Frank Zito is 1980 New York Made Flesh: My Veneration Of Maniac (1980)
Frank Zito is 1980 New York made flesh. He is the blinding lights of the porno theaters, beaming photons that promise lust across slush-slick sidewalks. He is the steam from a manhole cover obscuring a figure that watches you, as you fumble for your keys in the doorway. He is the moldering piles of trash left beside the road, their sludge decomposing into ichor that that flows into the sewers. That blackness forms creatures whose moans reach out of the stinking sewer grates at the darkest point of the witching hour. They warned you not to go out tonight.
As I've discussed before, true ugliness can be weaponized into compelling cinema. If you don't find the right balance, the result is shrill and hollow (See the later work of Robert Zombie). Maniac, the love child of Joe Spinell and William Lustig, knows that balance in its bones. Maniac glows with cruelty. Spinell is Frank Zito (In a performance that walked so Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer could run), a once abused child who has become an untethered killer. He stalks the streets of a bleak winter in New York, turning his trauma into the sadistic undoing of the women he encounters. They are avatars of the mother who scarred him, and their agony is paint on his canvas. He retains their scalps as souvenirs, attaching them to mannequin doppelgangers of his victims. In doing so, Frank believes that he is retaining their souls in his "art." The thin facade of sanity that Frank wears has been forever cracking, but now those cracks are gaping chasms. The things that seep out blur his dark fantasies with his abattoir of a reality. The city continues not to sleep.
When Maniac ends, you're a changed person. It stays with you like the sheen of sweat from a hangover, like the stink of adulterous sex. It's glorious. There is no reprieve from our time with Frank Zito. There are no interludes of police hunting the killer who stalks The Big Apple. You never meet any brave boys in blue whose skin is unblemished, and whose eyes shine with moral purity. No such luck kiddo. There is only Frank in his crumbling apartment, filling the silken innards of a violin case with instruments of mutilation. Only Frank and his gleaming straight razor, erect with the thrill of separating hair from skull. Long beautiful hair. The echoes of his rattling breaths and plaintiff moans is a soundtrack unto itself, spoken tongues of a desecrated Pentecostal church. In Zito's apartment there's a fractured plaster cast of a mouth that is mounted onto the inner door. It shrieks into the void. If you listen closely, past the panting and the thick, wet sound of a blade dividing flesh, you can almost hear it. It warned you not to go out tonight.
-Dr. Benny Graves
