This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Joe Spinell plays the great part of Frank Zito. In this movie we witness his blatant delusions and hallucinations and inner conflict with severe mental illness. He had a very traumatizing childhood and now enacts his revenge against any random person it seems. He prawls the gritty steets of 1970's New York and finds his victim for the night and his rush is getting the kill. Quite a timeless movie and concept, done exceptionally well by Lustig and Spinell.

Still affected by his mother's death, a psychotic serial killer begins stalking the streets of New York for potential targets only to find a potential romance that might quell his vicious streak and struggles to control his murderous urges before they return to affect his quest.This here was one of the more overrated slasher efforts of the time. The main problem here is the fact that the movie focuses on the killer more than the victims he goes after, being a character study rather than a truly enjoyable body count hacking. This is the real crime of the movie since he isn't one of the more fascinating serial killers in cinema history, so it can become boring if you're not in the right mind-frame. There are long stretches between kill scenes where you are just begging for something to happen, and all we get is watching him wander around looking for nothing or simply focusing on some old guy who keeps a part of his victims around and talks to them. That really loses the dread in the killer, since it either looks ridiculous and we laugh at him now or it's a trait that isn't very accurately represented throughout the whole movie. Here, it doesn't really invoke terror when a man scalps women to use their hair to dress up mannequins, then he begins talking to then while he's administering the hair to the mannequin. That looks silly instead of terrifying and when it comes into play as often as it does here with the utterly clichéd and wholly overused motive of childhood abuse from his parents as the catalyst for the rampage just making the whole thing even more problematic. There's also the utterly ridiculous romance angle that comes into play here that's incredibly difficult to rationalize why that occurs as it does here since there's very little about it that's believable why someone in her position would fall for an overweight, grimy person like him in the condition she does and it simply reeks of being there for envious purposes only. These here are really damaging and hold this back so much that the few positives here aren't that worthwhile. For the most part, nearly everything enjoyable with this one involves the gory killings which makes out nearly every single wound is like cutting through an important artery in the body. We get a slew of graphic kills here, mutilating the body with a series of intense work full of incredible effects work that gets featured. From the early random attacks, including the rather chilling stalking scene in the subway station to the attack in the friends' apartment to the gruesomeness of the utterly savage finale that ends this on a strikingly vicious moment, these here are quite good. Still, there's way too many flaws here to really mean anything here.Rated R: Extreme Graphic Violence, Brief frontal-full Nudity, and Language.

This low budget romp through the American nightmare is not really a slasher film, though it does see a maniac running around murdering people for no apparent, or perhaps that should be no rational, motive. This guy is eclectic if nothing else: he murders men as well as women, and he uses both weapons and his hands. "Maniac" is set in New York, and as crime buffs may know, a few years earlier a bloke name Berkowitz was running around doing essentially the same thing, though the Son of Sam was positively normal compared with this guy. So what is his problem?It appears to be something to do with his late mother, that and the fact that eventually he attacks the wrong damsel, who gives as good as she gets and then some. It is likely this film was intended as a quasi-serious exploration of madness, but with gore for the sake of it and absent a proper plot, it is nothing more nor less than yet more outpourings of a sick mind, most probably that of its New York born director William Lustig.

The original maniac is a definite underrated horror classic for me. Made on a shoe string budget in a time when violent slasher films were plentiful and frequent maniac manages to stand out with it's excessive gory moments and disturbing plot. The shotgun head exploding scene is brilliantly done, another tip of the cap to Tom Savini for that and Joe Spinell is perfectly cast as the aforementioned maniac of the title. This film is definitely better than the remake with Elijah Wood and you can see the influence of the Italian Giallo thrillers in it. Probably one of the most visceral and best horror films of the 80's and makes for quite uncomfortable viewing at times. Definitely one to watch for horror hounds like me.