Just the Ticket #180: Maniac (2012)
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
I'm not doing the Flashdance byline twice, Ticketholders!
But I am still blogging like I've never blogged before because it's the final day of critical content in the month of Maniac May, and what I've come to be reminded of in today's movie up for review is that what we see or hear can be just as traumatic as what is done to us.
Hate speech, crimes against those whom we identify with, the trickledown effect of incompetent and/or malicious leadership on our ability to live our lives in comfort, the commoditization and sterile regurgitation of the things that once brought us joy, the systemic erasure of memory by agenda-driven alternative facts and "superior" pressure (in contrast to peer pressure, and framed with sarcastic double-finger-wags) to drag present society kicking and screaming into a future it cannot afford; this and more is enough to drive the average first-worlder insane. At the twist of a word, what was once a carefully devised balance of Democracy and Capitalism becomes reviled as a stealth dictatorship trying to leverage our freedoms away from us at our own choice by way of a boogeyman economic structure that morphs from Communism to Socialism to Naziism to suit the narrative of whatever woke-hating, Tate-worshipping scum-fucker screams the loudest. We live in a country where the current President went from ridiculing "Sleepy Joe" to saying "there is no more 'woke' in this country." Up is down, left is right, right is wrong, B is A, Select is Start, Konami makes gambling machines instead of good videogames, movies fail not because they are bad or handle inclusivity poorly, but because they are "woke" at all even though they actually made sixty-nine metric culo-tons of money, and instead of giving you thirty extra lives, pressing the right buttons in the right order gets you fired from your job and makes you get hit by a leaky septic truck, land inside the tank, and get struck by lightning while it's raining tapeworms, leeches, and used condoms, all localized specifically over your head like you're the Bundy house in Married With Children.
I'd tell Trump to go fuck himself, but his dick isn't long enough and I only have half a tank of gas!
I'd also tell him to go to Hell, but he's already in the White House.
Yeah, I'm overcaffeinated, pissed at the world, and feeling creatively vulgar about it. Enjoy the ride!
Oh, and it's time to review one of the few remakes that I think is better than the original in enough ways to make it objectively better: the 2012 remake of William Lustig's Maniac.
Frank Zito this time is played by Elijah Wood (Lord Of the Rings), whose seldom-seen visage and chilling line delivery make the character a more unassuming, insidious presence than Joe Spinell's original take. This feeling is further enhanced by the majority of the film being shot in first-person, putting the audience in the driver's seat for every one of Frank's kills and mental breakdowns, and occasionally adding a disturbing sense of disassociation when the camera pulls perspective to make us watch Frank do the deed.
Of course, that's only the audience side of my opening, "what we see or hear can be just as traumatic as what is done to us" premise. Where the original Maniac made Frank a stereotypical, physically abused villain, this version makes the character more psychological, twisted by witnessing his mother's promiscuity, the disconnection of their relationship that it caused, and the revolving door of toxic, unstable male influences in his life.
We learn this through flashback and inference because, as I mentioned above, the remake only features the four most memorable kills: the strangle (here an online date named Lucie rather than a prostitute, played by Holidays' Megan M. Duffy), the subway chase, Rita, and Anna; this allows more time to focus on making the characters feel like people.
The gore effects weren't as impressive or entertaining as Tom Savini's work in the original, there was too much reliance on POV chase cinematography (losing out on some of the slow burn suspense of the original subway scene and the claustrophobic intimacy of the original strangulation), and the set design was too clean for my liking (again pointing to the subway sequence). But the choices that the writers made with the more important characters mostly worked. Rather than just being some guy who gets away with buying mannequins offscreen every time a woman goes missing because the modern internet didn't exist in the 80s, Frank instead has inherited his late mother's mannequin restoration business (the inference between the lines being that Frank might have snapped and killed his mother before the events of the movie). Rita (Jan Broberg, Abducted In Plain Sight) is aged up here to be a mean, snooty art director rather than a photography model, fitting more with the surrogate mother-y nature of her capture and death than in the original, and because the film uses her and the rest of the cutthroat art scene that Frank finds himself in to explore prejudices against sexual orientation and gender identity (restoring mannequins is "a grown man playing with creepy dolls" in their view because it's "gay"), said death is a brutal, disturbing, live scalping; a "she deserved it" kind of ending.
But I really love what they did with Anna (Nora Arnezeder, Safe House) as a character! She is still a photographer like she was in the original, but there's a genuine, kismet connection between her and Frank here that was lacking before, as she has an artistic appreciation for his work that serves as the foundation for their relationship, and it evolves to a point that the audience could potentially root for him to reform his homicidal ways and live a normal life with her.
Sadly, we know what is meant to happen between them because this is how Frank ultimately views all women:
Also sadly, but for different reasons, the remake attempts and fails to fully capture the impact of the original's ending. Granted, the element of surprise is gone if you've seen the original, but the context building up to it (Frank hallucinating as he succumbs to his injuries, versus having a psychotic break as he takes his own life out of grief and guilt) is completely different and doesn't work as well. Add on that the 80s characters were much more aware of Frank's killing spree (and therefore more intelligent about their surroundings than they are here), as well as the background investigation actually having a palpable presence there despite not being at the forefront of the plot, and the conclusion ends up feeling like something the remake had to do because it was in the original.
I suppose it's a commentary on the insular nature of then-modern social technology (which has only gotten worse with the sensory overload it has increasingly provided in the decade since) and a consequence of the first-person perspective (limiting scope makes things more personal for the viewer but obfuscates the bigger picture of the narrative), but knowing that doesn't change how I feel.
That said, I still prefer the remake.
The 1980 original was a shallow, sensationalist effort saved by a few good scenes, fun gore effects, a campy performance, and an insanely memorable ending. But while the 2012 remake missed a few of those marks, it provided a mostly unique audience experience and told a more engaging, coherent story than its then-thirty-plus-year-old source.
B+
I hope you all enjoyed Maniac May, a.k.a. Superhero AniMay this past month. I have very little idea (beyond getting my One Piece Multi-Piece on Punk Hazard finished and published) what I'm going to do for June, so Stay Tuned as I figure that out, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't yet, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you like, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to resort to scalping (tickets) as a side-hustle, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my crazy-good content.
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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