Review of Maniac (1934) by Daibhid J — 01 Jun 2007

Don (Woods), a mad doctor's assistant, kills his boss (Carpenter) in self-defense. Then, using his great skills as an impersonator, pretends to be the doctor to cover up the crime long enough to dispose of the body. Things get worse and weirder from there.

"Maniac" is a loosely based on (well, I should probably say "ripped off from") Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat". It also pretends to tell the tale of a man's descent into madness. As the film startts, our mad doctor's assistant is unwilling to even steal bodies for his boss's experiments in reanimating the dead, but by the film's end, he's plotting and executiing all sorts of violence and depravity while laughing and carrying on in ways that made the dearly departed Dr. Meirschultz look well adjusted.

I say it "pretends" to do this, because the film's real goal is to simply shock the viewer as much as possible--and in 1934, this fillm would have been pretty damn shocking. The cat eyeball-poppling and eating scene is startling and appalling even when viewed with the very jaded eye of a modern movie viewer who's sat through hundreds of films along the lines of this one.

With copious nudity, a maniac raping a zombie girl, dancers walking around in their undies, perverted morgue attendants, cat-fur harvesting, and the aforementioned eyeball-eating scene, the film is clearly designed first and foremost to cram as much "objectionable" material into its 50-minute running time. I imagine this film showed in "adult" movie houses Back in the Day, and I can't help but wonder what the initial reaction might have been to it.

This can't be described as a good movie by any standards. It's even too dull to be suitable for a Bad Movie Nite--although there are admittedly plenty of moments of unintended hilarity from the overacting by just about every castmember and the horribly purple dialogue they deliver. However, if you want to see how even early filmmakers pushed far beyond the boundries of good taste, "Maniac" is worth checking out. (I suspect it has some sort of place in cinematic history--"first eyeball-eating scene on film", or "first zombie-rape on film"?--so maybe all who consider themselves true cinema-buffs should check it out.

Maniac (aka "Sex Maniac").

Starring: Bill Woods, Horace B. Carpenter, Ted Edwards, Phyllis Diller, and Thea Ramsey.

Director: Dwain Esper.