About a week ago a teaser trailer leaked to the net for Franck Khalfoun’s remake of the William Lustig horror film, Maniac. It gave us a glimpse of a knife-wielding, psychotic Elijah Wood, but wasn’t quite ready for consumption and got pulled down before everyone could see it. Well now the powers that be have deemed it permissible for the public to take a look at the film, and Twitch has gotten their hands on a new cut of the trailer; which is full-length, very red band, and very not safe for work.
You should put the kids to bed for this one, because the image of Frodo frantically washing the blood off of his hands after butchering another woman is likely to ruin some childhoods and warp some minds if it gets seen by the wrong set of eyes. While it doesn’t look like this version of Maniac is quite as gritty or grainy as the original it was inspired by, this new version certainly doesn’t seem to be skimping on atmosphere, gore, naked body parts, and disturbing imagery. Just from all of the killing and screaming in these clips it’s clear that Khalfoun is keeping with a pretty straight, slasher-movie take on the material, hopefully with a healthy dose of the suspense and brutality that made the original worth remaking in the first place. The wonders of digital filmmaking have kind of ruined cheap genre films of a little bit of their low budget charm, but that’s not something a whole bunch of boobs and blood can’t make up for.
If you think you have what it takes, enter your birthdate and hit play to see Wood’s creepy elf face giving the thousand-yard-stare as he scalps some women with a straight razor. Yuck.