Maniac

This film has no cohesive story, go figure it's an exploitation film, and as a true exploitation film it provides an abundance of spectacle. Maniac is about a......well a maniac. Throughout the film intertitles appear that define aberrant mental states (dementia, praecox, paranoia, etc..). Spectacle is furnished scenes such as a man popping a cats eye out of it's head and eating it, two women lounge about in their underwear, two women fighting with syringes!! Finally the last two scenes are nudie strip scenes, and are inserted for titillation sake only! Suicide recovery, cat chasing mouses, mad scientists, and a guy ranting "rats eat raw meat--you know, cat carcasses...so the rats eat the cats, the cats eat the rats, and I get the skins", are all part of this disjointed viewing experience everyone should see!!

I'd venture to guess that HBO could come up with a decent series about gypsy movie producers skirting the Hays Office of the 1930's... guys like Dwain Esper running all over Depression-Era America showing T&A "sex education" flicks in fraternal lodges and burlesque houses... it's just too bad that the movies they made stink (maybe that's their appeal). MANIAC is patently awful... Framed within chapters straight out of a pre-war DSM manual, MANIAC has so much to mention, all of it bad. Bill Woods is deserves particular notice for his relentless over- errh, I hate to call it 'acting' but in the Land of Hams, he would be King of Pork. Rivaling Woods is the uniquely bad Horace B. Carpenter. Everything in MANIAC screams for something better. Actresses appear and vanish (and in one case change altogether) for no discernible reason (although I suspect one probably balked at being topless). There's a couple of gratuitous topless shots--- one of which makes absolutely no sense and Esper has spliced in some (probably, no undoubtedly better) silent movie into the scene where Maxwell goes nutzoid at the end. THE INTERESTING THING: The "cinematographer" William C. Thompson deserves special notice: his work REALLY sucks. Camera movements are terrible, the lighting is horrible and there's a jerky feeling in every scene (lots of shots of cats and rats)... but wait! Thompson would later go on to become ED WOOD'S cinematographer (look... goosebumps!) and would obviously never truly get any real grip on his craft. I suspect Thompson was played by the ubiquitous Norman Alden in Tim Burton's homage to the antithesis of cinematic greatness, 1994's ED WOOD (4-stars!), but his character is unnamed. MANIAC has historic interest as a footnote showing how stupid an independent producer/director could get with a camera and what looks like a $400 budget. Rumor has it that Esper was a prosperous slumlord who obtained an abandoned movie camera and editing equipment from a tenant. Esper must've turned a buck on these things because he was able to keep grinding them out... but Maniac makes the worst drivel spewed out by Educational Films and PRC look like art. NO STARS!

In the tradition of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS, this turkey manages to earn four stars because it's so utterly, completely, bizarrely and amazingly awful. After murdering his boss, a doctor, an aspiring actor uses makeup to take his place. The rest of the movie is pretty much incomprehensible as the fake doc goes berserk. Women catfight with syringes, a topless woman is kidnapped and, most famously, our protagonist, for reasons known only to him, pops out and eagerly consumes a cat's eye.

One presumes that MANIAC, to some degree at least, was supposed to be this bad. It was released in 1934 as a "roadshow" movie, meaning perpetrators of what was then intolerable filth traveled from one town to the next with its reel, showing it in shady burlesque houses. By today's standards, it's probably not even an "R" film; other than the brief nudity, it's extremely tame. MANIAC will appeal to fans of terrible movies. In fact, this may very well be the very first "good bad" flick. It will also interest those curious to see what was deemed as immoral artistic expression all those years ago.

I just watched this last night and I may never be the same. It is absolutely sui generis and almost beyond analysis, let alone criticism. Yes, the "acting" was awful, although it's hard to believe that such deliberate scenery chewing was ever intended to be taken seriously. At one point in the beginning of the movie, the mad scientist says to his apprentice: "Once a ham, always a ham...." And that pretty much sums up the "dramatic" aspirations of this film.

Beyond that, though (and overlooking the cliched and ridiculous plot), the discerning trash aficionado will find a treasure trove of delights. There are wonderful, classic throw-away lines ("What DID you put in that hypo, doctor?" and the aforementioned conversation vis-a-vis rats and cats)as well as delectably Rubensesque B-girls with their breasts exposed, hilarious special effects, and crudely effective photo superimpositions taken from sources such as Christensen's Classic History of Witchcraft and Fritz Lang's Siegfried. Not to mention the public health messages that constantly interrupt the plot to amusing effect. The whole effect is strangely disorienting--like watching Dreyer's Vampyr on a mescal hangover.

Recommended to fans of "Plan Nine" and "Mesa of Lost Women" If you like this, you should also check out "Daughter of Horror" (aka "Dementia").

The longer I live the more surprising things I see. Here's a movie from the '30's that has bare boobs, gore and a shot of a man popping a cat's eye out. I don't know if it was real--the cat didn't seem to mind much so I doubt it was.

This has the feel of an Ed Wood exploitation opus--all over the place story-wise (a guy impersonates a mad doctor to promote his own mad ideas and a lot of people aren't thrilled with it, and some end up dead). It's clearly an exploitation film--it takes place in one room and plot is forsaken in favor of grisly ideas and action, deception, slutty women and over-the-top acting. Like many movies from this era it's too slow and grainy for most people to enjoy and certainly too poorly made to recommend, and the rewards are slim. I'd keep the fast-forward handy and the alcohol too--the title placards that try to legitimize the movie by suggesting it's an essay on different forms of madness is pointless and irritating, really.

The best news is that it's short and there's more action than talking--too bad more movies aren't like that these days. Oh, and there's the oddity of an actress named "Phyllis Diller" being in it, no relation to the wild-haired 60's stand-up comic, of course.