the Horror Movie thread earlier today but I totally agree, it deserves it's own thread. Looks very promising indeed. Same collaborative team behind the underrated P2.

[drizzle]

you know what would be hilariously ironic... if he nailed this role so well he was tapped to play nutcases for the rest of his life and it made him unstable in real life ala Anthony Perkins

[battlecatmeowstab212]

While we're on the subject, has anyone heard the audio commentary from the original 'Maniac' DVD from 99/2000 or so? I always hear it referenced on movies from around that time as being the commentary that made directors want to do commentaries for their movies. Been meaning to listen to it, was wondering if it's aged well.

[Comedy Quaddafi]

Yes. The trailer looks very promising. Aja and Levassieur being involved is a very positive sign.

Funny how Frodo is replacing Joe Spinell, the greasiest man of all time.

[Echo Leader]

Never seen the original but this looks fucking awesome.

[Spartan]

As suspected, the trailer got taken down. Hopefully this embedded link works.

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<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqw538 ... shortfilms" target="_blank">Maniac (remake) - Teaser trailer (VO STfr)</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/ohmygore" target="_blank">ohmygore</a></i>

[Spartan]

Full trailer. This will probably get taken down like the other links so watch it while you can.

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<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xr2lsi ... shortfilms" target="_blank">MANIAC trailer</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/blankytwo" target="_blank">blankytwo</a></i>

Got to admit this looks superb and I'm cysed as hell.

[Spartan]

First reviews are in:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review ... iew-329836

Franck Khalfoun presents a slasher film with a twist by shooting the entire movie from the killer's point of view.

CANNES - Thereג€™s nothing cuddly or Frodo-ish about Elijah Woodג€™s psycho killer in French director Franck Khalfounג€™s haute-horreur remake of the low-budget 1980 William Lustig movie thatג€™s become something of a grubby touchstone among genre fans.

Elijah Wood is a Murderous 'Maniac' in New Teaser for the Slasher Remake (Video)

Woodג€™s limpid saucer eyes are used here to telegraph unhinged blood-lust and insanity, even if only sporadically, as he plays a sicko with mommy issues who scalps his female victims. The twist, and what helps elevate the nasty, no-holds-barred Maniac from the grindhouse to an out-of-competition midnight-screening slot in Cannes, is that the entire movie is shot from the killerג€™s POV ג€“ we only glimpse Wood in reflection and in photographs.

Itג€™s a daring decision, potentially stripping the film of the suspense of not knowing where the killer is and obliquely inviting the audience to have empathy with him. For the most part Khalfoun and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre pull it off, although the technique more than once tips over from inventively arty to film-school-grad pretentious.

Slasher-movie fans, however, need not be put off by the stylized camera work and arty patina: this is down and dirty genre filmmaking, and the various slaughters, excruciatingly detailed scalpings and other atrocities are no less gruesome because of the highfalutin approach.

Khalfoun worked as an actor on the similarly stylized 2005 French horror movie High Tension, written and directed by Alxandre Aja, who serves here as co-scriptwriter and producer. Both have evidently watched a lot of Dario Argento movies.

In Lustigג€™s original Maniac, Joe Spinell played the serial killer Frank as a sweaty, overweight and overwhelmingly physical monster who terrorized the women of grimy 80s-era New York. Khalfoun shifts the action to downtown Los Angeles (Disney-fied New York being far too clean and shiny now) and, taking advantage of Woodג€™s ethereal delicacy, makes him a slender, shy, creative type who is, in the end, no less creepy.

Frank works alone in a store that once belonged to his mother, restoring vintage mannequins. He has some issues. Heג€™s completely deranged in fact, stalking his female victims, stabbing or strangling them and sawing off their scalps to bring home in the belief it will bring the mannequins to life and thus fill the void left by his neglectful, promiscuous mother. Or something.

When he meets Anna (French actress Nora Arnezeder, who starred with Ryan Reynolds in Safe House), an artist who specializes in photographing mannequins, they form an attachment based on their mutual interest in plastic people. But then Frankג€™s headaches start up and things go off the rails.

The movie is essentially a sadistic art-house bloodbath, with opera music and ballet dancers and funky little art galleries. The nerve-shredding score, by the mono-monikered Rob, salutes the music Italian prog-rockers Goblin provided for Argentoג€™s early horror-thrillers, the 1980s electronica lending a deeply melancholic city-at-night vibe.

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947653/

A shocker of a remake, equal parts stylish and scuzzy, "Maniac" only marginally softens the grindhouse sleaze of William Lustig's 1980 original, still notorious for being the "Taxi Driver" of slashers. With an intense Elijah Wood in the title role of a wigged-out psycho killer who affixes the scalps of his female victims to fly-drawing mannequins, this merciless work of anti-entertainment is arguably admirable for being as disturbingly disgusting as it wants to be. Stateside distribs might well stalk the France-U.S. co-production, but an R rating is inconceivable for anything like the version screened after midnight at Cannes.

Shot largely from the p.o.v. of heavy-breathing Los Angeles slayer Frank Zitto (Wood), director Franck Khalfoun's faithful remake (co-written by Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur) sets out to victimize the viewer, and succeeds to the extent that unsuspecting horror fans might end up running for the exits before the Grand Guignol finale. The first of the film's handful of unwatchably ultraviolent scenes follows the maniac's excruciatingly slow progress in hunting an innocent woman who's eventually dispatched in gruesome fashion while trying to enter her apartment.

Such is the pic's devotion to subjectivity that Wood's performance is almost exclusively vocal for the first half-hour, the audience forced to share Frank's predatory gaze. Like Lustig's film, Khalfoun's surveys the city's seedier side from the window of the psycho's car, giving it an easily recognizable relationship to Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," with all the psychotically clammy voyeurism that kinship allows.

"Psycho," too, exerts itself on "Maniac," as Frank recalls in hallucinatory flashback the neglect he suffered at the hands of his late prostitute mother (America Olivo), on whom he remains fixated. Other horror pics are acknowledged as well: Frank's long, upsettingly sexual encounter with tattooed Lucie (Megan Duffy) is set to Q. Lazzarus's "Goodbye Horses," recalling "The Silence of the Lambs"; and the psycho's first date with Anna (a Cybill Shepherd-esque Nora Arnezeder) has them catching a revival screening of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," referenced by Khalfoun as a reminder that savage killer films stretch back nearly a century.

Where Khalfoun's "Maniac" fails to cut deep is in sketching the unlikely relationship between nutso Frank, who runs a mannequin shop, and sweet Anna, who somehow maintains an interest in the asocial weirdo while borrowing his dummies for her downtown L.A. gallery installation. Frank tries to control his murderous urges, declining to kill Anna when he has the chance, although the beauty-and-beast interplay rarely resembles anything emotionally authentic.

Late-reel victims Jessica (Genevieve Alexandra) and Rita (Jan Broberg) pay dearly (and, alas, memorably) in the pic, whose crisp and colorful widescreen shooting by Maxime Alexandre runs compellingly counter to the utter depravity of the material. The film's old-school synth score by the mononymous Rob somewhat recalls that of the original "Halloween." Sound recordist Emmanuel Augeard does a terrifically unsettling job of muffling the protag's voice, the better for the maniac to seem supernaturally sick.

Camera (color, widescreen, HD), Maxime Alexandre; editor, Baxter; music, Rob; music supervisor, Raphael Hamburger; production designer, Steffania Cella; costume designer, Mairi Chisholm; sound, Emmanuel Augeard; associate producer, Emmanuel Montamat. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Midnight Screenings), May 22, 2012. Running time: 89 MIN.

[Spartan]

[Comedy Quaddafi]

Very, very good. Incredibly gruesome too. Mostly shot from POV which gives it a creepy feel, obviously inspired by Argento in many parts. It also means you don't see a lot of Elijah Wood. Not too similar to the original aside from the mannequins and the oedipuscomplex. Loved the scenes where Frank is out prowling, LA looks sleazy as fuck. Generally the movie looks really good.

It has to be mentioned that the score is great, dirty synth-stuff and some classical.

[Galvatron78]

originally i was against this, but they might just have a winner here.

[Spartan]

Link?

[Comedy Quaddafi]

^ I don't think there is any link yet. Saw this at a festival.

Had the chance to check some reviews and Maniac is being slammed pretty hard most places. The argument often seems to be that the POV makes the film less scary. And perhaps they're right but this is more of a disturbing characterstudy of a serialkiller (which, to me, is much scarier than a movie going "booh!"), not really a slasher in the traditional sense, so it's best to be prepared for that.

[Spartan]

New trailer with Mr Frodo is amazing. Want to see this film so badly.

[Spartan]

Fuck, this was amongst my most anticipated movies of 2012. There's no sign of a US release date and it's not hitting the UK until March where I'm guessing the BBFC will more than likely order cuts.

Very cool behind-the-scenes vid, but it's full of spoilers:

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/62281/ ... nes-maniac

[Spartan]

First six minutes:

[Spartan]

Kermode disliked it, his criticisms are unintentionally selling it:

[Comedy Quaddafi]

This has been on the net for a few weeks now. No one saw it yet?

[Spartan]

Still not seen it. This film has had the worst distribution in recent memory.