Shot on Super 8 at some time in the early 80s in France, this film is 52-minutes of a killer aimlessly killing, killing and killing some more while a fuzzed out synth soundtrack plays, the kind of music that those that say their films are “inspired by John Carpenter” but just have a neon color palette and a few keyboard songs on the soundtrack dream and wish and hope and pray that they could achieve.
Then everything changes.
And by changes, I mean the end of Maniac gets ripped off.
Look, I get it, this is a cheap knockoff of a slasher that may be bright enough to make fun of the things we accept in these films. But man, I kind of love these lo-fi movies that want nothing more than to make their own effects and do the best they can to entertain you. They’re not major movies — they were never intended to be — but they seem like they were a lot of fun to make.
I’ve heard that this movie is in the genre murderdrone, in which “90% of the movie is people wandering around and getting murdered set to shitty lo-fi bedroom synths and it’s increasingly hard to pay attention but you can’t look away and you’re stuck in a murdertrance.” This Letterboxd list has some more of those…
