Maniac

Let me preface this by stating that Maniac is the sort of movie that might make Ed Wood cringe. Or make him proud. Take your pick.

Maniac is a howlingly bad little shocker from Dwain Esper and wife Hildagarde Stadie (who wrote the screenplay), who also made the exploitation camp flicks Narcotic (1933) and Marijuana (1936), in the era of tank-town jazz junkies, bathtub hooch, and no Hays Office Hollywood production code to be seen anywhere. Right around the time those Texas Rangers were dusting Bonnie and Clyde, and Ma Barker and her gang were being measured for a box in which to take a long sleep under the cold dirt, “bad” had a whole different meaning than the one it currently enjoys today.

Hollywood had already felt the iron grip of the Mad Doctor close around its throat in films such as Frankenstein (1931) with Boris, and what not—here, the mad scientist is Meirshultz (Horace B. Carpenter), a wild-haired, wild-eyed German shout factory who beats his hands expressively against the lab table because he requires a “shattered heart.” His assistant, Maxwell, a failed vaudevillian who does a Rich Little routine, goes with him to the morgue (which looks like Dracula’s basement) to steal a corpse, and we’re reminded of Count Von Cosel, who wouldn’t come into public scrutiny for another five years (in 1940, to be precise). Meirshultz tries some creepy ministrations, watched by two morgue attendants cut in from an entirely different scene. Doesn’t matter because neither of them could act anyway.

Satan, a fat, black pussycat, sleeks its way through the picture before Maxwell, now disguised as Meirshultz—because he killed Meirshultz, who was going to kill him, because he needed a “shattered heart”—plops its eye out à la Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Black Cat," and then...eats the f*cker. I’m not making this up. An old-timey movie actually serves up cat mutilation and eyeball scarfing. Wonders never cease. (The last eyeball scarfing scene I can bring up in memory was done by that insane little half-pint of horror, Louis de Jesus, who, as anyone that has ever seen his other famed cinematic excursion, "The Anal Dwarf," can tell you, was not small everywhere, who plucked out the eyeball of one of Sardu’s victims in Bloodsucking Freaks, and also later cooked a pot of them while doing his Ralphus dance, wherein he jumped up and down excitedly and swiped at his fro. Poor Louis’ last role was as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi. He died of a heart attack in 1984. But eye wildly digress.)

The film is intercut with scrolling words from various psychiatric texts. I’m not certain why. It’s all stuff from people like William Sadler and a few other sources that seems to be pulled from an educational film shown on an old-fashioned classroom projector that sputtered and ate up miles of old film. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a few title sequences from Metamorphic Rock and You.

Okay, so Maxwell, whose career as a failed impressionist might say something about the psychological state of a man who imitates others, becomes Meirshultz and then tries to use his revivifying serum he stole from Herbert West to cure some guy that thinks he’s the gorilla killer in Murders in the Rue Morgue. Lot of hammy overacting here.

Somewhere along the line we get a chorus of chorus girls or hookers or dancers or jazz babies in a boudoir, walking around in frilly underwear, and jitterbugging across the floor like they suffer Tourette’s or St. Vitus’ Dance, and the viewer is left holding the bag of wonderment. (But not for long. Picture ain’t even sixty minutes. Short and sweet and sour, dig?)

The whole thing can be seen as a take on Poe’s "The Black Cat." It has levels of disturbing necrophilious kink but is otherwise a near-hallucinatory study in exploitation film crumbliness in an era that knew it well.

Subtext is all over for any hack who wants to read into a movie wherein a man, Maxwell, chases a pussy cat through a tunnel into a “morgue” wherein he is frightened by two cats fighting, before killing a man he then takes on the identity of. There’s something more going on here that can be read into. I’m not sure what it is and, beyond the fact that I’m writing a small adaptation of Maniac based on the script, I really don’t care.

The film is low-rent even by 1934 standards, technically inept, incomprehensible with a plot so weird it’s dream-like, and seems, I don’t know, just “off” somehow—like Poltergeist and other movies that have a weird, cursed vibration.

I’d like to quote some dialogue from the film, but then I’d have to rewatch it, and I’m not eager to do that. Yet.

Keep an eye on that pussy.

The cat I mean. See ya!

Maniac (1934) MASTERPIECE of MADNESS

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1.

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