Maniac (1934)

Just what I expected

Excellent but underrated film

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I have to agree with another reviewer and say that, while not a great film, it is definitely not the worst. In fact, I found it a rather creepy journey into mental illness. Yes, the acting is over-the-top and you are left scratching your head at some things, but it also leaves an impression that I know I won't soon forget.

This gets "the turkey of the century" award, an absolutely offensive and atrociously acted drama that isn't even amusing on a camp level. It takes the elements of the classic horror film and surrounds an alleged view of the different types of mental illnesses, but the only thing it succeeds in being is obscene. Outlandishly acted by unprofessional adults who seem to be reciting a script written by elementary school kids, with a bit of pornography added, this is just an absolute shame that somebody had the audacity to even think of it. The basic storyline has a vaudevillian becoming assistant to the maddest scientist ever put on film who somehow kills his doctor boss, takes over his life, and turns even madder, locking two women in a basement where they proceed to get into a cat fight, while a male patient given the wrong drug kidnaps a female patient, proceeds to run through a field with her naked body, and obviously has his way with her. Whether or not she is alive or dead at this point is never determined. Visions of hellish creatures are thrown in at random to show the mind of the mentally ill as some devilish punishment. The only clever element of the plot is a reference to an Edgar Allen Poe tale involving a corpse and a cat. Everything else will just make you wonder what kind of drugs the filmmakers and actors who made this film were on.

No amount of solemn narrative justification in the captions can disguise this film's exploitation roots, and the film is so eager to get to the "good parts" that it loses coherence about 10 minutes in and never gets it back, but in spite of this (or even because of it), "Maniac" is a fair amount of fun to watch. "Maniac" is distinctly lacking in polish or professionalism (there's at least one major thread that just wanders off and is completely unresolved (a man the doctor injects with "superadrenaline" carries off and murders the cataleptic revived zombie woman also wandering the premises, and we never see him again)(trust me, in spite of the flash of nipple it isn't nearly as exciting as it sounds), but you can tell it's also funny when it means to be funny -it just doesn't have the soundtrack to "tell us" when something funny is going on. The movie does try to take a hack at being a "comedy of errors" and the payoff at the end is both welcome and deserved. Worth watching just to see how they did exploitation films back in the day and on its on terms as a piece of over-the-top silliness.

When you think of exploitation movies you normally think of the '70's. However as it turns out exploitation flicks have been around a lot longer. This movie features some violence and nudity and would had never got distributed because of that through the normal channels.Director Dwain Esper always distributed his own movies by renting out a cinema so he could play his movies. He advertised his movies by mostly putting up poster with some X's put over it, implying that it were movies for adults only. I don't think he ever got very rich from his movies, though obviously his movies also weren't exactly expensive ones to make.To be honest, the concept of the whole movie didn't seemed that horrible and it also didn't started off that bad. It certainly was comparable with most other genre movies from the same period but let me tell you that things get worse pretty rapidly.It's basically a really amateur like made movie. It's not only horrible cheap looking, it's also really bad written and acted. But lots of blame for this movie also of course really needs to go to director Dwain Esper. It seemed like he at times was just doing something without knowing how it would turn out for the movie. It's funny how in one scene they couldn't even get the camera focus right, when the character that is talking is all blurry since the focus is on something that is in the foreground and they simply did not bother to fix this at all when they must have find this out.I can understand and see what the movie was trying to do with it's story and to be frank, the movie seemed to have some good ideas but it's all being handled extremely poorly. I just couldn't understand and follow this movie at times because it often becomes such an incredible mess. Often the movie simply makes no sense at all.The movie is mostly still 'enjoyable' to watch because of its extremely bad acting. All of the actors go extremely over-the-top and some of them never had any experiences with acting, obviously.Nevertheless, really one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Luckily it's only about 50 minutes short.2/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/