The newest flick to make “The Daily Grindhouse” is the controversial slasher/splatter offering from one of the 1980’s masters of the American grindhouse cinema. William Lustig’s Maniac definitely fits the criteria of what makes a grindhouse flick.
Lustig’s flick helped start the so-called “splatter film” subgenre in horror. While more mainstream (and I used that term very loosely) horror like Friday the 13th and Black Christmas brought the “slasher film” genre to the public eye it was the release of Maniac which gave “splatter” the notoriety it craved. It was a flick which was released by it’s distributor as unrated since they refused to let the MPAA screen it for certification knowing the it would automatically get the dreaded “X-Rating”. This rating would kill off any attempt for it to get shown in cinema theaters (even some owners of grindhouse theaters would deny to screen it). But it was a colleague of special effects and make-up artists (also an actor in Maniac) who gave Lustig and it’s distributor the backdoor way to get the flick seen.
George A. Romero’s classic epic zombie film Dawn of the Dead was released unrated and it still made quite the box-office haul that it gave future filmmakers a way out of the MPAA’s X-Rating hell. Maniac would get the same treatment and, while it didn’t get quite the box-office success as Romero’s zombie opus, it did make enough coin to be become one of Lustig’s moderate successes.
The flick was controversial not just for the decision to release it unrated but also for the label of misogyny it received from film critics who did see it. It didn’t help Lustig’s cause that the film was practically about a pyschotic and schizophrenic man who murders and scalped beautiful women to help decorate the mannequins he kept in his home. This flick was the grindhouse version of Hitchcock’s Psycho (to me a film that would be grindhouse if not for Hitchcock being the filmmaker thus given classic status by the elite cineaste crowd) and where Hitchcock kept the violence as something to be imagined Lustig went for the jugular and showed everything.
The most controversial scene would forever be the slow-motion sequence of Joe Spinelli’s killer, Frank Zito, taking a shotgun and shooting Tom Savini’s character point-blank in the head. The scene was so horrific and realistic in its execution that people left the theater right after the scene ended thinking even worse things were to be shown for the next hour (acclaimed film critic Gene Siskel left right after that scene). Tom Savini’s experience as a combat photographer during the Vietnam War gave him the necessary know-how to create the “Disco Boy Scene” so realisticly and which made him one of the early “fathers of the splatter genre”.
Maniac would propel Lustig to cult-status in the horror genre not because of the quality of his work, but for how he pulled no punches in showing the violence in his films even if got him labeled misogynistic and exploitative in mainstream cinema. His flicks were average for the most part, but they were definitely grindhouse in that they spoke to the most base denominator and that’s sex and violence sells and he didn’t sugarcoat it.
Through the Shattered Lens 
Oh wow, Maniac. This movie gave me nightmares because it’s another one of those films that just seems to be bathed in evil and menace.
Lustig actually wrote the role played by Caroline Munro for Daria Nicolodi and gave her the script while Niocolodi was in New York filming Inferno with Dario Argento.
Also — according to Lustig — Joe Spinell eventually ended up bleeding to death after he slipped in the shower. When the police entered his apartment, the first thing they saw was a lot of blood and the 2nd thing they saw was the fake Joe Spinell head from this film sitting on the TV in the living room.
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I think Maniac is one of the greatest grindhouse films out there. It does feel like evil had a hand in making it. Not saying that just because rumors of the mob being behind-the-scenes financiers was the cause of it, but it sure added to its notoriety. It even had a porn actress in the cast though Sharon Mitchell’s role was a brief one.
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After I read The Other Hollywood, which is an oral history of the porn industry and features a lot of quotes from both Last House on the Left’s Fred Lincoln and Sharon Mitchell (in which she mentions “Maniac” as being one of her “mainstream” film roles), I actually forced myself to watch this movie a 2nd time just to see who Mitchell played. Since I wasn’t aware of what Mitchell looked like (knowing her only from the book), I assumed that when Mithcell said she played a nurse in Maniac that she would be the one who ends up getting killed. Of course, Mitchell turned out to be the short, dumpy friend of the murdered nurse and I believe she gets one line in the entire film. Maybe 2. 🙂
A lot of people who aren’t into grindhouse have asked me what I mean when I say that violence doesn’t bother me but sadism does. I think I can best explain it as follows — Last House on the Left is violent. Maniac is sadistic.
That said, it’s a surprisingly well-made film with Spinell giving a great performance and Lustig really knows how to capture that dread atmosphere. My main problem with the film is that so much of the plot hinges on believing that Caroline Munro — or any woman, for that matter — would be attracted to the loser played by Spinell. I mean, even when he’s not killing, he’s still ugly, sleazy, uncouth, and sweaty.
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Yeah, Maniac wear’s the label of misogynistic with pride from how it sets up the murders of the women. I always thought Munro’s Anna falling for Frank was almost something that Frank’s mind was conjuring up. That instead of the two actually going out together it was Frank stalking her and imagining that they were actually out on dates.
yeah, Frank definitely would fall under your label of a dumbfug or is he the other one?
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Oh, Frank is a total toadsucker. The difference between the two is that a toadsucker is a disgusting, possibly disturbed perv whereas a dumbfug is just a dumbass who probably goes to SMU. 🙂
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I like how Lustig still manages to make the ending kill scene look something out of a zombie movie even if it was just something being imagined.
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