Maniac (1934)

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Despite being a life long horror fan I have only recently come across this movie from 1934. The plot, if you can make sense of it, involves a mad doctor who wants to bring the dead back to life, but also throws in some Edgar Allan Poe, in particular his "The Black Cat". Bare breasted women, sexual assault, animals fighting plus an eye gouging & eating scene makes this an early exploitation movie. Perhaps worth seeing as a curiosity but a truly awful film, the animals are probably better actors than the humans!

With the foreword and the lines of text that occasionally interrupt the film to lecture us on the conditions of being a maniac, it's pretty easy to see how this is a public service announcement in the form of a feature film. The question is, what exactly was Maniac trying to tell us. The film is just so odd, with so many nonsensical elements, that it's pretty hard to find a message in this film. Well, a message other than, some people are just maniacs. Don Maxwell (Bill Woods) is a vaudevillian who now works for mad scientist, Dr. Meirshultz (Horace B Carpenter) who specializes in reanimating corpses. When Meirshultz asks Maxwell to shoot himself so he can use Maxwell as a test subject, Maxwell shoots Meirshultz, hides his body, and uses his impersonation skills to look like Meirshultz. To be fair when Meirshultz asked Maxwell to shoot himself, he was laughing like a lunatic. When a couple of people come to the lab, Maxwell as Meirshultz prescribes a treatment that turns a patient into (what else) a maniac. So for a film whose only purpose is to show what a maniac does, it certainly is short on the maniac. The plot is (for the most part) coherent and it has a story, but there are some places where the film is just so odd. The acting for the most part is okay. Watching Carpenter as the insane Meirschultz is pretty fun, but as a film I can't really recommend it.

The movie must have done something right to get 70 reviews. What it did right was to get everything wrong in terms of filmmaking craft. In short, the results are hilariously bad. There's more ham in the acting than at Farmer John's; the editing must have been done in a darkroom; the script pasted together in that same darkroom; while Esper likely laughed all the way to the proverbial bank. Yes, this is exploitation movie-making from the 30's, replete with snatches of nude girls and textbook psychology thrown in, the latter no doubt cover for the former. Good thing I covered my cat's eyes while we were watching. Likely, Esper's on PETA's all-time list of cat-throwing villains. Yes indeed, movie-making doesn't come more mangled than this. Unless, of course, it's one of those A-list snoozers that Liz and Richard used to make. Meanwhile, I'm hoping to find Maniac's sequel, maybe something like "Maniac Goes to Congress". It's probably buried in the Golden Turkey archives awaiting re-discovery.(In passing—the movie's Phyllis Diller, b.1897, is not the same person as the comedienne Phyllis Diller, b.1917.)

Don Maxwell is an ex-vaudeville ham, wanted by police, who has now found himself as the unlikely assistant to Dr. Meirschultz, a mad scientist in the business of reanimating corpses. Maxwell's gift of impersonation gets him and Meirschultz past the guards and into a morgue where they use a special serum to revive the corpse of a pretty young woman. But that's nothing. Dr. Meirschultz has a heart beating in a jar of solution and is eager to put it into a corpse that really needs it. Meirschultz gives his assistant a gun and advises him to commit suicide, so that he can put the heart in him, but Maxwell shoots and kills the scientist instead and hides the body. People will miss Meirschultz, Maxwell quickly realizes, but no one will miss his lowly assistant; and so Maxwell dons eyeglasses and a fake beard to become his onetime benefactor. The trouble is, he impersonates the mad doctor too well and goes crazy himself.The schlockmeister, Dwaine Esper, produced and directed this utter crap, which includes more than enough nudity, sex and morbid perversity to have kept it out of legitimate theaters in 1934. It also includes the infamous scene in which the mad assistant pulls out a cat's eye and eats it. The movie is hilarious at first, not least because of the arbitrarily distributed title cards, which irrelevantly inform the audience about mental illness - a ruse to give the exploitative garbage the pretense of being an educational film. The funniest scenes are between the scientist (Horace B. Carpenter) and the assistant (Bill Woods), each actor trying to out-ham the other, making it a shame when one of them has to get killed off. Luckily, Ted Edwards, as one of the doctor's patients, gets his chance to do some over-the-top raving when the assistant accidentally injects him with the corpse-reanimating serum.But even at the short running time of 51 minutes, the whole business starts to get tedious and the laughs wear off around the time we're subjected to some dismal cheesecake scenes. Eventually the irritation of the incoherent plot, which constantly introduces a new idea, only to drop it quickly and pursue another, will make even bad movie fans grateful when it's all over.