Rita Montone Movies

Joe Spinell, who appeared in Taxi Driver, stars in this unsavory horror film as Frank Zito, a character reminiscent of an even more disturbed Travis Bickle. Frank is an embittered loser who talks to himself and his dead mother, stalks a pretty model (Caroline Munro), and spends his spare time brutally murdering women. He then scalps his victims and puts the trophies on mannequins which he takes to bed with him at night. An unpleasant film with a relentlessly downbeat tone, Maniac! features graphic, bloody special-effects makeup by cult favorite Tom Savini, who meets a gruesome end in a cameo as "Disco Boy." Highlights include a realistic scalping by Exacto knife and an exploding head. The ending takes an interesting twist as Spinell hallucinates his victims returning to life and tearing him limb from limb. Spinell and Munro reteamed in 1982 for The Last Horror Film. Adult film star Sharon Mitchell (whom director William Lustig discovered in The Violation of Claudia) appears briefly as a nurse. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Joel M. Reed directed this notorious cult-horror comedy, which was the center of impassioned protests by Women Against Pornography. Seamus O'Brien stars as the epicene Sardu, who stages Grand Guignol torture performances at a downtown New York club. What the amazed audiences don't know is that the performances are real, using kidnapped victims who are kept in cages, mutilated, and later sold into white slavery by Sardu and his cackling dwarf assistant, Ralphus (Luis De Jesus). Sardu finally goes too far when he kidnaps a famous ballerina (Viju Krim) and a noted critic (Niles McMaster) for his demented shows, resulting in a revolt by the "Caged Sexoids." Reed pours on the gore by the bucket, as a nude victim is turned into a human dartboard, Ralphus gets oral sex from a severed head, Sardu uses human fingers to play backgammon, and a sadistic dentist sucks out a woman's brain through a straw. The fact that the film is intended as a comedy will relieve some and disgust others. Krim and De Jesus co-starred in Gerard Damiano's Let My Puppets Come the following year. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi