Maniac

stuart

at 5:24 am

This is just utter insanity. Plain madness, even by bad movie standards. I cannot think of any rating based on cinematic criteria applicable to this mongrel of a movie, 0/10 obviously, but for bad movie lovers.. 10/10 for entertainment value, guaranteed! This movie is so bad, it’s almost beyond comparison.

This piece of cinematic excrement is the work of Dwain Esper, perhaps the granddaddy of bad movie making, the precursor of such other infamous names as Ed Wood and Roger Corman. I pay my utmost respects to the man who – unlike the latter – never managed to contract any “real” actors for his films or any other talent for that matter. MANIAC is even worse than his other brainchild, REEFER MADNESS or MARIHUANA,THE DEVIL’S WEED (1936), probably the first film to deal with the effects of marijuana, although Esper’s NARCOTIC (1933) covered various kinds of narcotics, I’m not exactly sure if marijuana is covered too (haven’t seen that one yet). Interesting note: Dwain Esper also was associated with the production of Tod Browning’s earlier masterpiece FREAKS (1932), not on the credits though.

This piece of work deals with the subject of insanity, as in mental disease and psychiatry. It’s about various forms of madness and for all you voyeurs out there, there’s various forms of female nudity in it as well. Most people who read reviews want to know what the movie is about. I don’t know what it’s about, I’ll just describe some things I saw.

A mad scientist, Dr. Mierschultz, decides to employ some vaudeville artist. In bad movies, scientists always need non-scientific helpers, who never seem to be useful anyway. Usually either one of them ends up being killed, used for some kind of sick experiment, or – in this case – the scientist himself is killed by his new employee, an interesting “plot twist”. So, the vaudeville artist puts on his false beard and takes on the identity of the mad scientist and grows more insane with each passing minute. Why? Because Dwain Esper wanted it that way.

What follows are the infamous cat eye-popping scene, a catfight with two drugged women using baseball bats, homicide, some bare-breasted women, some incredible examples of over-acting and lots more. Between the scenes, the viewer gets some psycho-analytical (des)information about various mental disorders, which were novel and quite en vogue at the time. Everything from manic depression, dementia praecox, to schizophrenia is covered and is apparently the sole explanation for the existence of this piece of cinema.

Everything, and I mean everything in this film is as bad as you can possibly imagine. With this piece of demented nonsense, Mr. Dwain Esper committed every possible crime imaginable against the rules of film-making.

In short, a must, for all the wrong reasons.
Rating: 3 / 5