Maniac

One of the grimmest slashers ever made, and elevated by two things: Tom Savini's effects and Joe Spinell's disturbing central performance. A lonely, damaged man murders women and scalps them to adorn his mannequins, and the film puts you uncomfortably inside his point of view rather than a victim's.

Spinell, who co-wrote it, makes the killer pitiable and repellent at once, and Savini's shotgun-to-the-head effect, performed on himself, is infamous. It is a bleak, sweaty portrait of urban madness, not a fun body count.

Nasty, sad and better acted than it needed to be.