After a pair of lovers camping on a beach meet a gruesome end at the hands of a killer, middle aged, pudgy Frank Zito (Joe Spinell) wakes up in an unspecified borough of New York screaming. Surrounded by dismembered mannequins, Frank carries on one-sided, rambling conversations with his dead mother and seems like a good candidate for “You Might Be A Serial Killer If …”

By night, Frank ventures into the city to hunt and kill women, though he’s not averse to wacking the occasional dude who gets in his way either. Frank’s M.O. is to remove the scalps from his female victims and nail the hair to the heads of the mannequins in his apartment.

When photographer Anna D’Antoni (B- movie starlet Caroline Munro) snaps Frank’s picture in a park, he tracks her down, but actually manages to pass himself off as normal for a while, wining and dining the British fotog and coming across as a charming art lover. A visit to his mother’s funeral plot unleashes the maniac, and Anna is next on his list of victims.

Joe Spinell was a gifted character actor best known for popping up in The Godfather, Rocky, and Taxi Driver, as the cab company man who pelts Robert DeNiro with questions like “Will you work Jewish holidays?” He was approached with the idea of doing “Jaws on land” and co-wrote what constitutes the script with C.A. Rosenberg.

With some of the scenes shot around 42^nd Street, before Guiliani Time, when the neighborhood still had hotel rooms you could book by the hour, Maniac is about as bargain basement as you can get, but has attained cult status due to the unrestrained work of makeup effects artist Tom Savini, who also supplied the blood and guts for Dawn of the Dead and has a cameo as “Disco Boy,” one of Maniac’s victims.

Aside from the Savini supplied moments of graphic gore that make this a favorite of those who can name every actor to play Jason Voorhees, Maniac is by no means a good movie. Spinell seems inspired by the lurid excess of Taxi Driver and the chance to star in his own movie, almost as if he thought DeNiro had nothing on him, and he’d give audiences the “real” Taxi Driver.

Many actors become good directors, but few if any ever demonstrate the command of storytelling necessary to become successful writers. Spinell belongs in that camp. Granted, there’s only so much you’re going to do on a $350,000 budget, but the filmmakers here are guilty of not even trying. This is sleaze, and that’s okay. The problem is that it’s humorless and pointless sleaze.

There is a key sequence involving a nurse (Kelly Piper) who enters the bowels of the subway in an effort to escape the Maniac that, on a B-movie level, is fairly well executed, even if her fate is a forgone conclusion. Everything else in the 87 minute running time plays down to the meager resources put into the film. Munro is drop dead gorgeous, but is here for the sake of the exhibitors and does nothing more.

It’s unfortunate that Spinell – a hemophiliac who died in 1989 – didn’t come along twenty years later, when he could have starred in a Maniac II and beyond. As for where this ranks among serial killer thrillers, it pales in comparison to Psycho or Halloween because director William Lustig can’t handle anything beyond the over the top gore.