Maniac (2012)

Maniac follows the story of Frank Zito, a mentally unstable man who stalks, attacks, kills then scalps women in order to fulfill his own sick fantasies. By placing the scalped hair onto the heads of his mannequin's (whom each of them resemble a victim) it brings them to life in his mind.

His insatiable need to kill comes out once he starts suffering from a migraine.

Frank meets a photographer named Anna who is interested in the mannequin's he has been restoring through his family business and offers him a part to add his handy work in her art show.

He starts to fall for her but learns she has a boyfriend which starts a series of events that could change everything for him.

The movie stars Elijah Wood as Frank Zito, Nora Arnezeder as Anna D'Antoni and America Olivio as Angel Zito (Frank's Mother).

A large portion of the movie was filmed from the Point-of-View of the killer. You would see everything he saw and follow exactly what he would do, almost like a 1st person shooter game such as Doom or Duke Nukem. I believe this effect was used to try and gain sympathy from the audience for Frank throughout his hardships and mental disorder.

I really loved the way that I was filmed, You can see it every once in a while in other films for a scene or two (I.E. John Carpenter's Halloween), but you rarely, if ever, see the whole story be filmed in quite that way.

Elijah Wood's performance was excellent! I really got into his character just by the way he would speak throughout different scenario's in the film. However, I can not say the same about the performance by Nora D'Antoni.

I could not buy the accent a lot of the time as she seemed to keep slipping in and out of it. Being that I am bilingual, I know exactly what a primarily French person sounds like on a normal basis and that was not at all like anybody I know or have spoken too over the course of my life.

The kills were nothing spectacular, but they were realistic and looked great for that reason, plus you have to including the mentions on the special effects used for the scalping scenes.

All together, this movie holds up fairly well, but did not have anything jumping out at me to keep me on the hook the entire way through. The first scalping looked awesome which got me interested right away, but after the second one it started to feel like it was getting repetitive and started to lose my attention. It was not boring but after the first few scene's it stopped feeling for fresh.

With that being said I will have to give this one a 5.5 out of 10.

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