La Petite Reine/Kobal/ShutterstockSerial Frank Zito (Joe Spinell) prowls around New York, brutally scalping young women before attaching their hair to the mannequins in his collection. The slasher movie Maniac (1980) intermittently drops viewers into his voyeuristic point of view as he stalks these hapless victims. His heavy breathing seeps into the film’s sonicscape. A voiceover of his frenzied, disjointed internal monologue briefly gives viewers an insight into his erratic mental state. Frank’s unsettling demeanor — while driving his date to a restaurant, he abruptly diverts course and takes her to his mother’s grave instead — and the graphic scenes of bloodletting he engages in makes it hard to spend even 88 minutes in his presence.Snuffing out any last sliver of escape, however, Franck Khalfoun’s 2012 Maniac remake doesn’t just force viewers to watch Frank (Elijah Wood) commit gruesome crimes; it makes us an active participant in them. Almost the entire film is shot from the killer’s perspective, trapping the audience inside his head. “You really have the opportunity to maybe feel the [nausea] of committing crime rather than glorifying it,” said Khalfoun in an interview.Now, a Severin Films’ limited edition 4K Blu-ray of the film takes you on a fresh tour of Frank’s depravities.How Was Maniac Received?Reception to the film’s first-person POV approach was mixed, with the The Hollywood Reporter’s Megan Lehmann describing it as flitting between “inventively arty and film-school-grad pretentious” but conceding that Khalfoun and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, for the most part, “pull it off.” New York Times critic Nicolas Rapold, however, called it a constraint, adding that Khalfoun, “forgets that sometimes the killer’s perspective is not the most interesting thing in a horror film.”While Variety’s Rob Nelson found Maniac “unwatchably ultraviolent,” IGN reviewer Daniel Krupa observed that the film does “run the risk of being accused of wanton sadism but importantly, never elides the suffering of its victims.”Khalfoun himself saw reports of audience members vomiting as a compliment and was pleased that an attendee at an Los Angeles screening he was at had fainted, but Maniac’s hard-to-stomach gore ultimately hindered its commercial prospects: the film grossed a box-office total of $2.6 million on a $6-million budget.Why Is Maniac Worth Watching Now?A souvenir of one of Frank’s victims. | La Petite Reine/Kobal/ShutterstockIt’s widely acknowledged that most remakes of classic 80s horror films — The Fog (2005), Halloween (2007), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Poltergeist (2015) — are pale imitations of their predecessors. But even if you’ve seen the William Ludwig-directed Maniac, 2012’s iteration crafts a uniquely terrifying experience. Frank, reimagined as the lonely owner of a mannequin restoration business, is still the antagonist but in forcing us into his vantage point and refusing to cut away as he watches his victims die horrifically, the film renders us just as monstrous. It’s deeply unnerving to realize it’s our hands choking a helpless woman and us taking a scalpel to her hairline.Maniac adopts Frank’s perspective even as he loses control of his, suffering from disorienting audio-visual hallucinations and believing he’s the one being victimized. Rare and abrupt shifts to an objective third-person viewpoint occur only when he kills, mirroring his dissociation from his own body, and deriving fresh horror from the juxtaposition between this mild-mannered man and his vicious, violent acts.In contrast to the physically imposing Joe Spinell of the original film, Elijah Wood appears boyish and even fragile every time his reflection is glimpsed. “Please don’t scream,” Frank tells the cornered young woman he’s been stalking early in the film, a sentence that doesn’t register as a threat but as childlike pleading, making what comes next even more horrific. He swiftly shoves a knife through the underside of his victim’s chin; a sickeningly squelchy sound design only amplifies the horror.Elijah Wood gives a career-best performance in Maniac. | La Petite Reine/Kobal/ShutterstockMoving away from the grime and grunge of New York’s cheap motels and lonely subway stations, the remake unfolds in a neon-inflected Los Angeles of art galleries and the ballet, grimly establishing that for women, danger lurks even within seemingly innocuous spaces. While there’s no dearth of horror movies that leverage the unsettling appeal of the internet as a means of obscuring one’s real identity, it’s just as distressing to watch Frank pull a bait-and-switch by instead emphasizing his most agreeable traits online to entrap new victims.Instead, it’s with Wood’s vocal modulation that the eeriness of his performance comes through. At one point, Frank delivers consolatory words to a new friend with a stiff, mannequin-like intonation — he says all the right things but his cadence is all wrong. Also scripted with more finesse in the remake are Frank’s origins, which tie into Maniac’s themes of voyeurism, as well as his eventual descent into mania.What Special Features Does The Maniac 4K Blu-Ray Have?Severin Films’ two-disc set includes nearly four hours of new and archival special features, such as an audio commentary by Khalfoun, Wood and executive producer Alix Taylor, as well as interviews with actress Megan Duffy and prosthetic makeup supervisor Mike McCarty. There are also interview outtakes from The Joe Spinell Story (2001), a 49-minute-long documentary examining the legendary character actor’s life and career. A making-of featurette and deleted scenes are also included.Maniac [4K Ultra HD]Amazon -