Maniac
Dir: Franck Khalfoun
2012
****
I felt that Franck Khalfoun's previous film, Wrong Turn at Tahoe, was a formulaic and rather dull gangster/revenge movie that tried to emulate a mix of Tarantino's writing and the Coen Brother's quirky flare but failed miserably in both respects. So the thought of him remaking William Lustig's 1980 cult favorite Maniac with Elijah Wood in Joe Spinell's iconic role didn't exactly have me excited. I missed it at the cinema and it didn't make my rental list, instead, I waited for it to appear on TV and was pleasantly surprised by the story and blown away by the visuals and direction. The original is a nasty film, not really my cup of tea but there is a place for such films and it is one of the better films of the later exploitation movies. The remake had to be nasty for there to be any point to it and it really is. Elijah Wood is no Joe Spinell but then I think that is the point and why his character works so well. To be fair, it is a completely different character, Wood's character is a broken man rather than evil as Spinell's was. Many recent horror films have had quite a stylish finish but often this makes up for lack of story, character development and even horror but Khalfoun has all three. It's stylish and horrific, free of cliche and relatively original for a horror/remake. I'm mightily impressed.