Strong and Moving!

A Major Disappointment

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Unbelievably campy and funny. This old slasher film had the worst acting and accents out there. It is in the Top 100 amusingly bad films and rightly so with evil laughs, bad lines, and terrible acting. There is a huge heart suspended in a jar that is beating. An evil doctor with a German accent invents a substance that can bring a recently dead person back to life. He ends up getting killed by his mad assistant, who doesn't bring him back to life, who then impersonates him.This is a 1934 film that contains nudity to my surprise.My only complaint is that this in a full screen edition which noticeably cuts off some of the writing on the screen.Mrs. Buckley was portrayed by Phyllis Diller...okay not the famous comedian, but it is neat to watch it on the credit roll.

Dwain Esper's "Maniac" (1934) is a wildly imaginative 51 minute manic mindfudge that deserves much more respect than it gets (none). "Released" (taken out on he road) 3 years after "Frankenstein," "Maniac" raises the stakes by making the reanimated corpse that of an beautiful woman and then having it abducted, stripped to the waist, and raped by a raving psychotic who has been fired up with a "hypo" of "super- adrenaline." The scene is made all the more sensational by the victim's centerfold ready bare breasts. Purloined Poe references permeate the proceedings. Women of all sorts dominate the cast and are responsible for the lioness' share of the jazzy, almost psychedelic dialogue that ranges from carny to proto-beatnik. Two women are tricked into arming themselves with huge hypodermic needles, each thinking the other is a violent lunatic, lured into a filthy basement, plunged into darkness, and fight a prolonged battle as physical as a professional wrestling match. The already hectic movie has a busy background undercurrent of cat insanity: hyperkinetic cat fights both literal and figurative, a skulking black cat / Satan stand-in, a circular cat-rat fur scam ("The cats eat the rats, the rats eat the cats, and I get the skins"), and miscellaneous wtf? cat themed dialogue ( "I think too much of Satan to use cats for experiments"). A trash masterpiece.

Esper's most notorious effort is almost a fiction film; I say almost because while there is certainly a story being told here, there are continual interruptions – sometimes in mid-sequence! – by title cards blandly delineating the nature of various types of mental disorders. The plot concerns a mad scientist and his even nuttier assistant – cue some of the most florid, yet oddly enjoyable, overacting in movie history – who steal a fresh corpse from the morgue (looking more like the basement of Dracula's castle!) in order to revive it by transplanting a beating human heart the doc has somehow acquired. However, the two cannot see eye to eye – especially when the old man asks his pupil to shoot himself so that he will then perform a transplant on him as well! Naturally, at this, the latter kills the scientist instead and, being something of an actor ("Once a ham, always a ham!" Dr. Meirschultz snidely remarks) impersonates him, since he happens to own a personal make-up kit and carries it along with him! Soon, he gets his first patient – a man who thinks he is the killer ape from Poe's "Murders In The Rue Morgue"(!): however, the inexperienced medico 'unwittingly' (hardly since the two needles are so obviously different in size!) administers the wrong medication and he goes berserk, first ranting about how his brain is on fire and then making off into the countryside with the revived girl from the morgue and ravages her (after which he is never heard from again)!! That said, his wife – who had accompanied him to the doctor's – is a schemer and hangs around; more trouble comes the protagonist's way when he is visited by his estranged wife while he is posing as the scientist. So, he has a stroke of genius and sends the two women to the basement of his lab armed with hypodermic needles making each believe the other is dangerous and needs to be sedated! Still, the much-talked about cat-fight which ensues between them does not really involve the syringes as they are dropped practically instantly. Also worth mentioning is the liberal but totally irrelevant use of footage from two Silent masterworks – Benjamin Christensen's HAXAN (1922) and Fritz Lang's THE NIBELUNGEN (1924) – in an attempt to emphasize the lead character's deranged state-of-mind, and also the abhorrent treatment of cats on display – among the film's most infamous sequences is that in which a feline has one of its eyes ripped out and eaten (though a completely different and apparently half-blind animal was used expressly for this shot!) but when it is violently thrown against a sheet of glass, this seems all-too-real!! The film ends with the Police bursting on the scene to find the two women still in the basement and the deceased Professor walled-up a' la "The Black Cat", having been alerted to his presence – as in Poe's tale (and countless other films) by the meowing of the feline which had itself been inadvertently entombed! Had Esper exerted more self-control and infused some real cinematic sense into his picture, MANIAC could well pass off for one of the oddest horror outings of the 1930s…but, as it stands, can only be deemed a relic and an undeniable curio – as both 'Grade Z' exploitation and, for what it is worth, a record of known variations of insanity (and their attributes) up to that time. Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, this film rates higher than BOMB for me because - unlike NARCOTIC (1933) which was a total bore - this actually manages to be so preposterous as to be highly amusing.

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.