51/100
Avoided this for decades, because Stephen King, in Danse Macabre (which I probably read sometime around 1985–87*), included it in a section about grotesquely revolting horror films, singling out a scalping sequence as especially awful: "The camera does not even leer at this—it merely stares at it with a kind of dead, contemplative eye that makes the scene well-nigh impossible to watch." Not enticed! Turns out I had nothing to fear, since gore doesn't bother me at all when divorced from pain and suffering. Scalp all the corpses you want, they don't feel a thing. So I was soon able to relax and focus on Joe Spinell's offbeat performance in the title role, which is all that really distinguishes Maniac from your run-of-the-mill slasher. Can't find any indication he gained weight expressly for the role but he looks positively huge compared to his appearance in Taxi Driver (as the cab company's dispatcher or boss, the guy who hires Travis) just four years earlier, somehow maximizing Frank's physical repellence when alone while also plausibly coming across as a relatively normal guy when Frank interacts with others. (Still hard to buy Anna being into him.) The concept starts out as reheated Norman Bates, then actually kinda shifts into reheated...Travis Bickle, had Travis been a serial killer rather than a free-floating sociopath; Frank, too, briefly makes an effort at standard dating with a model-beautiful woman way out of his league, while we anticipate the worst. Ultimately, this psycho's trapped in his own head, and the mommy fixation channeled into mannequin dress-up didn't interest me much. Notable mostly for one very effective prolonged stalking sequence (the nurse) and for Spinell's choice to play Frank as fundamentally pathetic, though I could've done with 40% less impotent moaning. Certainly far superior to the first-person-camera remake, which I bailed on at Cannes.
* The book was published in April 1981, according to Wikipedia, and Maniac was theatrically released in NYC on 30 January 1981. So I'm surprised King had even seen the film in time to mention it. Maybe that passage was added to a later edition; my paperback copy dates from 1983.